"He arrived at the frontier gates of death carrying the melons on his head."
I tried to put it back on the shelf and leave it but I really couldn't not buy that: Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-ên, translated by Arthur Waley (London, 1942), 3rd impression 1943, "BOOK PRODUCTION WAR STANDARD ECONOMY", £2.50 from Voltaire and Rousseau.
I liked those wartime editions partly because I could afford them, partly for the poignancy of people reading in the blackout. I've never bought a book because it was a first edition or because it was a beautiful object. Blame the Vatican and the Kremlin. The book is the wrapping; the Word's the thing. In the USSR the handsomely bound efforts were Brezhnev, Leonid, opera omnia. Anything worthwhile circulated in the barter system on the usual
cheap paper. My Gaelic books got me a set of Blok's poems and a cruel hangover.
But some things just weren't available: Shestov, for instance. Even in the year the Soviets were publishing Mandelshtam, Lev Isaakovich was invisible, in the central libraries but not in the catalogues. I know he was there because I saw a young librarian reading him in a café near the Academy of Sciences Library: she'd taken it from the secret stacks. Does this sound like The Name of the Rose? It should, because printing does not guarantee survival. Nor does the writing. A work's survival depends entirely on the individual reader. And as for the bookshelf - the more important a book becomes the more you realise you don't own it at all: you're looking after it.
The Soviets were afraid of books: afraid of letting them in, afraid of letting them out. It took time to get permission to leave with books I'd brought with me to Leningrad, and a big official stamp was put on the last printed page of Morgan's translations of Mayakovsky; same for Dante's Inferno, whose last canto now ends with an exit visa from the Soviet Ministry of Culture.
If heaven is a bookshelf, hell is a book. Choose carefully . You might find yourself in Russia's War by Richard Overy, in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia. You might find yourself selling them all for bread, your pension not worth tuppence. Which is still better than living on the street in Manila.
Bookish fears of the well-to-do become encysted and transfigured on the right side of the law: to break the law is wrong but to gain from it is surely sinful. Solution? Posit something infinitely worse than hell on earth to paralyse the conscience. My bookshelf is blessed with a

HAND BOOK OF
CHINESE BUDDHISM
BEING
SANSKRIT-CHINESE
DICTIONARY
WITH
VOCABULARIES OF BUDDHIST TERMS
in Pali, Singhalese, Siamese, Burmese,
Tibetan, Mongolian and Japanese
ERNEST J. EITEL
SECOND EDITION
REVISED AND ENLARGED

prefaced in Hongkong, March 1888, reprinted Madras 1992. I use a lot of odd dictionaries, some of which, if you were to sling them in a pond, would mushroom into so many second-hand bookshops, the proprietor hunched over a calor gas stove in the corner, perishing from black lung, and a plastic sheet under the leaky roof bellying with bathfuls of rainwater, an
accident waiting to happen; a dozen hapless browsers immortalised in papier-maché while consulting:
1. L. Levitchi, Dictionar Romîn-Englez (Bucharest, 1960): "joian s.m. name given to an ox born on a Thursday"; 2. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (the entry on the Duke of Argyll); 3. Dorland's Medical Dictionary, 24th ed.: "NOTE - an infusion flows in by gravity, an injection is forced in by a syringe, an instillation is dropped in, an insufflation is blown in and an infection slips in unnoticed"; 4. and a dictionary of Russian prison camp slang which, for empty prattle, gives the elaborate "discussing the effects of lunar rays on herpes in the hereafter".
Eitel, though, is in a class of his own. His entry for "Nâraka" has to be seen in its enormity:
NÂRAKA (Pâli. Miraya. Siam. Narok. Burm. Niria. Tib. Myalba. Mong. Tamu)... explained by ... (nara)...(ka), lit. men's wickedness, or by ... lit. unenjoyable, or by ... lit. instruments of torture; or .. .(Niraya) explained by ... lit. prison under the earth, or by ... lit. the prefecture
of darkness. General term for the various divisions of hell. (1.) The hot hells (...), 8 of which (see Samdjiva, Kâlasûtra, Samghata, Râurava, Mahârâurava, Tapana, Tratâpana, and Avîtchi) are situated underneath Djambudvîpa in tiers, beginning at a depth of 11,900 yôdjanas, and reach to a depth of 40,000 yôdjanas; but as each of these hells has 4 gates and outside each gate 4 antechamber-hells, there are altogether 136 hot hells. (2.) The cold hells (...), 8 in number (see Arbuda, Nirarbuda, Atata, Hahava, Ahaha, Utpala, Padma and Pundarîka), situated underneath the 2 Tchakravâlas and ranging shaft-like one beneath the other, but so that this shaft is gradually widening down to the 4th hell and then narrowing again, the first and last hells having the shortest and the 4th hell the longest diameter. (3.) The dark hells, 8 in number, situated between the 2 Tchakravâlas; also called vivifying hells (...), because any being, dying in the first of these hells, is at once reborn in the 2nd, and so forth, life lasting 500 years in each of these hells. (4.) The cold Lôkântarika hells (... lit. hells on the edge sc. of the universe), 10 in number, but each having 100 millions of smaller hells attached, all being situated outside of
the Tchakravâlas. (4.) The 84,000 small Lôkântarika hells (... lit. small hells on the edge), divided into 3 classes, as situated on mountains, or on water, or in deserts. Each universe has the same number of hells, distributed so that the northern continent contains no hell at all, the two continents E. and W. of the Mêru have only the small Lôkântarika hells, and all the other hells are situated under the southern continent (Djambudvîpa). There are different torments in the different hells; the length of life also differs in each class of hells; but the distinctions made are too fanciful to be worth enumerating.

My italics. It goes on, though, and ends with a special hell for females "(... lit. placenta tank), consisting of an immense pool of blood. From thishell, it is said, no release is possible"...

Clearly, the former S.U. is the cold hells, the former Zaire the hot and Nâraka itself is governed from Bretton Woods. Back to the bookshelf. What is it with books? Why are most of them novels and biographies and cookery? Do people really have to be spoonfed? It's true that a novel can take my mind off squabbles with other bureaucrats, but in almost everything I read I find myself checking how many pages are left till I'm done with it. The last big exception to that was Nicolas Bouvier, l'Usage du monde (Droz, 1963; reissued by Payot, 1992)(in English - The Way of the World) and it was, of all things, a travel book. Most travel books seem designed to endorse the reader's prejudice or laziness. This one had me champing at the bit, wanting to take off now for the East. The author's father was head of the Geneva Public and University Library, whose utmost stacks and incunabulae - Scottish universities take note - are available to the reading public of the city. It's where I borrowed a copy of Athanasius Kircher's China, when I got back from Xi'an - city of the T'ang poets, who knew that government and
the law existed to make room for music and verse. In the "Forest of Steles", where the classics and historical documents are engraved in stone, I got a calque of a poem:

Moon down, crows up, sky of frost
River trees, fishing lamps, weary mind,
Past the town, Cold Mountain Temple
Midnight bells the traveller's skiff

The collection also displayed a document in Chinese and Syriac about a Nestorian Christian church established there in 631AD. Kircher devotes much of his book to it. Islam came later - and has stayed. But in that year of 631, a monk was heading west out of the T'ang dominions, along the Silk Road and round to the Ganges. In 645 he brought back the Buddhist scriptures, and the Little Wild Goose Pagoda - still standing - was built for their protection and study. His journey became the stuff of legends, which were set down in the Ming dynasty as "The Journey to the West", of which "Monkey" is an episode. I'd just got round to reading it.