I had in fact stolen my first book when I was fourteen–a paperback edition of Dracula; the second was Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobopalapbamboom, the Paladin edition, a lovely thing with a Guy Peellart illustration of Elvis on the jacket. But now I couldn’t be stopped. I stole a first edition of Scoop–Waugh had done the jacket art himself–priced at seventy-five pounds by the Heffers second-hand and antiquarian department. I stole the sturdy and solemn-looking Yale edition of the works of Samuel Johnson, one volume at a time. I walked away with Heinemann firsts of Enderby Outside, Tremor of Intent and A Clockwork Orange. The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, Cape, 1939, buckram-bound. A cased, Cassell edition of The Father Brown Stories. Harold Nicolson’s biography of George V; A. J .P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945; Ian McEwen’s First Love, Last Rites; Crash by J. G. Ballard–those angular, oddly austere Cape jackets by Mon Mohan. I stole books every day. I went on expeditions first thing in the morning and again late in the afternoon, wearing a baggy jacket and marching out with books tucked in the armpit. The elegant John Murray edition of Byron’s correspondence–I stole two at a time, Byron being slimmer than Johnson. I stole the war memoirs of David Lloyd George, brick-heavy, but I thought I’d better give them a whirl. The Neville Spearman first of A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren was daftly underpriced at twenty-five pence on one of the stalls in the Market Square. I stole it anyway. I made the acquaintance of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth in the shape of various firsts stolen from all over town. I stole first editions of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, Bleak House by Dickens and Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Black Mischief, an old Chapman & Hall first, no dust-jacket, but handsome with mottled brown boards. A 1788 three-volume reprint of Johnson’s Rambler essays, leather-bound, black, with gilt lettering. I loved those things. I stole Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus. The First Raymond Chandler Omnibus (Hamish Hamilton). Finnegans Wake. The Penguin P. G. Wodehouse novels, a rare excursion into paperback because I liked the artwork. Nabokov’s Ada, Lolita and The Gift, as well as the four hardback volumes of his annotated translation of Eugene Onegin, boldly boosted in a Routledge boxed set from Bowes & Bowes.