Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile – review

The British Museum Reading Room has loomed large in Phil Cohen’s life

Phil Cohen is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of East London and the author of East London and the Olympics, On the Wrong Track? and London’s Turning: The Making of the Thames Gateway among other works.

He is also a former hippy squatter who played a leading role in the occupation of a 60 room mansion at 144 Piccadilly in 1969 – an event that made national headlines amid hysteria about “the enemy within”.

Now he has written a memoir melding whimsical reminiscences with a scholarly analysis of his life and the history of book collecting.

Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile is an odd mix, but then Cohen does describe himself as a “mischling” who has led a “disjointed” life, so a certain eclecticism is to be expected.

Cohen’s father was a surgeon and “devout atheist” with socialist leanings whose “one concession to his religious background was to take the Jewish Chronicle, which he read with a sternly disapproving look”.

His mother was a Daily Mail-reading Welsh nurse who regarded herself as a Christian.

They lived in a small flat in that most bookish of locales, Bloomsbury.

Cohen really understands London and this book could be read by cultural historians interested in just how much the city has changed, or as a kind of companion guide to the West End of the Beat era.

He describes how he dropped out of Cambridge and, inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, did a stint as a galley boy on a trawler.

He also ruminates on life in various hippy communes including 144 Piccadilly.

The British Museum looms large in Cohen’s life, particularly its Reading Room, where so many great authors have sought solace over the years.

A discussion of the pros and cons of the new British Library segues into an extended, playful riff on bookworks, bibliophiles, booklore and speculations on future changes in our reading habits in the age of the all-powerful internet.

Somewhat surprisingly for a self-styled bibliophile, Cohen concludes his memoir with advice not to let books take over one’s life and extols the virtues of “writers who spend a lot of time in the fresh air, exposing themselves to the danger of the foreign”.

Cohen has done his fair share of that, which is for the best as books that are only about books rarely excite readers.

Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile by Phil Cohen is published by Five Leaves. ISBN: 9781907869785. RRP £14.99