Having spent several weeks confined to barracks – without remission – courtesy of an untimely bout of Covid (plus one or two additional complications I could have well done without) I have had more time than usual of late to contemplate the joys of books. Covid, at the best of times, is a distinctly unpleasant experience. In the heat and humidity of July and August it is, in the idiom of Orwell’s 1984, double plus ungood.

At such times, books and reading take on an even greater importance. In my case, it has definitely reinforced the particular pleasure I take in one particular category of book. Everyone who reads has his or her favourite genre, be it detective novel, fantasy, history, biography or whatever. Personally I consider myself very fortunate to be completely at home reading each and all of them. I do, however, have my favourite. This is the reference book. I am never happier than when I get a chance to settle down with a collection of information, facts and figures, which I can then browse among to my heart’s content.

You must know the feeling: you go to look up one particular piece of information and, on the way there, something else entirely catches your eye. That refers you to something else and that in turn points your way to something else again. And you suddenly realise that a couple of hours have gone past most enjoyably, you have learned a lot, but you still haven’t looked up the subject you started with.

That is the joy of research volumes. More than a joy, they are a godsend when you are under the weather and you lack the patience or concentration to cope with the long complicated plots and the exhaustive (and exhausting) casts of characters that too much modern fiction has to offer.

I enjoy my eclectic shelves of factual volumes. Within reach as I write I can lay my hands on books which represent literature, military history, the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, world mythology, comics, the Universal cinema serials of the 40s and 50s (think early Batman, early Superman, and Flash Gordon, to name but a few).

To start close to home, I am going to single out two particular Maltese books which are never far from me. The first is Stephen C. Spiteri’s magisterial history, The Great Siege. I was introduced to the history of the Great Siege on the very first day I ever spent on Malta back in the 1990s and I have been fascinated by it ever since. Stephen Spiteri’s book is an absolutely essential account and analysis of this seminal event in Malta’s history.

The second book I am forever returning to is Stephan D. Mifsud’s wonderful little study of the ghosts, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night to be found on these islands. It is the sort of book I love. In particular, I do enjoy his descriptions of monsters like the Gawgaw, the zombie-like man beast, and, my favourite, the Mħalla, the well ghoul who lives in our water supply just waiting for the chance to drag the unsuspecting victim to a horrible doom.

In their different ways these two volumes demonstrate just how good Maltese books can be and what a flourishing industry publishing should be here. They should be in every Maltese house, and it is frustrating and galling to read constantly about the problems which Maltese writers and their publishers face.

With these two local examples I have, I hope, set out the various ways in which factual books can be liked. On the one hand, there are the serious, well established “classics” such as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or the Oxford Companion to English Literature. In fact, almost any book with Oxford or Companion in its title will be well worth its space on your shelf.

At the other end of the scale, there are those volumes which, although well planned and well written, are essentially quirky bits of fun. I have a particular place in my heart for such books, probably because they perfectly match that curious instrument that is my mind. I could drone on for hours about them all, but I am going to be selective and describe just two which rank amongst my favourites.

The British author Stephen Pile produced several books celebrating heroic failures. In his third book, the ultimate book on heroic failures, he tells the story of the world’s least successful suicide pact. Two Polish seventeen year olds, forbidden to marry by their parents and inspired by the story of Romeo and Juliet, decided they had to commit suicide together. Seeking a poison they went to a pharmacy where, smelling a rat, the pharmacist gave them a bottle of laxative instead. Having obtained their potion they booked into a cheap hotel, locked themselves in their room lacking an en suite, took their potion to let it work. Which it duly did, spectacularly by all accounts. When things settled, the engagement was off. As was the entire room.

My second little favourite is called Military Misdemeanors by Terry Crowdy. This tale comes from the height of World War II when, in March 1944, the trial opened in the famous Old Bailey in London of a woman called Helen Duncan, charged with contravening the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Yes, you read that right. The Witchcraft Act of 1735, introduced in the reign of George II being used to prosecute a woman in the reign of George VI when you would have thought that Britain would have more important things to worry it, namely the preparations for D Day, which was at that time less than three months away.

It was, in fact, the imminence of D Day that provoked the trial. Helen Duncan was, you see, a medium operating in the great Royal Navy centre of Portsmouth, and the authorities there had become alarmed that she might, in the course of her “occult” studies, uncover and give away the details of the Allied invasion of Europe. She was arrested, charged, found guilty, and banged up in Holloway Women’s Prison until well after the Normandy invasion had taken place.

So far, so bizarre. But there are some fascinating aspects to this little tale. For a start, Winston Churchill no less, who you would have thought had definitely more on his mind at that time, became involved, demanding to know why all this “obsolete tomfoolery “ (in his very words) was necessary. Then there is the fact that Mrs Duncan held her seances in Portsmouth and was arrested in Portsmouth. Why then was it considered necessary to bring her and the whole trial mechanism to England’s most senior criminal court, the Old Bailey in London? Could it be that the Royal Navy and the British security services believed she might be a genuine witch? After all, it emerged during the judicial process that during one of her seances Mrs Duncan had shown a lady the spirit of her dead husband, who had died when HMS Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean. The Barham had indeed been sunk in the Mediterranean some time before, only the British Government hadn’t told anybody, not even the next of kin.

To close on a much lighter note, every year the British literary (?) world awards its annual Bad Sex Award, acclaiming the world’s worst writing about sex. Needless to say it usually goes to writers of fiction, for obvious reasons, but in 2010 there was an unusual nomination for a work of fact by a very eminent British politician. The writer was former Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the interests of delicacy, I will not go into any further detail of his entry!

Main Photo: Andrea Piacquadio