The final article in the series inspired by Through the Magic Door, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's little volume of 12 essays about books, writers and reading, has been outstanding for some time now.
The last in a string of book-inspired posts is often the most difficult to produce; it isn't easy to let a good book go! Then there is the uncomfortable feeling that some key commentary-inspiring material might have been overlooked, which means retaining the book on standby for just one more trawl-through when time permits.
I now feel that enough is enough; at long last the time has come to call it a day. I have made a final journey through the Magic Door for the purpose of producing just one more article, and I found a little more interesting material to highlight.
As previously mentioned, Conan Doyle describes the tempting tub of bargain books that stood outside the door of a bookshop that he used to pass on the way to buy his lunch; each time he went to get something to eat, he had to decide between spending his budgeted threepence on food or doing without and buying a book for the same amount of money instead.
He twice mentions Jonathan Swift's satirical work A Tale of a Tub; this was one of the cheap treasures that he found when digging in the tub!
This reminds me of a similar scene in Dion Fortune's Goat-Foot God. A twopenny bargain bin that stands outside a bookshop tempts a passer-by into looking for gold among the gravel. He finds a good book that 'by chance' was put in the bin by mistake. When he goes inside to pay, a whole new life opens up to him.
Conan Doyle says that Macaulay's Essays opened up a new world to him. He describes how much this book meant to him:
“If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder stained copy of Macaulay's "Essays." It seems entwined into my whole life as I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it has been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound volume could ever take its place for me.“
This reminds me of Alan Quatermain and his copy of the Ingoldsby Legends that accompanied him everywhere.