It is a lovely idea and you wonder why it hasn’t been done before: tracking down the previous owners of your second-hand books, talking to them if they’re alive, telling their stories if they’re not. You find out, if possible, what the books meant to them, how they came by them, the circumstances under which they parted. You have the potential for a series of poignant narratives; and besides, who hasn’t ever felt, however fleetingly, like doing the same?
Naturally, you pick up this book and flick through it before reading it, to see what books have been chosen, rather in the spirit that you look at someone else’s bookshelves, if they’re interesting, and it dawns on you that each of the 11 books that Josh Spero has chosen is a textbook for either Latin or ancient Greek. This rather makes one wonder how the interest may be sustained. Classics may be coming back into fashion, in a way, but it is still somewhat . . . niche. Moreover, those of us who were obliged to study the subject at school do not invariably have fond memories of the time spent doing so. No one who ever learned, with feeling, the rhyme “Latin is a dead language, as dead as dead can be,/It killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me” ever forgets it, yet strangely there is no place for it in this book.
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