[NetBehaviour] Sidestepping the Known: A Loose Chronology of Meztext[ing]s

[Edward Picot]

Very interesting about how an early formative experience of reading can 
have such a profound effect on your intellectual direction, and in fact 
on the whole direction of your life. It would make a good subject for an 
online project: get people to send in their recollections of how they 
first started to read. Experiences of libraries would be particularly 
interesting, as we're now in an age where libraries are being closed 
down or starved of funding in order to save money.

The library in Hoddesdon, the nearest town to where I grew up, was a 
good one, an old-fashioned building with the children's section 
upstairs, with clonky wooden floors and nice wide white-painted 
window-sills where you could sit comfortably to read. Even more 
influential for me, however, was a bookshop called The Bookworm in 
Hertford, where I bought my collections of C S Lewis, Alan Garner, Henry 
Treece - anything with either magic or swordfights in it, preferably 
both - and later on Penguin Classics and Modern Classics. I think I was 
profoundly affected by the design of books. As a boy I was always drawn 
to books with illustrations that I liked, and when I got older it was 
the look of Penguin books that particularly attracted me to them. I 
resisted things like Faber and Everyman for years because I didn't like 
the way they were designed.

- Edward