I am still – at a snail’s pace – shelving the books that came home from my work office three years ago (four a day, or 120 a month, is my relaxed target). A few days ago, I came across a very distinctive one. It was a rather austere German volume from the late 1980s on Roman religion, which I doubt I will ever look at again. But it was dressed up in a brown paper cover, and there was a form pasted onto the front with a list of names of my erstwhile Cambridge colleagues, with notes of “date received” and “date sent on (to whom)”.
It was a precious memory of a lost institution (which I knew in Cambridge Classics, but similar things were once much more widespread – as some of you will remember, I’m sure). It started in the early twentieth century and had its valedictory party in 1993.
Soon after I took up my job in Cambridge in 1984, I received an invitation to join “the book club”. The general idea of the club was that each member had to order a classical book from Heffers each year (no charge at that point). It was then dressed up in its brown paper cover and delivered to you. You then had a few days in which to read it (or not), sign it off on the pasted form, and deliver it to another of the listed members. And so on. At the end of the year, the books that had been read by all members were auctioned off at a general meeting of the club to pay the Heffers bill.
There is a very charming article about the club by two longstanding members (John Crook and Joyce Reynolds) in Chris Stray’s edited volume, Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge. The authors very modestly reflect on the club’s raison d’être. It was made for a time when people found it hard to keep up with new books across the whole field of classics, and when they didn’t have much of a communal intellectual life anyway. It was finished when people had other ways to discover what the new books were and (so Crook suggests) the identity of Classics itself was disaggregating. People working on ancient history, he claims, no longer wanted to see what was coming out in ancient philosophy – and he quotes Moses Finley saying, “Classics is not a subject”.
As a young member, I remember it a bit differently. The financial security of the club came down to its Byzantine system of fines for minor infractions (that is, in addition to anything raised at the annual auction). There were fines for keeping a book too long (beyond a week?), for suggesting an inappropriate book for the club, for not suggesting a book at all, for not turning up to the auction, for not buying a book there, for loudly saying a book wasn’t worth it (mid-auction), and so on. The auction got more bibulous as the evening went on, and there was a horrible tendency to gang up and force some poor innocent to pay a ridiculously high price for a book they didn’t want (rather than pay the fine for not buying a book at all). It might have been sociable, but there was a thinly disguised streak of low-level cruelty, admittedly cruelty that was often delivered by those lower down the food chain onto those higher up.
Anyway, all this came to an end when the club dissolved itself in 1993. Crook and Reynolds observe that “its remaining liquid assets were consumed” at its final meeting (literally). It was a tremendous party, but looking back I wonder if we might have found something more constructive to spend the reserves on!
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