A Pound of Paper: confessions of a book addict, by John Baxter

Beware: books can drive you to the Samaritans

This is a collector's item. Any book is a collector's item. It could be volumes bound in human skin. It could be – indeed it has been for one dealer planning his demise in style – anything on suicide. For my father it was, among other authors, Charles Dickens, whose books I first read in bound volumes of the original partworks, the pages of which gradually slipped free of the Victorian glue in my casual hands.

Some book collectors doubtless collect books about book collectors. A Pound of Paper is exactly right for them, and for anyone who has ever decided "I don't have a single inch of shelf space left" before ferreting about in a second-hand stall or jumble sale. John Baxter's 400 pages are as agreeable as any you will find in a month's rummaging.

Graham Greene began collecting Victorian detective fiction as a teenager; Baxter, as a lad, began collecting Graham Greene. Unfortunately he did not at first acquire any books, merely borrowing them so frequently from the library that he felt he had virtual ownership of them.

He grew up in various backwaters of Fifties Australia where reading was considered a deviancy, quite apart from collecting. He was lucky to be born in a house adjoining a public library, with a connecting door which could be tweaked open. He sneaked in after hours and started devouring the sections nearest the illicit entrance.

Sadly, his family moved to a tiny town near Wagga Wagga and he had to use the local library in the same way as everyone else. Or would have done, if there had been one. There was no bookshop either, but the newsagent for some reason had a copy of Rupert Brooke's poems. This was Baxter's first purchase.

His first big purchase came after he moved to London: a rare Graham Greene children's story snapped up for five pence. The same author had him telephoning the Samaritans. This was not because of suicidal tendencies but because Greene had given some of his novels for that worthy organisation's fundraising event. The sympathetic soul answering the phone took some persuading that Baxter wasn't speaking with his head inside a gas oven.

Greene, incidentally, never collected Graham Greene, owning few volumes from his own prolific output, although he was always interested to discover one of his novels on a shelf in, say, a Saigon opium den. Baxter often found himself on less respectable premises than that or even, in the cases of pavement stalls, on no premises at all. Some of the raffish "runners" who scavenge for dealers would make Vietnamese drug dealers look upmarket. One of them used to stuff his wooden leg with stolen volumes.

Book collecting is the bum end of the literary body; it is like food seen from the abattoir or finance observed via the bankruptcy courts. Baxter, also an author, is at the respectable end and his collection is now worth rather more then five pence. Even in his youth he was ahead of the game, being one of Australia's top two collectors of science fiction. Admittedly, there were only two.