It is not that I need to consult an art history book for every piece of journalism I write, but doing so inevitably yields different details from only Googling an artist: a quote, say, from a 1970s catalogue no one has thought to digitise, or the title of a piece an artist mentioned seeing when they were a student in the 1980s.
In the art history section, I’ve felt a certain thrill at reconnecting with the kind of Big Book you have to consult repeatedly as a student (Erwin Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting) but that you then somehow never lose, like furniture in your mind.
I got to Senate House early the other morning and picked an empty room at random, only to realise at 10am that I was in the German literature section, surrounded by titles that composed something unexpectedly lyrical when put together (Light Beneath the Horizon; So I Sat Then Between All the Seats; Twilight).
All around me are these old tomes with clothbound covers – exactly the kind of books I used to look for as a child in my library at primary school.
And, as I did as a child, I lose myself in a world of books ... Last September, I started walking to the library every day.
