I’m Simon French and I’m the Library Graduate Trainee for the 2014/2015 session. The photograph is of me on a literary pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Company in Paris. As you can see, even when I’m on holiday I don’t want to stray too far from the books!
Books have always played a major part in my life. One of my earliest memories as a child was joining my local library. The first time I went in, I couldn’t believe my luck. I could have any three books that I wanted. Free! This was too good an opportunity to miss. Obviously I was going to make it worth my while and so I picked the three largest books I could find. After nearly forty years my memory of that day is a bit sketchy but I distinctly remember that one of the books was called something like ‘Warplanes of the Third Reich’. It was a huge book, bound in blue cloth filled with technical diagrams and details along with silhouettes of the planes in question. I could barely lift it and quite what use it would have been to a small boy in 1970s rural Herefordshire is anyone’s guess, but I didn’t care. It was the size of the thing that mattered.
Yet my working life did not begin in a very bookish fashion. I started out selling polythene bags for a living but the excitement of that soon waned. I stuck it out for five years and then I threw in the thrills of the bag factory to go and pursue my first love – books. I studied for my BA and MA in English Literature at the University of the West of England in Bristol. I then got a job researching and cataloguing manuscripts and rare books for an antiquarian bookseller. Some six years later I struck out on my own path and for ten more years I bought and sold books for a living.
