As a writer and a bibliophile, I welcome the quickly multiplying “books’ sarcophagi” that have spread through the streets of British villages and towns. I love these impromptu mini-libraries inside the used red phone boxes.
Why “sarcophagi”?
If one day, while exploring London, you wander into the vast churchyard of St Pancras Old Church in Camden, you are unlikely to miss the spectacular mausoleum of the wife of Sir John Soane, the distinguished collector of art and the architect of the Bank of England building. The sarcophagus, a Grade I listed monument designed by Soane, resembles in its shape the world famous K1 and K2 telephone boxes, which at the time of Eliza Soane’s death, in 1815, were over a century away from being invented. How come?
The answer is that in the mid 1920s, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a trustee of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was inspired by the mausoleum when he designed the base for the K1. His unusual blueprint won a Post Office-sponsored competition, and from then on, Britain’s red telephone kiosks were shaped accordingly. Since the demise of public phones, that design icon has had a number of unexpected reincarnations, including “the world’s smallest nightclub”—a one-person disco kiosk (in Kingsbridge, Devon), complete with flashing lights and a glitter ball, where any reclusive individual can dance away like nobody’s watching.
But the most widespread new use for the phone boxes is as book exchanges, or mini-libraries, in which no-longer-needed folios can be deposited, swapped, borrowed or grabbed for free.
My initial reaction to those pop-up mini-libraries was cautious. As an author, I found the sight of so many unwanted books depressing. But as an incorrigible bookworm, I couldn’t resist the temptation to browse and borrow.
The problem is that I already feel permanently guilty about owning too many books for my very small cottage. My passion (or should I say addiction?) goes back to my first life, in the Soviet Union, where, in accordance with the strict state-imposed information diet, good books were very hard to get hold of. Some people were ready to pay a month’s salary for a book they needed, and coveted folios were kept in the safest places in their homes, next to the family silver (if they had any).
Guess what my first major purchase in my second, western life was. Not a used jalopy, a three-piece designer suit or a primitive 1980s word processor. Shortly after fleeing from the USSR and settling down in Australia in 1990, I bought—from a glib Polish salesman—the latest edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
When the bulky, leather-bound volumes—all 28 of them—arrived in the back of a van, I could hardly fit them in our first Melbourne flat. Little did I know that several years of a peripatetic existence lay ahead, and those 28 weighty tomes would turn into 28 millstones around my neck. Eventually, an antiquarian bookseller friend of mine agreed to buy the lot as a huge favour—for one-twentieth of the cover price.
It was a lesson I’ve sadly failed to learn from. To get rid of this book addiction would probably take a powerful drug, a “bibliozempic” of sorts, that caused nausea at an attempt to buy yet another book.
Whenever I go for a drive these days, I carry with me a bagful of paperbacks, which I exchange inside the nearest redbook sarcophagus, often ignoring the handwritten pleas not to deposit any more books. Yes, under the pressure of the internet and the e-readers, old books have become a burden, a white elephant of sorts. This is a pity, for in over a year of persistent sarcophagus browsing, I’ve added to my growing collection a number of literary gems in the fields of philosophy, history, biography and linguistics, not to mention numerous who-and-how-dunnits! An amateur chef, I was lucky to find in a book sarcophagus near Cambridge the long-sought-after French cookbook Cuisine Super Facile by Natacha Arnoult.
The contents of the ex-phone boxes differ with location. Cambridgeshire sarcophagi are often filled with books in foreign languages, dictionaries and nonfiction. (I once spotted a neatly bound copy of a dissertation in one of them.) The red cabins of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire are normally resplendent with battered Mills & Boon paperbacks and, for some obscure reason, almost ubiquitously, novels by Virginia Andrews. A revealing socio-demographic survey could be conducted, or a dissertation written, about it, even if the latter would itself eventually end up in one of the sarcophagi.
Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that I’ve so far failed to spot of the16 books I’ve written inside them, I remain a devoted fan of these literary phone boxes. Neither have I yet lost hope that I’ll stumble upon all 28 volumes of my old Encyclopaedia Britannica squeezed into some mythical super-size book sarcophagus.
If that happens, I would happily hire a lorry to take them all home again.
