Give me the man who buys books he likes, to read them and sees the numbers in his book shelf increase merely as a by product of that reading. Or picks up a book for the same reason mountaineers attempt the Everest — because it is there.

I often get writers to sign their books. This is for purely sentimental reasons. I can open a V S Naipaul or a Vikram Seth or a Salman Rushdie or an Arundhati Roy suitably autographed, and feel a thrill as I recall the circumstances when they signed their books.

I am with the critic Edmund Wilson who said, “All this trade is as deeply boring to people who are interested in literature as it seems to be fascinating to those others, who, incapable of literary culture, try to buy the distinction of letters by paying unusual prices for bibliographical rarities.”