The morning of the 14th Guardian first book award found me riffling through my bookshelves in search of former winners. There's no sign of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the first ever winner and therefore a novel close to my heart. No Jimmy Corrigan, the only graphic novel to win the award. No trace of Philip Gourevitch's still sadly pertinent chronicle of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, or of last year's winner The Emperor of Maladies. In fact, I appear only to have five of the 13 winners still on my shelves.
I can't say I was surprised, because it reflects a problem that has for years reduced my library to the bibliophile's equivalent of a slab of Emmental cheese: I'm a chronic lender, with the result that my shelves are more hole than book. My loans are nearly always the result of enthusiastic conversations, so it's invariably my favourite books that disappear.
Over the years I've consoled myself with Anne Fadiman's insistence – in Ex Libris (also no longer in my possession) – that it's not the physical object that counts. But I'm enough of a materialist to have once launched a nighttime raid on the home of one of my borrower friends to retrieve a stash of lost treasures. And I've never quite forgiven another who sub-lent a vintage edition of Beckett's shorter plays.
Last weekend we ran a feature on My Ideal Bookshelves, which found readers pining after everything from Amis to Brontë and from Homer to Camus. But standing in front of my own actual bookshelves this morning, I realised that my ideal shelves would be full of books I once owned.
Maybe I just need to start becoming a little more acquisitive, or perhaps we could start some sort of bookswap. I currently have a burning desire to re-read Graham Robb's account of a country discovered at cycling speed, The Discovery of France, which disappeared a couple of years back. My copies of this year's first book award shortlist are still on my shelves. Before they go the way of all favoured books, we have quite a few copies of this year's first book award winner in the office at the moment. Would anyone like to swap their copy of The Discovery of France for one of them? (And don't forget to check back this evening at 8pm to find out who's won.)
