craven.fr

This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction and Stonehenge.

There was no possibility that visiting Oxford would have a good outcome for me, yet it was the one place on this trip that I absolutely had to go to. This is because, as I explain in my earlier article On Fantasy Goals, studying at Oxford is something I dream about on, at minimum, a weekly basis, and have done so for years: it is the central feature of my "What I would do if I won the Lottery" fantasy. Yet, until now I had never actually been to Oxford University. Which is why my visit could only have two outcomes, neither of which were entirely positive: either Oxford would not live up to my expectations, and I would be disappointed out of a dream; or else Oxford would live up to or exceed my expectations, in which case I would be even more melancholy about never having studied there.

So, stirred up with more personal emotions than for any of the other destinations on our trip (except for Craven, which is still a long way off), we set out for Oxford after lunch, using the convenient Park & Ride service to park outside the city centre and take the bus into town (saving me some very confusing driving and parking stress).

Long story short, Oxford did not disappoint. This was only an afternoon visit (as I outlined above, I needed to visit Oxford, but I didn't want to linger there too long), so our experience had to be tightly focused: walk around the town, admiring the colleges and other key sites of the campus, and make it to Blackwell's bookstore. Besides taking in the ambiance of the campus, there were a lot of academic books I've been wanting to get my hands on, and reasoned that this might well be the only bookstore in the world where I could buy them off the shelf.

The Campus

We started near Pembroke College, working our way past Christ Church on the way towards the bookstore which sits near Balliol and Trinity. As I made my random comments along the way Emilie's remarks went from "we sure don't need a tour guide with you here!" to "how do you know all this stuff?!" But it is a beautiful city and I think she enjoyed the visit too. After a lengthy stop at the bookstore, which I'll talk about separately below, we moved on towards the Radcliffe Camera, passing Hertford and All Souls' Colleges, and coming back by Brasenose and Lincoln. I actually didn't go by my hypothetical first- and second-choice colleges (Corpus Christi and Oriel, for what it's worth), but nonetheless thought that this quick visit was perfect. If I really wanted to do more in Oxford, after all, it would be as a scholar, not as a tourist, so this brief tour was enough. Like paying a compliment to a beautiful woman, things can move very quickly from a pleasant moment to uncomfortable awkwardness if one lingers too long. I would try to get the rest of my connexion with Oxford through books.

Blackwell's

As I mentioned, though it's not the Bodleian library, this massive bookstore in the heart of the university campus was a place where I was hoping to track down a number of hard-to-find academic books. As an expatriate any visit to an English-speaking land means loading up on books, but here I was hoping to go beyond the usual fare and pick up some rare gems. Visiting was a more physical experience than I had pictured when planning the trip, since I had the charge of a heavy backpack and folded up stroller to lug up four stories' of stairs, while Emilie and James perused the children's section. But, my enthusiasm was strong enough that I hardly noticed. The books I was looking for in Blackwell's were extremely focused, but I still managed to find a number of them—and frankly, the fact that they had a whole floor dedicated to the Greek and Latin classics makes this officially my favourite bookstore in the world. (I've written before about my dismay at not finding any Greek or Latin books at the Strand's vaunted seventeen miles of books in New York City.) An ample, perhaps even comprehensive, set of the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis was there, and the Bibliotheca Teubneriana likewise. Still, neither has the Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν of Marcus Aurelius, so I remain constrained to reading that online (come on, Oxford Classical editors!) But that disappointment was countered by the fact that one of the "easy to find" items on my list—the Oxford edition of the Iliad XIII-XXIV, was not only present in multiple copies, but actually had a large "£2 off!" sticker on it. Delightful: only in Oxford would a book written entirely in Homeric Greek be a sale item :-)

Classical texts, however, are easy to find (especially online), and easy to read on one's own. But in the course of my hobby of trying to self-teach myself classics, hopefully eventually to a graduate level, it is in philology and textual studies where I am at the greatest loss by being outside of a university setting. So I wanted to pick up some of the standard texts in order to help bring myself up to speed. Unfortunately, although they had multiple copies of the "Scribes and Scholars" book that I wanted, one was labeled £52 and one was labled £65 (for the same book)—both of which I was sure were way more than I saw it for online. So I left that one on the shelf. Similarly, I had hoped to find a grammar of the Hittite language (spoken by the historical Trojans) and of Sumerian (a fascinating civilisation in its own right), but found nothing on either. There are some topics, I guess, that are just too obscure for any brick and mortar bookstore to keep in stock.

Heading up to the used books section, I also failed to find the undergraduate microbiology textbook I was hoping for. In its place, though, I came across a wonderful find, one that was not on my list but which fit in perfectly with my own reading list, with this trip to Britain, and with Oxford itself—and it was a bargain at only £5! The 1936 Oxford edition of Tacitus' De Origine et Situ Germanorum—an excellent follow-up to Cæsar's De Bello Gallico and an excellent primary text for one interested in studying the ancient Anglo-Saxons. The fact that I was able to pick the book up in such circumstances makes it a great sentimental souvenir as well.

So, after stopping in the bookstore café to give James his bottle and take some fluids after all the heavy lifting I had been doing while hunting for all these books, we departed with a small collection of treasures: one children's book for James, tome II of the Iliad, and the Tacitus. We then continued our circuit as described above, and returned to the hotel very contented with the amazingly successful day of sightseeing.

Stay tuned for Day Three, when we leave England to begin our tour of the Celtic nations, beginning with Wales.