We had so many books we had to hire a structural engineer to prevent us being buried

My father Anthony Hobson, whose books are to be sold at Christie’s in two sales next week, claimed that the book collector’s greatest joy was the sight of an empty shelf: a vacuum begging to be filled. Such a thing was a rare occurrence in our home, so freighted with literary matter, mainly upstairs, that the advice of a structural engineer had to be sought: were we all about to be buried beneath an avalanche of bibliographical rarities?

On the landing stood the vast tomes on Renaissance book binding, my father’s lifelong study – serried dark objects stamped with words that sounded to my young self like spells: Sigismondo Boldoni, Aldus Manutius. But in the library itself, where my father used to read us bedtime stories, the large glass-fronted cases were filled with his friends. A shelf of Connolly, his step brother-in-law, immortalised for me after I watched ET with my mother: ‘But he’s just like Cyril!’ Bruce Chatwin, the languid boy who lay in a deckchair on our lawn.