You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A year or so ago, I read an obituary in The New York Times of the American author, intellectual, and critic, Susan Sontag, who died on December 28, 2004, from leukemia, at the age of seventy-one, after a multi-decade battle against cancer. Although sad to hear of the great suffering endured by this creative writer, I did breathe a little sigh of relief and recognition when I discovered that, at the time of her death, Sontag reputedly owned some 15,000 books in her Manhattan apartment. Although I do not have a New York apartment, I do nonetheless possess a ridiculously large amount of professional books (15,000 would not be an unreasonable estimate), and I thought to myself, just as the chronic dipsomaniac must do upon sitting down at that first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, “Hooray, I am not alone.”
I first discovered Karnac Books at 58 Gloucester Road, London S.W.7., in either the latter part of 1982 or the early months of 1983, shortly after commencing postgraduate studies at Oxford. I must have seen an advertisement for the shop in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and no doubt wended my way to London to investigate this mecca of psychotherapeutic books. I do recall that upon entering the rather unprepossessing premises, I saw no psychology volumes at all—only the usual selection of cookery and gardening fare. I staved off my rising sense of disappointment as I walked towards the very back of the shop, wondering whether I had in fact come to the right location; but then, happily, I spied a bust of Sigmund Freud perched near a dimly lit and unmarked staircase, which led