Rupert Humphries shares fond memories of his father Barry Humphries

My first memories of my father are of books. I remember sitting in his lap as he let me leaf through a collection of Japanese fairy tales collected by Lafcadio Hearn. The woodcut illustrations of goblin spiders, ghosts and samurai, the rough texture of crepe paper and gossamer rice paper overslips challenging my childish mind. How could rice be paper? Wasn’t that food? The exoticism of the stories, their content and presentation, has stuck with me ever since. It was intoxicating.

Dad’s library felt exotic, not a room you would expect to discover on the first floor of a house in South Hampstead. Thick curtains were shut to keep out natural light, and deep purple, red, black and yellow spines lined the sagging shelves with books stacked two, sometimes three layers deep. Many in morocco leather boxes with ornate gilt designs that he had commissioned and took great care over. Amongst the books were strange curios - an Indonesian puppet, a bat and a funnel-web spider preserved in glass, various masks and erotic statues. The warm glow of iridescent glass lamps and a heavy art-deco chandelier, the smell of incense in the air. It was like a setting from one of the decadent stories he loved so much, maybe Prince Zalesky’s dilapidated abbey in Wales.

He loved having his library and all the books in it, but he also loved collecting: the active pursuit of missing editions and better association copies. So much of my childhood was spent watching him crawl on his belly as he inspected the bottom shelf in an antiquarian bookshop. He spoke with great nostalgia for the times before the internet, when a second-hand store in Detroit couldn’t check the latest auction prices in London with the click of a button, but it didn’t diminish his enthusiasm for visiting bookshops, bookfairs and private libraries. Every jacket he had tailored had a “poachers pocket” sewn into the lining so he could make off quickly with a new acquisition.

Growing up around books, a love of literature naturally rubbed off on me. Although my tastes aren’t as highbrow as his, he helped expand my horizons with every brown-paper wrapped parcel that arrived at my boarding school from Heywood Hill. When I got into detective fiction, he showed me how it was rooted in Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and M.P. Shiel. When I said I liked William Burroughs, he made sure I read Thomas De Quincey and Aleister Crowley. I went on to study Literature at Edinburgh University and was amazed to find out he knew just as much about the critics as the authors he loved. I would call him, and he was able to recommend the best essays on Shakespeare or Baudelaire. In my third year, I was taking the train back up north and I realised I didn’t have my copy of Thomas Moore’s Utopia. Dad said he’d pick one up for me. A few days later, I looked around my seminar at my fellow students’ Oxford World Classics and Norton Critical editions. Mine was a large format edition, finely bound in vellum with silk ties.

Now that he’s gone, his library, along with his collection of art and music, is the closest thing we have to a map of his incredible brain. All his knowledge and taste is there, on those shelves, in those books. They are where his spirit resides. As this sale commences, I like to think he will be happy knowing that a little part of him will continue to be treasured in other libraries and bookcases around the world, and perhaps even in a few old book shops.

- Rupert Humphries

Wednesday 26 March, 1pm GMT
Forum Auctions, 4 Ingate Place, Battersea, London SW8 3NS
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