The secret lives of second-hand books: How one author made it his mission to discover the previous owners of pre-owned books

There is something bold and beguiling about this book – it is also a little (good Latin word) pugnacious.

The author’s idea is simple – tracking down the previous owners of his second-hand books through little more than their names written in the front, dates and, sometimes, helpfully, their school or university.

Josh Spero had the idea of tracking down the previous owners of his second-hand books through little more than their names written in the front, dates and occasionally the name of their school or university

However, once you have got over the originality of Spero’s fabulous, if not exactly Homeric, adventure, you come down to earth with a bit of a bump. Spero, you see, is a classicist: keen on the subject at school (no surprise to read that, as an intellectually precocious schoolboy, he didn’t have a lot of – he says, any – friends), he read classics at Oxford and was then a classics tutor to support his postgraduate course in journalism.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he owns a great number of books, many of them second-hand, and you can tell from the sensuous precision of his descriptions how much he loves them. The 11 titles that make up this one are all classical books, whose owners’ lives have often been shaped by love or rejection.

Spero digresses a lot, which is the point and the appeal of such a book.

We learn about him – his Jewishness, his gayness, his taxi driver father, his feeling of being an outsider looking in on the wealthy, privileged boys at school and then Oxford (there’s something apt about his job now as editor of Spear’s, a magazine for the super-rich) and how he found a circle of like-minded friends at secondary school and university.

But we also learn about the lives of his subjects – some of whom, albeit mostly the dead ones, had led fascinating lives.We learn about the lives of his subjects – some of whom, albeit mostly the dead ones, had led fascinating lives

For example, I knew poet Peter Levi’s name, but had no idea about his wrestles with his Jesuit faith or the renouncing of his priesthood in later life, having fallen in love with the woman who eventually became his wife after her husband, the writer Cyril Connolly, died.

She and Levi had loved one another from afar (how romantically redolent of another age) for ten years.

Then there is the classics scholar who became a spy and hero during the Nazi occupation of Crete, and a theatrical teacher who was a leading exponent of the once-fashionable Direct Method approach to promote Latin and Greek by making everyday conversation in those ancient languages.

The theme may deal with the ancients, but the book, a memoir with a fictional sensibility, the different lives reading like a collection of short stories, feels very contemporary. One has to applaud Spero’s bullishness in taking on such a subject – and his infectious persuasion that, far from being something dusty and arcane, the classics are as vividly relevant now as then and can be enjoyed by people from any kind of background.

Spero’s tone tends towards the arch and, sometimes, the downright camp (he describes Maurice Bowra, the sharp-witted classical scholar, as, among other things, ‘a bitch’).

But in his final chapter, about an Oxford friend whom he loved and who committed suicide at the age of 24 (the link here is that Spero finds on the friend’s shelves a second-hand book that he himself had lent him), the writing is of a different order: naked, raw and deeply moving.

I would like to hear more of that voice, though I would not wish on him another tragedy to summon it.

Daily Mail