‘There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic, and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books …. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader’s consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve-centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception tipples through the person … Ah! Books give you sentences which you can roll around in the mind, throw in the air, catch, tease out, analyse. But in whatever l way you handle them, they widen your vision. For they are essentially Idea-creating, in the sense that Coleridge meant when he described the Idea as containing future thought – as opposed to the Epigram which encapsulates past thought. Ah! Books give the impression that you are opening a new account, not closing an old one down’.
– Vernon Sproxton, ‘Introduction’, to Fynn. Mister God, This Is Anna (London: Fount, 1979), 1-2. HT: Per Crucem Ad Lucem
