For book lovers. Reid of Liverpool is a bookshop I discovered in 1990. Walking up Mount Pleasant to who knows where, I was attracted by the sight of books on the pavement and decided to investigate further. The front of the shop is like the cover of a book itself, something that looks quite small but which opens up to something much more immense and expansive. The first section I saw when I entered was the philosophy section, and here I remained. I found such a diversity of things, most of which I couldnt understand. But here and there were lines and passages which really clarified all kinds of issues and problems, taking the knowledge and information I had already acquired at university to another level entirely. I bought four books that day. A Hundred Years of Philosophy by John Passmore was a good crash course involving empiricism, logic, critical realism, semantics, language, Cook Wilson and Oxford Philosophy ... and a chapter on Existentialism and Phenomenology. Very Anglophone and analytical, then. But the book has the merit of being clear as well as touch, and it turned me onto philosophy. I bought John Stuart Mills Autobiography, charting the intellectual development of a philosopher I still retain a soft spot for. Nietzsche called Mill a blockhead apparently. I like Mill, hes very reasonable. Which didnt impress Nietzsche! They are a modest and thoroughly mediocre species of man, these English utilitarians, Still, from Bentham to Mill and after, the utilitarians have plenty good to their name, for all their mediocrity. The third book I bought was Galvano Della Volpes Rousseau and Marx, a structuralist work which I found thoroughly boring and choked the life out of the subject matter. Apparently Della Volpe turned sharply against his early idealism. It shows. Better to read Marx and Rousseau directly. Thankfully, I also bought Rousseaus The Social Contract and Discourses, edited by G.D.H. Cole. Cole makes clear the extent to which Rousseau emphasised exchanging natural liberty enjoyed by individuals apart for a civil liberty in which individuals join in association. Theres no hint of the noble savage in this view of Rousseau, and that reading stayed with me. Having finally read my way through these books, and feeling highly inspired and somewhat enlightened, I returned to my little den of reading delights. And returned again and again. Every couple of weeks, on my way to the football to watch my beloved Liverpool give the usual masterclass on the beautiful game, I would stop off at Reids. I would also go and visit Atticus books on a parallel road. And I would enter the ground at Anfield with a bagful of books, sometimes more than a dozen! In a plastic bag! Id stand on the terraces with these books and became quite a noted character. When the ground went all seater I was in my element. I could sit with the books on my knee, and the more the Liverpool team deteriorated in quality in the 1990s, the more tempted I was to just read my books instead. I made some amazing discoveries in these little book shops. A pattern eventually emerged as my interests sharpened. But the attraction and the excitement lay in not knowing what may be on the shelves every time I entered. I would come away with books I had previous awareness of. And started to make all manner of connections between various disciplines. And the books. I have Mills Principles of Political Economy from the nineteenth century. Platos collected works from the 19C, one edition from the 1840s. John Ruskin too from the 1880s. Just a world, a big, expansive world in which words inspire thoughts and thoughts lead to actions. “Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.” ― Francis Bacon I read on, I write on. 260,000 words now ready to knock into shape. Being at One: Making a Home in the Earths Commonwealth of Virtue - coming soon. reidofliverpool/
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 14:59:40 +0000
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