Quest to divest old books reveals volumes about the collected life

They say when an old man dies, a great library burns to the ground. Got a match?

‘OK, I’m a hypocrite to complain but surely there is a less drastic way to denude myself of books?’

They say when an old man dies, a great library burns to the ground. Got a match?

I’m trying to unburden myself of books. Not long ago, I moved house and had to lug hundreds of them. There are better ways to wrench a groin adductor muscle.

I took a selection of books to my local Vinnies. Not wanted because they were “old”. As a veteran browser of charity shops, I never expected books to prove their virginity. It’s true my selection included the oldish works of Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), bard of Ukraine and Soviet hero. I’d never warmed to him but, who knows, someone out there might have a thing for the author of “O my thoughts, my heartfelt thoughts” and other stirring refrains.

I blame capitalism. Entertainment is in superabundance and instantly available in featherweight digital form. No wonder second-hand shops can’t shift antiquated books and DVDs. Vinnies will be in real trouble when someone works out how to teleport retro clothes into the virtual cloud for download in a different climate.

Like everyone, I want my stuff the moment I want it, otherwise I want someone else to store it somewhere else. I’ve looked wistfully at the recycling bin but I can’t bring myself to shovel books in with real estate bubble bulletins, condolence letters and the cherished artworks of children.

I have a mate, Milan, in Sydney’s east, who used to feed the unsleeping city its diet of stories. He was a paperboy at the Taylor’s Square newsstand, long ago now, but he still venerates the printed word. He was puzzled to see a neighbour’s recycling bin overflowing with books. Here was a great library, or its smouldering remains. Turns out it once belonged to John Douglas Pringle.

He’s worth a digression. Pringle was a big name in 20th-century Australian culture. A liberal Scot educated at Oxford, he served on The Manchester Guardian before arriving here in 1952 to edit The Sydney Morning Herald. His 1958 book Australian Accent was influential as an attempt to tease out the essence of the country, its attitudes and values. He also wrote on Australian painting, and his books bound for the shredder included a copy of Russell Drysdale’s Australia, autographed by the artist.

Pringle was still alive in 1984 when Stephen Murray-Smith first published his magnificent dictionary of quotations, with 33 entries devoted to Australian Accent. (Don­ald Horne’s The Lucky Country scored 11.) For Pringle, the typical Aussie was “rough rather than tough, kindly but not tolerant, a generous, sardonic, sceptical but surprisingly gullible character quick to take offence and by no means unwilling to give it, always ready for a fight but just as ready to help a fellow-creature in distress”. Our attitude to sex seemed “healthy, frank, open and often somewhat animal; there is rarely any sense of reserve or sophistica­tion … there is no eroticism”.

Nor a burning passion for books. University libraries send monographs off by the pallet for landfill to create “flexible learning spaces”. OK, I’m a hypocrite to complain but surely there is a less drastic way to denude myself of books? My local shops have a community book swap; they’re springing up everywhere. It’s a nook where most of the time adults loaf and squint at their smartphones while the odd child ponders the novelty that is a book. I added my Shevchenko to the pile, feeling virtuous, but then my eye fell on a novel with the wonderful title Eva Trout. Then my other eye fell on a book about the Chinese in Southeast Asia. It conjured up suddenly the image of a collector at work, stumbling across treasures long out of print, rescuing a contentious history that had been cunningly filed in the fiction section. And now, the collection broken up and scattered.

The least I could do was put a few, well, several orphaned books into my shopping trolley and trundle down the hill to my overstuffed library. As for that dear old Ukrainian bard, he lasted only a day before disappearing to a new, more sympathetic home.