In February, Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating the 120th anniversary of Horbury’s Carnegie Free Library. This 1902 reprint of The Origin of Species might have been part of the original stock, although as it has been trimmed and rebound there are no original labels or stamps to confirm that.
With its photogravure sepia-toned portrait of Darwin as the frontispiece, it’s identical to the book that I borrowed from Horbury Library when I was a student at Batley School of Art in 1968.
At that time I was trying to read through some of the ‘great books’ – Greek myths (in a two volume compilation by Robert Graves), the Bible, Plato’s Republic, etc – and I took it as my holiday reading when I visited, for the first time, my French penfriend, Philippe, in le Havre.
It wasn’t the best choice for what turned out to be a 40-hour stint without sleep on my return journey by ferry to Southampton and train:
I attempted to Read Origin of the Species but heard voices and saw faces in the corridor out of the corners of my eye and the spaces between the type on the page formed figures suggested by the narrative”