Remember when they tried to tell us books were obsolete? I recall reading a story a decade ago about a library that had got rid of all its books. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

At that time, people had begun reading eBooks and, with the usual exaggeration that accompanies newfangled things, it was declared that soon nobody would be reading books at all, except online. Or they might just listen to them. (Note to readers: listening to a book is NOT reading.)

There was a period when some book stores closed and there was panic among the bookshelves. But people’s love of actual books put paid to the dire predictions of the philistines. And books are still popular, thank God.

I have never read an eBook, even though some of my own books are available on such platforms – and that’s nice for some. I hope. I read news online and all sorts of other things, but I love nothing more than sitting down with an actual book.

I’m thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. One is that I recently read about how much David Bowie loved reading.  He had a massive collection of books. His son Duncan Jones started an online book club in his late father’s honour. Bowie himself was a voracious reader and collector.

You might like

Books & Poetry

Return to paradise: Charmian Clift’s Greek odyssey revisited

Books & Poetry

Poem: Any Shorter and I’d Have Missed It

My love of books and reading was kindled as a boy growing up in Hong Kong

You might like

Books & Poetry

Return to paradise: Charmian Clift’s Greek odyssey revisited

Books & Poetry

Poem: Any Shorter and I’d Have Missed It

Then I read another article about Karl Lagerfeld, the legendary Chanel creative director. Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, was quite the bibliophile, apparently. He had a personal library containing several hundred thousand books. I had to smile when I read how he liked to stack his books horizontally rather than upright, because I do exactly the same thing. One of the bookcases in my study has books upright, but the important one, the one with all my literary favourites and books on Asia, has them all stacked horizontally, which is the way I like it.

We have several piles of books stacked horizontally on a table in our bedroom. These are the books we intend to read, although we never manage to get through them all. But it makes me feel good to have them there, as if I could somehow ingest their contents by some sort of osmosis. I have several on my bedside table to dip into. At the moment I am reading On A Chinese Screen by W. Somerset Maugham. How about you?

My love of books and reading was kindled as a boy growing up in Hong Kong. I was a bookish kid and I started with the Famous Five and Secret Seven before graduating to The Hardy Boys mysteries and then to more serious fare including the Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis, when I was about 12.

I got my books from Swindon Book Company Ltd. (established in 1918), in Lock Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, which is basically downtown Kowloon. This bookshop was like a sacred space for me and for generations of Hong Kongers, particularly other expats. If I close my eyes and imagine myself back there in 1967, I can also conjure the smell of fresh books that was so comforting and exciting to me as a lad.

I have written about Swindon in my memoir, The Kowloon Kid, and have had a lot of correspondence from the Hong Kong diaspora – people who had a similar love of the store.

Each time I have gone back to Hong Kong, and that’s quite often, I have made a pilgrimage to Swindon. I was devastated when they closed the physical shop (I think they are still operating online). There was an enormous outpouring of grief over the loss of this bookstore on the numerous Hong Kong expat Facebook groups that I am a member of. It meant so much to all of us.

We have five bookcases in our house, with various stacks of books around the place including under the coffee table

I love mooching around bookstores and on a recent trip to London we haunted the Waterstones bookstore on Gower Street, near where we were staying in Bloomsbury. Despite not having much room in my suitcase, I had to buy a small stack of books.

We are lucky to have a number of really good bookshops in my home city of  Brisbane, including two of my favourites, Avid Reader and Bent Books, both in West End.  Last time I was at Avid I looked across the stacks of books to see the Hollywood actor Owen Wilson browsing nearby. He was here making a film, apparently. Good to know he loves books, too. That was obvious from the way he examined various tomes, quite engrossed. It took a sneaky photo of him but, other than that, left him alone to browse.

We have five bookcases in our house, with various stacks of books around the place including under the coffee table. We do refresh them from time to time but whenever we get rid of a few books they are quickly replaced by others. I’m lucky to have some old and rare books bequeathed to me by my mum’s aunt, whose husband was a bibliophile.

In the ’70s when mum’s Aunty Lo was quite aged, she gave me a swag of her late husband’s books because no-one else in the family seemed interested. Among them is a 20-volume set of short stories of the world. One of my pride and joys in a 10-volume leather-bound set of the collected short stories of Guy de Maupassant, which I have had refurbished.

These books are treasures and I am lucky to have them.

Does anybody still seriously think that books have passed their use-by date? To the contrary, I think people love books now more than ever. They are windows to other worlds and they are artefacts in their own right and trusty companions. A house is not a home without books, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t you agree?

Phil Brown’s new book Confessions of a Minor Poet will be published by Transit Lounge in October.