But I set my face firmly against taking unnecessary literature. My house gets choked with books, ninety per cent. of which I never open a second time. I am for ever turning them out, and yet they go on accumulating. Virginia has a perfect mania for hoarding impossible books, that she could never find time to read through again if she lived to be the age of Methuselah; yet she keeps them all, on the chance that some day she may require to refer to a solitary sentence in one of them. Her cupboards are full, and her shelves are packed behind and before, and she has had sets of drawers made just to hold “papers”; which means hundredweights of abstruse pamphlets, and learned magazines, and cuttings—well, I dare say you know the sort of girl she is, and what it’s like when their flat gets spring-cleaned, and she insists that no one must lay a finger on her books!
Ursula isn’t much better; but at least she is more practical, and believes in spring cleaning; hence, in her case, she does have a turn-out occasionally, and just throws away indiscriminately whole shelf-loads of books in a fit of desperation, when she has managed to get every article in the flat jumbled up in a heap in the room it has no business in, and no one can find anything. I believe at such time she surreptitiously disposes of some of Virginia’s tomes, too; but this I only suspect. At any rate, Virginia is always bewailing a number of “most important books” that never can be found after one of Ursula’s domestic upheavals.
Knowing all this, I said that only a definite number of books would be allowed on The Island. Both girls said it would be impossible to fix any limit that would meet the case. I said I was quite sure humanity, more especially the intellectual feminine portion of it, could do with far less books than they thought they could.
Vehement protests!
Then I suggested, to prove my words, that we should each start to make out a list of the books we couldn’t possibly do without on The Island—only those we couldn’t possibly do without—and see what it amounted to. “Jot down any book or author that occurs to us as being essential, irrespective of any sort of classification,” I said. “And we had better compare notes every ten books, as we go along.”
Forthwith, we each scribbled down our first ten absolutely indispensable books (they were to be exclusive of religious and devotional works). When we compared notes in a few minutes’ time, these were our lists:—
Virginia.
- Encyclopædia.
- A Dictionary.
- Jane Austen’s Novels.
- “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.”
- A Time Table.
- Franklin’s “Voyages.”
- “Punch” (regularly).
- A good Atlas.
- “The Spectator” (regularly).
- “A Child’s Garden of Verse.” R. L. Stevenson.
Ursula.