Left the shop at 10 a.m. for a book deal in Dunscore (an hour away). The house belonged to a woman who had inherited her brother’s books. It was full of dogs (I lost count after seven). The books were in a predictably filthy state, and their content was even more unsavoury than their condition – Holocaust denial, extreme religious right, anti-abortion. After a while I discovered that these were her books, rather than her brother’s. She had decided to keep her brother’s books because she ‘didn’t want that kind of liberal nonsense to be read by anyone’ and to sell some of her own. She was a member of Opus Dei, and while he was alive she would regularly send her poor brother cuttings from the Daily Telegraph; he was a Guardian reader. I managed to salvage a handful of the slightly more palatable titles.
