Jonck's Personal Library: Overview

After Jonck's crowded funeral, which took place at St Mary's Church Paddington in September 2005, and at which various poetical, musical and eulogistic offerings were made by eminent friends of Jonck's, the congregation, at the invitation of Jonck's partner and wife, Sophie Botros, formed a long "crocodile" and walked the several blocks to Jonck's apartment in Little Venice. As they passed up the garden path, people could immediately see that this was no ordinary flat, for the walls of both rooms that were visible through the windows were lined neatly with books. As they queued in the corridor, they passed by a long, and tall, bookcase containing works on statistics, computing, physics, mathematics and Shakespeare. This last item was the first sign that Jonck had been no monomath, and when they turned into the sitting room, where the reception was held, a further panoply of books on literary criticism, philosophy, Buddhism, religion, sociology and politics came into their view, together with many works of Proust, Becket and T.S.Eliot, not to mention Freud.

The suggestion was made that, because of the way in which dead men's possessions soon become scattered, and because of the picturesquely neat appearance of the books in their shelves, it would a nice thing to photograph the bookshelves as they stood, as a monument to the breadth and depth of Jonck's reading and knowledge. Certainly, it would be wholly impractical to catalogue properly those thousands of volumes. Some thought that such a sudden project would intrude on Sophie's grief, but, in fact, when it was mentioned to her, she thought it a fitting thing to do. Unfortunately, the pressures of the new academic year prevented any professional technical help being obtained from Jonck's Department of Psychology at UCL. But, because of Sophie's enthusiasm, the project (resembling an archaeological rescue dig) had to go ahead, and so the photography was carried out by a rank amateur.

In many places, the bookshelves stretched from floor to very high ceiling, which necessitated the use of a tall step-ladder. That, and the awkwardness of some of the corners, together with the narrowness of the corridor, made focussing very problematic at times. That is not the only reason why the spines of many of the books are illegible; old spines had lost their vividness of print, paperback books (e.g. Penguins) had highly reflective (and concave) backs and nearly all French books (of which there are very many) had rather friable backs with titles in very small print. For the sake of the prevention of eye-strain, therefore, a list was made of the titles and authors of all the illegible books (or pamphlets) in each of the over 270 photographed bays. Users of this website may make use of this supplementary facility, when legibility fails.

Jonck's library grew physically as he grew older, to accommodate later acquisitions. Inevitably, therefore, little pockets of Art or Poetry or Religion, for example, may appear in unexpected contexts. The attempt was made, within topics, to have the books in alphabetical order of author, but there are dislocations in this, too. Such jostling of subjects is altogether characteristic of Jonck's polymathic mind, in which each subject was connected with each other subjects, often through science.

Select an image to view further photos of Jonck's home/library