I keep a note of books which look interesting (from reviews, friends’ suggestions and such like) and last weekend I converted this list into requests on the Library reservation service. A few days ago I received notification that the first book was available for collection and when I arrived at the branch today, there had clearly been another delivery.The picture shows exactly what I walked out with. It was exhilarating and I had an impulse to call up and down the street, to draw attention to this amazing resource. It cost me £3.80.

Within this pile, there will, no doubt, be books I will struggle with; titles I enjoy but can return without a second glance; and maybe just one or two that are real discoveries and enrich my life just that little bit. It’s amazing to look at this small stack. Such richness. Wot larks. O Brave New World.

A Kindle doesn’t have this sense of thrilling promise yet – it may acquire it over time, but as yet I am still hard-wired into an appreciation of books as physical objects. The smell of the pages, their weight, how they feel in the hand. My daughter has been reading a copy of Pride and Prejudice. It happens to be a book which her great-great-aunt acquired. It has been passed down casually through the family and she has been delighted to use a book which is around 100 years old. It’s a strangely satisfying size, fitting neatly into your hand or a pocket, very easy to carry around ready to read at odd moments, so we have never replaced it with a “better” copy and this is just “the version of Pride and Prejudice which we own”: it happens to be a rather pleasing object.

I also suffer from a mild compulsion to buy multiple copies of much-loved titles . There is very little logic to this. I can, perhaps, argue that there is some justification to having a beautiful hardback copy of Brideshead Revisited, and then having “camping copies” – tatty paperbacks which can be slung in rucksacks and taken on holiday and it doesn’t matter if they get wet. But why keep three or four identical paperback copies of 84 Charing Cross Road? Or – just this morning – buy another copy of The Subtle Knife at the library sale? My response was more suited to a stray kitten rather than a book – I felt it needed a home, and we could give it one, and I couldn’t leave it there as if no-one cared for it.

On reflection, there is just the hint of a reason – the spare copies are so that there is one available to give away when someone reveals their deprived state of not having read this “desert island book”. Plus, my children will need their own copies, although, worryingly, they show signs of inheriting my camping copy mentality. Hence four copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and multiple editions of The Waste Land.   Perhaps wanting to possess in order to share is no bad thing after all. As Hector says in The History Boys by Alan Bennett (which is another one in our household) “Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone , somewhere, one day. Pass it on boys. That’s the game I wanted you to learn. Pass it on.”

“Love apart”, says Scripps in the same text, “it is the only education worth having”.