"Hence vain deluded joys…"

"They went up to Proctor-Gould's room, a dark, lofty chamber on the third floor, furnished in the characteristic Imperial  baroque, and looking out over the Kremlin.  Proctor-Gould appeared to be not so much occupying the room as camping in it, like a rambler in some corner of the lawns at Versailles. An open suitcase lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, a tangled heap of possessions straggling out across the carpet.  Suspended on plastic hangers from the dark furniture all about the room were wet shirts and socks, dripping into antique ornamental bowls or on to pages of the Soviet newspapers.

…[Proctor-Gould] rummaged in the suitcase, found a little aluminium camper's kettle with a folding handle, and disappeared with it into the corridor.  Manning sat down in an uncomfortable carved chair, with brass lions' heads beneath his hands, and gazed about him, steeping himself in the profound melancholy of the room.  On a table in the corner were stacked dozens and dozens of English books, all still in their dust jackets.  Manning put his head on his shoulder to read the titles.  He made out Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, The Human Use of Human Beings, Philosophical Investigations, five copies of Lucky Jim, and seven copies of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

'I see you're looking at my beads,' said Proctor-Gould, coming back into the room holding the kettle, now steaming, at arm's length.
'Your what?'
'My beads.  Presents for the natives.  I always bring a suitcase full of English books when I come over  -- they're like gold-dust here.'
He felt under the clothes in his case again, and produced two stout plastic mugs.  Inside a spare suede shoe he located a Woolworth's apostle spoon, and beneath a pile of dirty socks, the old familiar tin.

'Do you mind Nescafe?' he asked."

The Russian Interpreter  Michael Frayn

Encyclopaedia of Istanbul

"It was only after he realised that his collection might have no bounds that he hit on the idea of an encyclopedia, and from then he remained aware of the 'thingness' of his collection.  When Professor Semavi Eyice, the historian of Byzantine and Ottoman art, who'd known Kocu since 1944, and who'd written entries for the Encyclopedia since its inception, wrote about Kocu after his death, he described his large library piled high with 'material' he kept in envelopes -- newspaper cuttings, collections of pictures and photographs, dossiers and notes (now lost) compiled from his long years of reading the nineteenth-century newspapers.

When Kocu realised that he would not live to finish the Encyclopedia he told Semavi Eyice that he was going to take his entire collection, a lifetime of scavenging, and burn it in his garden.  Only a true collector would consider such a gesture, which calls to mind the novelist Bruce Chatwin, who for part of his life worked at Sotheby's, and whose hero, Utz, destroys his own porcelain collection in a moment of rage.  Kocu did not, in the end, let his anger get the better of him, but if he had, it would have made little difference;  production of the Istanbul Encyclopedia steadily slowed, stopped altogether in 1973."

Istanbul, Memories of a City  Orhan Pamuk   trans. M . Freely