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.
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