posted on 23 Nov 2022

Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince

Broadcaster and comedian, Robin Ince shares an obsession with me – books. Well, it’s not just an interest in books but a habit of acquiring far too many of them. But actually, Ince makes me look like a rather limp dilettante when it comes to acquisition because he doesn’t hold back: while I constantly fight to keep my compulsion under some semblance of control, he simply gives in. 

I have found that when I enter some bookshops I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that I could be interested in almost any subject and that I positively need (not just want but need) a book on a subject I’ve shown no real interest in before. It’s a feeling Ince apparently shares with me but, unlike me, he happily gives in to it. To judge by what Ince has to tell us in Bibliomaniac pretty much nothing is out of bounds – it’s a sort of book buying incontinence. 

To be fair, he knows his book buying is out of control – he has to smuggle bags of books past the rest of the family and hope that they don’t notice the growing mountain of paper – but it’s also clear that the compulsion to buy a book and find a bargain just has to be surrendered to.

This recently published chronicle of bibliomania is subtitled ‘An obsessive’s tour of the bookshops of Britain’ and is his record of a tour of independent bookshops he undertook in 2021:

“In the middle of 2021 I found myself at a loose end. I was meant to be going on a tour with Professor Brian Cox, but the worries of playing arenas in a time of uncertain Covid variants meant that we decided to postpone it…. To fill the gap where the tour should have been I would visit at least 100 bookshops across the United Kingdom.”

He resolved to combine this with promoting his then recently published book called The Importance of Being Curious and each new town or city he arrived in he would take the opportunity to scour the charity bookshops looking for new finds. And, of course, in almost every bookshop he spoke in, there were books there too that he just had to have. He travelled around by a combination of trains and impromptu lifts in the cars of bookshop owners and his book buying seems to have been limited by how much he could carry in a collection of backpacks and plastic bags.

Bibliomaniac has a splendid introduction in which Ince steps back and honestly reviews his book obsession:

“My life is summed up by the Japanese word Tsundoku – allowing your home to become overrun by unread books (and still continuing to buy more).”

Ince sees himself as a book hunter – a man engaged in a noble pursuit of life-supporting prey that he ‘mounts’ on his bookshelves and which provide him with essential sustenance. They are even life savers:

“Books define me. They are even the reason I stopped drinking heavily……In my finite existence I was missing out on comprehension due to intoxication, so I pretty much gave up.”

 And so Ince takes us on his tour, zigzagging across the country on delayed trains, straining to get to his next gig before the charity shops close and finding the most extraordinary array of second-hand bargains. I have to be honest and say that we don’t share a taste in books: who on Earth could compete with Ince for his range of reading? He has a love for the bizarre, for horror and science fiction curiosities, for biographies of minor celebrities, for popular and even obscure science. 

It's a book buying riot – funny and breathless. It’s written as he talks – at 100 miles per hour – and it swirls off at tangents; but for any book buying obsessive it’s also a delightful afternoon’s read. What was missing for me, however, were the books themselves. Yes, there are hundreds of books named here but very very few actually described as physical objects. There are those of us who love the hunt for books but who are driven at times by the sensual physicality and beauty of the book as an object and it’s that which, for me at least, is missing from this confessional.

The book is newly published and so is only available currently in hardback for £16.99 but if you like reading books about books and bibliomania you will not begrudge the money spent.

 

Terry Potter

November 2022