Unsuccessful application for cataloguer post at Peter Harrington

I have grown up aware of unusual and beautiful books, and spent most of my life reading them. Françoise Sagan remarks that general conversation with strangers is unnecessary, next to the more important questions, ‘Whom do you love? What are you reading?’ How convenient, then, if the answers to both coincide. I have never interpreted the adjective bookish as anything less than a high honour.

I like my reading, whether for pleasure or study, to be directed both by happy accident and specific curiosity. I am particularly interested – by now professionally so – in biographical questions; when I read English at Oxford, I did my best to evade academic theory, preferring the antiquarian pursuit of immersing myself in the lives and historical periods of writers, their friends, issue, relations, acquaintances, commercial, personal, political and amatory rivals, and other connections. These things seem to me both interesting in themselves and a prerequisite for developing an accurate ear for the language and idiom of particular authors. My postgraduate degree included courses in palaeography and bibliography – in particular, as it turned out, examining manuscripts by the courtier and verse translator Sir John Harington, the playwright Thomas Middleton, the Jacobite Bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury, and early editions of Shakespeare, Spenser, Ariosto and Tasso. I would value the opportunity to develop these skills by putting them to more practical use. I am used to concentrated work, absorbing and distilling large quantities of information. I have an eye for detail, and set great store by accuracy. I would have much to learn about the specifics of the book trade, but I am quick to master a new idiom and have had some cognate work experience assisting the cataloguers in the Old Masters department of Christies.

I am drawn to the Latin languages and can read and write French and Italian and speak them communicably. My spoken and written Spanish is much more basic, but I can read it. I developed a love of the classical languages and literature at school, and can still (with a little persistence) translate poetry, inscriptions, and tags in Latin and Greek. My amateur but intense emotional attachment to medieval literature and history, as well as some of my university work, gives me a foundation in Old and Middle French and English. I am also interested in historical and dialect Italian, and fairly conversant with the vernacular of Dante.

My historical and biographical interests are miscellaneous and have become, if anything, more so during and since university. Over the last two years I have been working on a life of the learned but popular medieval historian Sir Steven Runciman, a man famous for his ‘ability to ignore the conventional limits of time and space’, as one obituarist put it, and I stand by this catholic approach to the past: history as the true study of human beings, that should not be artificially simplified into movements and neat periods. Partly with this principle in mind, and partly for pleasure, I have found myself absorbing information from many different eras with little or no fixed, utilitarian objective in mind, but I would hope that working as a cataloguer for Peter Harrington would be a serendipitous way to put this magpie temperament to practical purpose.

My historiography is, academically speaking, adrift in a state prior to the Annales, but I am confident with the basics: Roman emperors and popes, Guelphs and Ghibellines, the names, dates, and wives of the Kings of France, England, and Scotland, the pronunciation of Wriothesley, the Civil War and who backed whom, the Dutch usurpation and its pragmatic, mercantilist aftermath. From the eighteenth century the past often seems to me more vividly resurrected via letters memoirs and the higher gossip: outstanding examples being Walpole, Creevey, and Greville. My attachment to and affinity for these genres extends in the twentieth century to wide reading and familiarity with the novels, memoirs, and letters of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Barbara Skelton, Simon Raven, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch and so on in a quasi-Petrine succession, whose best contemporary representative is, I think, the novelist and historian James Buchan. While assisting the new OUP variorum edition of Evelyn Waugh, I found several unpublished Waugh letters in college archives, and am still engaged in similar, if more ambitious, work for my book on Steven Runciman. However, these recherché tastes do not by any means preclude a vigorous interest in current political debate and journalism: I keep up with the broadsheets and weekly periodicals and am au fait with current intellectual controversies.

Whenever chance has taken me in the direction of your bookshop – fortunately, of late, more and more – I have found a lot of pleasure and excitement there. I imagine you will have many more professionally qualified applications for your post, but if you are interested in taking a chance on someone who is hungry to learn and has a real appetite for the material, I hope that I would not disappoint you.