Between the Bookstacks and Into the Buffyverse!

Dear Juliet

I listened to your podcast first thing this morning instead of watching Frasier. Good production, and I like hearing Dru's voice. It cannot help but strike a chord...

I hadn't really considered Dalton as the anti-Giles, and he was gone before I thought more about it. But I remember you once considered me as a sort of Giles. I didn't altogether agree at the time, but there is some fairly compelling evidence. A postgraduate diploma in library and information studies, experience of rare books, specialist knowledge of the Book of Deer and most of all, the fact it feels like I was grabbed and flung headfirst into the Buffyverse by Dru like some sort of conscripted Watcher.

I didn't ever find any occult works on the shelves in Corehouse (that stately home where I worked 1993-1995) but I was certainly steeped in history and some of it rubbed off. It's hard to forget sitting where Sir Walter Scott sat, seeing a page singed in the Great Fire of London, handling an incunabulum or cataloguing a manuscript maybe from the monastery of Melk, dated to about 1250 A.D. In The Name of The Rose, Christian Slater plays an apprentice called Adso of Melk and the monastery (a replica built on a hill outside Rome) is possibly based on Melk itself.

Giles and Dalton would have been in awe. I think Dru would have twirled in a tizzy.

Then there was the sense of travelling in time. As you know, there are two ways to do this (I might discuss choosing between alternate futures with reference to Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics another time).

1) Build a TARDIS (impossible at present)

2) Live in a building from another time, the views from which are the same as they were a hundred years ago and, one fine day, you might walk out into that other summer...

Or as Jack Finney explained in Time and Again:

"...Once you get away from midtown, there are entire city blocks that have been where they still stand for fifty, seventy, even eighty and ninety years. There are scattered places a century or more old, and a very few which actually knew the presence of Washington. ... If Albert Einstein is right once again - as he is - then hard as it may be to comprehend, the summer of 1894 still exists. Unaltered and unchanged, identical in each and existing in each. I believe it may be possible this summer, just barely possible, you understand, for a man to walk out of that unchanged apartment and into that other summer..."

Corehouse, built between 1824-1827, had remained in private hands much longer than usual. The views from the windows were the same as they'd been a century before and, as I toiled in the library, I turned a dark, dull and neglected dungeon into an approximation of the light, bright and knowledgeable sanctum it had been as far back as the eighteen-thirties.

You really could feel the past coming alive round you.

I was there for three years, and maybe towards the end I got a bit blasé. Then one fine morning I was up in the attic seeing if there were any more lost treasures hanging about, and I came across a slim and grotty volume of poems by one Hilaire Belloc (MP, political activist, author), who'd died in 1953.

I casually checked whether Belloc had signed it (I'd already found the signatures of G. K. Chesterton and Pope Pius X), and he had.

But more than that, he'd dedicated it to a Miss Edmondstone-Cranstoun at Corehouse in 1913. Belloc had been a peripatetic man of letters of no fixed abode, and it seemed he'd stayed at Corehouse for some time that year. I realised with a profound sense of awe that he'd walked the same floors, handled the same books, seen the same views I had.

I can't really explain exactly what that felt like but it was as if, for a few brief moments, the past really did come fully to life. And who knows, perhaps it set me up uniquely to be receptive that day on the train I started writing Roses...

It had certainly been like walking in worlds others couldn't imagine...

And people think librarians are boring...

Well, not all of them. Not Giles, not Dalton and maybe not me.

Have a good day, gorgeous!

Love,

James