True Confessions of a Bibliophile

Note to self: I should never be allowed inside Blackwell's Books unsupervised. When I got done with my first lecture today, it was 11, so I still had an hour to kill before going to see Maarit for the tutorial. I briefly considered going to the Ashmolean, but having been there several times already it seemed a bit old. So I decided to browse (just browse, not buy!) Blackwell's for a half hour before grabbing lunch and going to the tutorial. I should have known better. With five floors and hundreds of thousands of books (they cite the basement alone as having 160,000 volumes), Blackwell's has the look and scale of a Barnes and Noble without losing the charm of a small-town bookshop.

So I get in there, and of course I head straight to the second floor, the location of their classics section. Now, most of my non-classicist readers will probably not be aware of this, but the classics section of most bookshops is tiny. Maybe two bookshelves, if you're at one of the huge Barnes and Nobles. That's certainly enough to cover most of the original texts, and maybe a few modern authors, and of course you can always order whatever book isn't there. I can't help feeling a little crestfallen, however, whenever I try to browse classics in the states, only to find that my browsing space is smaller than a broom closet.

Not so at Blackwell's. Fully half of the second floor is devoted to Classics, with complete collections of Loebs (Oxford-published Greek and Latin texts with facing translation) and Oxford Classical Texts (same thing as Loebs, but without the facing translation), as well as virtually every translation I could want and every commentary, historical analysis and biography I could think of. If the Sackler library weren't five minutes away this would likely be the best collection of classical sources in Oxford. I think the way I put it to Brett is best: I'm a Classics Junkie and Blackwell's is like crack - expensive, addictive and a mind-blowing experience.

So as I was saying, I get in there, and I start browsing. I come across the Oxford Classical Text of Ovid's love poems (specifically, the Amores, Ars Amatoria, Medicamina Faciei Femineae and the Remedia Amoris). Now, I by no means am at the level where I could breeze through those poems in Latin the way I could in English - far from it. But...it's Ovid! At first I tell myself no, that I won't have time to read it, that I'm already quite busy enough with papers and Sallust. But I keep coming back to it. So finally I surrender to temptation and buy it. thirteen and a half pounds. I'm a bad person.

I go to my tutorial, and that goes very well. Maarit really likes my essay. There are a couple of points we quibble over, but on the whole, she really likes it and thinks I demonstrate a strong understanding of the topic. As background material for the next two papers she wants me to read Hesiod ("Theogeny" and "Works and Days"). Now, I theoretically could go to the Library at St. Cat's college and just borrow it, but to my mind Hesiod is an important enough author that I really should have a copy. So I go back to Blackwell's. At this point you're probably saying to yourself "Oh dear, Jan's gone and spent another thirteen and a half pounds in addition to the thirteen and a half he already spent just a few hours ago." Well it isn't that bad. Thankfully the volume I chose was very slender and a paperback. Blackwell's also was having a "buy-one-get-one-free" deal for this edition, so I was able to walk away with the works of Hesiod that I needed, as well as a volume containing Antigone, Oedipus and Electra for a grand total of eight pounds. So I'm not too horrible, right?