A collection of books can never be too big; but a house may be too small.

So, with time, I have come to be selective in my purchases. Books for me are like people. When I was younger, I used to get everyone's address at the end of a course or a conference. Now, I frequently don't bother with anyone's. Just as my address-book contains the details of people I have not thought of, let alone written to, in thirty years, so my library contains volumes that I would miss if I didn't have, but never actually take down and open. As far as possible, they are in order ' at least, in such order that I can find them. I trust my memory, which operates by organic association rather than linear system.

I can usually recall when and where I acquired a volume. Some people (I know, because I have bought their books second-hand) write boldly in the front the date and place of purchase. I don't. In fact, I don't write in books at all. I think it's out of respect for them. I wouldn't dare to say openly that books deserve more respect than people, but I'm pretty sure I have more friends between two covers than on two legs (four legs is another matter entirely). There's a passage in Montaigne's essays (but don't ask me to find it this minute) where he confesses that people dead these fifteen centuries, such as Brutus, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, mean more to him and are closer to him than his own father.

I have never disposed of a book. Throwing one away would strike me as an appalling crime. To sell one would never occur to me. My friends and my students rushed to get rid of their set texts at the end of each course or year of study. I kept mine. They were part of me, part of my life, part of my memories, part of my past. How could I amputate or excise them, like some foreign growth? It would be like scrubbing the lichens off an old tree. Life is about acquiring more ' no, clearly not more money, or more material possessions (look at my car!). It's about becoming richer ' in a largely intangible way. It's about acquiring experience. Books are experience in a tangible form ' but their tangibility is an accident. It's what's inside that's important ' which is why I have such a large collection of scruffy and disintegrating paperbacks. (The glue they used in the seventies was a complete disaster.)

Some people, I know, worship that very tangibility. They slaver over catalogues: 'Moroccan, gold-tooled, demi-octavo, slightly foxed'� ' it leaves me completely foxed. Why buy a book for its binding? You might as well marry a woman because she has a pretty face! I assume it's the lust for possession ' the same desire to assert the rights of ownership that makes these people write their names in everything, or, more extremely, have their own book-plates printed, with Ex Libris on them, though I doubt that they commonly converse in Latin, or use it for jotting down phone messages and shopping lists.

I only write my name in a book when I'm lending it to someone, so it can find its way home. A book is its own master, and exists independently of its owner (now you know why my dogs are so poorly disciplined). But, as with all rules, there is an exception. And that's what I'm going to tell you about now.

I was visiting Cambridge, where I had studied some thirty years before, and having overdosed on CDs the previous day (the only help that addicts like me can get is heavy discounting for purchases on the net, and the occasional second-hand shop where a reviewer who must live locally offloads his complimentary copies of the latest releases) I thought it was safer to go to a second-hand bookshop, where I would have the thrill of the chase without the danger of actually catching anything. It's reached the stage now, where I actually own almost all the things of interest that I see, and the satisfaction comes from noting how much more expensive they have become.

This time, however, I had a nasty shock. At the back of the shop, where the light was least and the smell greatest, I came across a block of four or five shelves that looked completely familiar. The same books that I owned, in the same editions in which I owned them: orange Penguins, green Penguins, little navy blue World's Classics, Everyman in the pre-war format and the post-war format with the colour-coded dust-jackets, a little Nelson Thirty-Nine Steps. To all intents and purposes, it was a segment of my front room, offered for sale in a second-hand bookshop.

That's what it'll be like, I said to myself, when I'm dead. All the books I've loved, all the books that are a part of me, will be taken out of their nice snug shelves and sent out into the cold hard world, where nobody will love them. They'll freeze and shiver in the chill and damp, waiting in vain for a perceptive purchaser. I know the things I like are definitely not fashionable. If they're lucky, they'll moulder. If they're unlucky, they'll be dumped. I began to think seriously about making a will. It was like that poem by Mörike, that Hugo Wolf sets, where the poet sees a rose-bush ' any rose-bush ' and imagines that one day it'll grow on his grave.

However, I wasn't dead yet, and there was one book I didn't have, so my hand flicked out like a chameleon's tongue and grabbed it. It was the fourth volume of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories, Kai Lung under the Mulberry Tree ' the one you never see anywhere. Two of the remaining three were in Penguins for years, and are a drug on the market because nobody knows how elegantly funny they are ' but I digress.

As I checked the price ' inflated, but not astronomical ' I noticed the bookplate: a stylised sun, its rays dispelling the darkness in which I could dimly discern a goat-footed devil directing a coven of hags, and various spiked and tailed Principalities and Powers. Quite an impressive piece of work in itself ' and I recognised the name. It took me back to my student days.

Cambridge was having to meet competition from all the sexy new universities of the sixties, such as Sussex, so it tried to soft-pedal the very clear connection between eccentricity and intellectual distinction. It wasn't helped in this by the famous feud between Dr Black and Dr White. (Not their real names, of course.)

In 1912, Dr White had been appointed Fellow of the College for life (that's the way they did things in those days) on the strength of a wonderful book which proved how enlightened the Middle Ages were. He demonstrated, among other things, that accusations of witchcraft were simply a way of stamping out heretical doctrines and persecuting non-conformists and critics of the Church ' the accusers didn't believe in any of this nonsense for a minute. Very consoling for a twentieth-century man who cares about the rationality of the human race, but not of much significance for the drowning or burning witch.

In 1913, Dr Black came along with another impeccably argued and meticulously researched study which restored the status quo ' indeed, it went even further, and indicated that all kinds of important figures hitherto regarded as paragons of rationality had in fact been devout believers in the occult (if not, indeed, actual practitioners ' Newton was quoted as being prouder of his alchemical discoveries than the Principia).

With commendable, if foolish, impartiality, the College appointed Dr Black likewise to a lifetime Fellowship, and he occupied rooms on the Northern, or Chapel, side of the Great Gate, exactly balancing those which Dr White occupied on the Southern side.

From this moment on, both ceased to publish anything, Dr White out of pique that the College should have denied his theories so publicly by appointing Dr Black, Dr Black out of resentment that the College should continue to support a man whose intellectual credibility he had so completely destroyed. Anecdotes of their feud abound ' when Dr White re-designed the Fellows' Garden, and turned the main path into a lawn, Dr Black ripped up the turves, and so on...

As undergraduates, we saw them in the distance, and to tell the truth, I was never sure which one was which. One was wheelchair-bound, and looked like nothing so much as a bundle of clothes that someone was taking to Oxfam, or a rather poorly made guy. The other, gaunt and vaguely frenetic, strode at great speed through the streets at strange hours. Late one night, as I was coming back through Garret Hostel Lane, I could have sworn I saw him walk through a wall ' but when I reached the spot where he had disappeared, I found a small door into the College that I had never noticed before, and to which clearly only Fellows possessed keys.

Obviously, Dr White must have died. I had not seen the fact mentioned in the annual College Record which, though it is got up to look like a book, isn't, so I have no compunction in binning it, after I've checked the obituary lists for the years that I was there, partly for friends, and partly to make sure that I'm still alive. I reflected briefly on the similarity of our literary tastes, but it wasn't a train of thought I wanted to pursue too far, so instead I began inspecting my intended purchase.

I don't know if you realise, but books are actually printed on fairly large sheets of paper, which are then folded several times before being stitched together and bound. (In England, we cut the pages open, but the French don't bother.) This means you have to deal in groups of at least eight pages (sixteen, if you fold it again). A book that overruns a multiple of sixteen pages by just one or two will have blank sheets at the end.

As in this case. Only they weren't blank. The handwriting was that of an old person ' no one had been taught to write that way in the last fifty years. Firm enough when it began, the last few lines were barely legible. This is what it said:

19th November 1979. Two days ago, I was amazed and delighted to discover in David's second-hand booksellers volume 3 of the proceedings of the consistorial court of La Belle Heaulmière, which is notoriously rare ' even in libraries, only six copies are known. The price was so absurdly low, that I am afraid the bookseller did not know what a treasure he had. Ignorance grows. One other circumstance gave me an emotion at the time which lay between pleasure and displeasure. The book contained an Ex Libris which declared that it belonged to Dr Black, of this College. On the one hand, I felt affronted that he should have possessed this work, which would have been so valuable to me in my researches, and whose insights he would only have distorted to serve his own highly dubious ends. On the other hand, I reflected that only some great personal disaster, perhaps even death (though I had not heard, through the College servants, of any change in his health) could have caused him to part with it. However, one does not look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I hastened home with my purchase and placed it on my shelves at once beside the first two volumes which I had had the good fortune to discover in the shop of a little bouquiniste in Montrachet in 1908.

Yesterday morning, I resolved to play with my new toy, and to treat myself to some study of the consistorial court's later activities. As I was in the middle of getting the book down, the scout brought my breakfast. That must have been how the confusion arose. I opened the book, intending to browse a little while I ate, and found myself disagreeably affected by the sight of Black's bookplate, which depicts a tiny candle failing to illuminate a vast dark space in which an imaginative person might discern various bizarre and contorted figures. The motto, In tenebris lux, did not console me, since the change in word order from the sacred Lux in tenebris clearly implied a reversal of sense, namely that 'in darkness there is light.'�

Nonetheless, I began reading. But I was struck by a strong sense of familiarity with the text. Had some unscrupulous person (perhaps Black) forged the title page of my recent purchase, to pass off one of the relatively common first two volumes as the infinitely rarer third?

I looked at the title page. It was, indeed, the first volume, which I had taken down by mistake on being interrupted by the scout. But it was Black's bookplate, and not my own, which stared up at me from inside the front cover. Though my opinion of him was low, I had not thought him given to such petty mischief. Disquieted, I checked the second volume, and was relieved to see my own bookplate, with the sun dispelling darkness.

Given the parallelism of our interests, our libraries must be very similar, almost duplicating one another. I assumed he must have suborned one of the college scouts, in order to vex me by the substitution of one of his books for mine. I resolved to order more of my bookplates, the original printing having been exhausted some years ago, and to see if I could not find a way to pay him back in his own coin.

The doings of the consistorial court fascinated me so greatly that I neglected my usual morning walk. Shortly before lunch, I needed to consult the second volume to refresh my memory of a case which the court had taken up again. Fortunately, I had not bothered to replace it. It had lain beside me on the table all morning. As I opened it, I noticed Black's bookplate. My first thought was that I must, once again, have picked up the wrong volume. I opened all three on the table in front of me. The same pitiful candle guttered in the encroaching gloom on all three of them.

At that moment, the scout knocked with my lunch. I refused to admit him, and told him to set it down outside. There it lay all afternoon, to be joined by my tea, and then my dinner, as I went through my library to see how far the infection had spread.

An infection. A plague. A Black Death. Given the limited resources of my physical strength and the equally limited resources of physical space, I have instituted as rigid a regime of quarantine as possible. Books are strewn about everywhere. I check them as often as I can, to see which have changed, and need to be separated from those which are not yet infected. Perhaps the only effective remedy would be complete destruction by fire ' but that is not something which I can contemplate. It seems to me unlikely that the book in which I am writing at present will be affected. A sense of humour is not one of Dr Black's attributes, so it is improbable that he has a copy of Kai Lung in his library.

6.30 am 20th November 1979
I have stayed up all night ' but to no avail. I thought a wash and a shave would help me, but my first glance in the mirror has shown me all too clearly what the end of this process is intended to be.

That was what I read, leaning against the shelves at the back of the second-hand bookshop. I bought the book, nonetheless. I have no particular fear that I will turn into Dr White, or Dr Black. I have many other books that will not have been in the collections of either of those two gentlemen, and they make me what I am.

But I have pasted over Dr White's Ex Libris, and keep it in a drawer, on its own, just in case.
9.30-13.10, 25.iii.2002

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