The Quandary.

Right, you get a book handed to you for cataloguing. One of your insanely knowledgeable work mates has managed to secure a book not seen for a goodly number of years. In this case it's a first edition of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's bone meltingly good "In a Glass Darkly". It's three volumes in a rather nice not terribly old brown leather binding and it contains ground breaking supernatural tales like "Carmilla" and "Green Tea". You know the whole Hammer House of Horror thing with lesbian vampires and heaving cleavage and more brooding shadowy figures than you can shake a stake at? Well it started here, Mr.Stoker came puffing in third after Dr. Polly-Dolly and JSLF and a bunch of other sideliners (including Conan Doyle, who wrote so much more than the adventures of everybody's favourite coked-up consulting crime fighter). I live for this stuff; the sweeping vistas of escapism gifted to us by the grand masters of the weird make me go all tingly and unprofessional. I do things frowned upon by the traditionalists of book dealing and become actually enthusiastic (Imagine Jeeves whooping "Hell Yeah!" and leaping in the air at the fruition of one of his cunning plans and you have the image I'm going for, or possibly a catholic school geography teacher on a crystal meth binge. Either way, you know what I mean). So I sit there with this item in my shaky grasp and wonder how I can do it justice. I mean you do the whole professional biblio-jargon bit about half titles not being called for and recent half calf with twin title labels and gilt inner dentelles so that everyone interested knows that this particular copy escaped the tree shredder that apparently got most of the others...and then you sit there thinking there must be something more you can say about how marvellous this object actually is. It's a bit like trying to describe someone you're in love with, no matter how hard you try you always feel as if you aren't quite getting the point across about how wonderful they actually are. Of course you can't, which is kind of the point. In cases like this I always want to end my catalogue descriptions with: "You should buy this book, if you are the right kind of person I'll really work on the price, but you'll probably never see another one of these and that's a lot like being told you're about to go blind or you'll never see anther sunset. This copy of [insert title] is so much more important than that Blackberry you were going to buy, or that car or indeed anything other than spiriting sick children away to somewhere they can be safe and happy that if you aren't doing that sick children thing you should buy this book because in the grand mural that is the passage of time it pretty much works out to the same thing because; in all likelihood you will be saving the people of the future from the possibility that they might never get to read [insert title here]." But of course I can't, so sometimes I have to just apologise to the book in private later. No, I don't go mushy about kittens and babies and as far as I am concerned, if ghosts exist then it doesn't actually make the world any more interesting than it is already. Go about your business, nothing to see here except the really lovely copy of In a Glass Darkly.