I buy a lot of books.
In fact, I buy books the way other people buy ‘souveniers’.
And one of my most favourite things to do is to spend a
couple of hours in a second-hand bookshop.
That might sound sad, but in picking up one book, you can be holding
100/200/300 years of history. In fact, I
get a thrill out of simply opening up a really old book, with pristine pages,
and realising that no-one has
read those pages since the book was printed and bound. [That probably sounds really sad.]
I don’t usually spend a lot, partly because the type of
books I like, no-one else is interested in.
So if I go away on a trip, or a holiday, I will often come
back with one or two (or more) books as a memento of that trip, plus the memory
of the bookstore where I spent the time to find them.
I was recently in Hobart at the end of a holiday travelling
down the east coast of Tasmania. There
are two second-hand bookshops there that I have a lot of time for:
- Déjà Vu, off Salamanca Place
- Imperial Bookshop, in Collins St.
It’s from the latter, that I made a few purchases this
time. And boy, did I hit the
jackpot. Amongst several other books, I
purchased a copy of “Physics for the Inquiring Mind”, first published in 1960
by Professor Eric M. Rogers, of Princeton University. It is beautifully written and crafted,
all 778 pages of it. And I especially
like the blurb on the back cover. Have a
read of it for yourself – I’ve pasted an image below.
