In a story I missed a year ago, Stewart Lee reveals he’s a packrat addicted to collecting comics, cds and books:
And all this stuff, in the digital age, is literally worthless financially, and losing any value it had daily. There’s nothing here a burglar would even bother with. I’m aware I’m a social relic from an age when you walked through the shopping centre with an unbagged album under your arm to show like-minded souls who you were, and when the book as an object was quietly fetishised. Now kids stake out their personal space with knives and guns and gadgets, and working stiffs flip falsified pages of virtual books on Kindles. I’m like a character in a dystopian science-fiction novel, holed up in a cave full of cultural artefacts, waiting for the young Jenny Agutter to arrive in a tinfoil miniskirt, fleeing a poisonous cloud on the surface, to check out my stash and ask me: “Who exactly was the Quicksilver Messenger Service? Who was this Virginia Woolf? What kind of man was Jonah Hex?”
I feel his pain. Below is part of my own library; we’re sort of resigned to having to move on from our cozy two room flat in a couple of years solely because our (well, my…) collections will be too big for the limited space we have.
Can *you* identify the two books on the table?