Do you have any collections?

Books are a collection for me — waves of obsession, enquiry and temporary immersion. I don’t “curate” a library so much as accumulate enthusiasms. (See below for a list).

There are shelves in the house, but probably ten times as many books boxed up in sheds and stacked in “Really Useful” boxes: Victorian fairy tales, shelves of H.G. Wells, First World War history, memoirs, school stories, consciousness studies, art and printmaking, photography, psychology, creativity, trees, fungi, environmentalism and education and some of the themes that come to mind.

The enthusiasms come in phases. One year it is boarding schools and adolescence: David Nicholls, Jonathan Coe, Dodie Smith, Philip Roth, school histories and memoirs. Another year it becomes short stories and narrative form: Chekhov, Alice Munro, Borges, Calvino and George Saunders. Then I vanish down a rabbit hole of printmaking, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, railway posters, wood engraving and British art between the wars, or Anais Nin and Henry Miller.

Some collections become ecosystems in themselves. My First World War shelves spread across trench memoirs, battalion histories, war poetry, propaganda, objects, maps, local Sussex studies, American Black History, the colonial experience of war, novels and memoirs written by veterans, military photographs and books on remembrance and memory. Nearby are shelves on trees, woodland conservation, fungi and landscape — veteran oaks, lichens, fungi guides and books about rewilding and the psychology of nature.

The books often cross-pollinate: a shelf on Paul Nash and Ravilious sits close to books on the Western Front. Printmaking brushes against Tolkien, Arthur Rackham and fairy tales. Environmental writing by George Monbiot sits beside woodland ecology and mushroom identification. Even the fiction forms patterns: Sally Rooney, David Nicholls, Alice Munro and Philip Roth all circling relationships, longing, embarrassment, class and memory in different ways.

What interests me now is that the collection has become autobiographical without intending to be.

The shelves chart not only what I’ve read, but the successive versions of myself — filmmaker, teacher, swim coach, historian, councillor, environmentalist, diarist, would-be novelist, dream analyst, tree surveyor. Every cluster of books marks a period when I was trying to understand something properly.

And because I rarely throw books away, the earlier selves remain there too, waiting on the shelves or sleeping in boxes until the next enthusiasm wakes them up again.

And the one book still missing?

One written by me.

Other shelves have over 3 million words in notebooks, diaries and archival files. Will any of this one day be published or produced in some form? On verra!

A Catalogue of Enthusiasms

A partial map of the shelves, stacks and “Really Useful” boxes

The books gather in clusters: obsessions revisited over decades. They speak to one another across subjects — the Western Front beside Paul Nash; fungi beside ancient woodland; adolescence beside memory and longing; Wells beside Borges and Calvino.

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I. Adolescence, Identity & Human Entanglements

The recurring territory here is youth, longing, embarrassment, memory, class, sex, self-invention and emotional awkwardness.

Core Fiction & Contemporary Voices

• Sweet Sorrow — David Nicholls
• The Understudy — David Nicholls
• One Day / Nicholls-related shelf influence
• Open Water — Caleb Azumah Nelson
• Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell
• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides
• Small Things Like These — Claire Keegan
• Foster — Claire Keegan
• The Body — Stephen King
• He and She — Kenneth C. Barnes
• Simple Gosseyn — A.E. van Vogt
• Emmanuelle

Memory, Consciousness & Narrative

• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — George Saunders
• A World Appears — Michael Pollan
• Selected Stories — Alice Munro
• Chekhov Selected Stories — Anton Chekhov
• Fictions — Jorge Luis Borges
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller — Italo Calvino
• The Mezzanine — Nicholson Baker

Psychological & Reflective Works

• Encounters with the Soul — Hannah/Chiron edition
• Speak, Memory — Vladimir Nabokov
• Love, Guilt and Reparation — Melanie Klein

These shelves are deeply connected to my fascination with adolescence as performance, emotional experiment and social danger. I kept a diary for 17 years from the age of thirteen.

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II. Boarding Schools, English Class Systems & Institutional England

A major seam running through the shelves and my writing.

• The English Public School — Martin Stephen
• Parade’s End — Ford Madox Ford
• Lady Anne Clifford — George C. Williamson
• Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man — Siegfried Sassoon
• The End of the Affair — Graham Greene
• Villains of the Piece — Graham Shelby
• Captive State — George Monbiot
• Too Black, Too White — Ely Green
• Playing to the Gallery — Grayson Perry

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III. First World War: Memory, Objects, Art & Landscape

This may be the strongest and most coherent collecting ecosystem.

General Histories & Interpretation

• A History of the First World War in 100 Objects
• The First World War in 100 Objects — Gary Sheffield
• The Faces of World War I — Max Arthur
• Les 300 Jours de Verdun
• Lewsians and the Great War 1914–1919
• The Path of Peace — Anthony Seldon
• The History of the 35th Division in the Great War

Memoir & Literary WWI

• Siegfried Sassoon
• Ford Madox Ford
• Wilfred Owen-related material implied throughout
• Sassoon/Fox-hunting world intersecting with your Northumberland interests

War Art & Artists

• Paul Nash: Outline
• The Photographs of Paul Nash
• Ravilious Wood Engravings
• Brancwyn at War
• Art and Survival in First World War Britain — Stuart Sillars
• David Boyd Haycock works
• Modern British & Irish Art catalogues

Landscape, Ruin & Remembrance

The WWI shelves repeatedly merge with:

• trees,
• ruined landscapes,
• printmaking,
• memory,
• and English identity.

This is quintessentially “Paul Nash territory”: landscape as psychic scar.

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IV. Trees, Woodland, Fungi & Ecological Consciousness

This is both scientific and devotional.

Trees & Woodland

• Ancient Oaks in the English Landscape
• The Complete Guide to Trees of Britain and Northern Europe
• Treetime — Ted Green
• Britain’s Tree Story
• Remarkable Trees
• Woodland Conservation and Management
• The Sussex Tree Book
• Bleeding Heart Woods

Fungi, Mosses & Lichens

• Fascinated by Fungi — Pat O’Reilly
• Fantastic Fungi
• Mushrooms and Toadstools
• Lichens: An Illustrated Guide
• Merlin Sheldrake-related territory implied

Ecology & Environmentalism

• Art Meets Ecology
• George Monbiot works
• From Another Kingdom — fungi/ecology
• Delivered from Distraction (interestingly adjacent — ecology of mind)

This shelf is practical, philosophical and spiritual at once — fitting my real-world tree survey and environmental work.

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V. Art, Printmaking, Drawing & Visual Thinking

This collection reflects both the filmmaker and the visualiser.

Drawing & Draftsmanship

• Ways of Drawing — Royal Drawing School
• The Drawings — Raphael
• John Craxton monographs
• Angela Harding books
• Perspectives — Don McCullin

Printmaking

• Printmaking
• Linocut and Reduction Printmaking
• The Printmaking Ideas Book
• Lewes printmakers material
• Wood engraving books

British Modernism & Landscape Art

• Ravilious
• Paul Nash
• Stanley Spencer
• Craxton
• Railway poster aesthetics
• Ashmolean and Tate catalogues

This shelf is not merely “art appreciation”; it is about ways of seeing. It informs how I evoke landscape, memory and atmosphere in prose.

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VI. Fantasy, Myth & Childhood Imagination

An older imaginative stratum still alive beneath the realist work.

Mythic/Fantasy Works

• H.G. Wells editions:
  • Men Like Gods
  • The New Machiavelli
  • The Food of the Gods
  • The First Men in the Moon
• Arthur Rackham
• Blue Fairy Book — Andrew Lang
• Tolkien-related books
• Victorian fairy tale collections
• van Vogt
• Wells’ speculative utopianism

These books underpin my stories, Watersprites, The Girl in the Garden and my fascination with alternate worlds and worlds transformed children.

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VII. Music, Film & Cultural Atmosphere

These collections support mood, period authenticity and emotional recall.

Music

• The Songs of David Bowie
• Beatles Complete
• related guitar/songbooks

Film & Design

• Saul Bass film poster collections
• The Making of Them (film production/Tolkien adaptation)
• cinema and poster design material

These are atmosphere engines — helping build 1970s emotional texture.

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VIII. Creativity, Learning & the Life of the Mind

The “how thinking works” shelf.

• Open University creativity texts
• Managing Problems Creatively
• Creativity, Cognition and Development
• How to Be an Artist — Michael Atavar
• Delivered from Distraction
• educational psychology and cognition texts

This connects directly to:

• your OU background,
• teaching,
• coaching,
• reflective practice,
• and the way I use AI as a creative assistant.

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IX. The Meta-Collection

Paul Nash sits beside Verdun.
Trees sit beside war memory.
Boarding schools beside emotional fiction.
Printmaking beside fungi.
Wells beside Borges and Calvino.
Chekhov beside David Nicholls.

The collection keeps circling the same great themes:

• memory,
• landscape,
• adolescence,
• class,
• transformation,
• institutions,
• nature,
• longing,
• and the attempt to see clearly.

It is less a library than an externalised contents of my mind.