1984 (in search of razor blades)

"And when memory failed and written records were falsified -- when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up.  He was in a narrow street with a few dark little shops interspersed among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head there hung three discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop where he had bought the diary.

A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the place again.  And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of his own accord.  It was precisely against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself by opening the diary.  At the same time he noticed that although it was nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open.  With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway.  If questioned, he could plausibly say that he was trying to buy razor blades.

'I recognised you on the pavement,' [the shopkeeper] said immediately.  'You're the gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album.  That was a beautiful bit of paper, that was.  Cream-laid, it used to be called.  There's been no paper like that made for -- oh, I dare say fifty years.'  "

Nineteen Eighty-Four  George  Orwell

School books

"As for the few textbooks  that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid-nineteenth century.  There were only three textbooks of which each child had a copy.  One was a shilling arithmetic,  pre-War but fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The Hundred Page History of Britain --a nasty little duodecimo book with a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot.....

The date of the book was 1888.   Dorothy, who had never seen a history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling approaching horror.  There was also an extraordinary little 'reader' dated 1863.  It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Watts and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the queerest little 'Nature Notes' with woodcut illustrations.  There would be a woodcut of an elephant and underneath in small print: 'The Elephant is a sagacious beast.  He rejoices in the shade of the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a little child to lead him.  His food is Bananas.'  And so on to the Whale, the Zebra, the Porcupine and the Spotted Camelopard."

A Clergyman's Daughter  George Orwell

The blank symbol

'"It may be that a writer's attitude to books is always ambivalent, for one of the reasons one writes is that all existing books are somehow unsatisfactory, but it's certainly difficult to think of a better symbol of civilisation.  Of course the symbol changes: the fine book, its materials, its craftsmanship, its design, was eloquent of  a civilisation founded on means,  leisure and taste;  today the symbol is the paperback, hurled in hundreds of thousands against the undeveloped areas (Asia, Africa, the young), spreading what we think is best in our thought and imagination.  If our values are to maintain a place in the world, these are the troops that will win it for them, but victory is not a foregone conclusion.  And what is won abroad may all too easily be lost at home.  Perhaps George Orwell best used the book-as-symbol in a way satisfactory to both sides: you remember how in 1984 he made his hero, Winston Smith, treasure a book that he had acquired from 'a frowsy little junk shop';  it was, Orwell tells us, 'a peculiarly beautiful book' in paper and binding alike.  Only, the pages were blank.  For a writer, the image is a powerful one: the books the past has given us, the books in which the bookseller deals, are printed; they are magnificent, but they are finite.  Only the blank book, the manuscript book, may be the book we shall give the future.  Its potentialities are endless."

'Books'  Foreword to the Antiquarian Book Fair programme, 1972
Required Writing   Miscellaneous pieces 1955-1982   Philip Larkin