Bricks, Books, and Books like Bricks

Next June this book is being published. I don't usually pre-order 9 months in advance. Few books that interest me sell out within the first few weeks, or years.

But here's an interesting thing. In 1977 I bought Howard Marshall's commentary on Luke, the first volume in the series New International Commentary on the Greek New Testament (NICGNT). One of the ones I most want to get my hands on is still not written: Richard Bauckham on the Gospel of John being one of them. That book has been scheduled for 35 years, and I would really, really, like to read it before I die!

There are, for the commentary lover, desiderata that we dream about. I still remember going into the tiny St Paul's Bookshop when it was at the top of Buchanan Street in the early 1970's. It was staffed by several warmly welcoming and knowledgeable Catholic nuns, who knew a thing or two about reading the Bible seriously. 

Now I worked for a couple of years in a brickwork in Carluke, Lanarkshire, while earning the money to get to University. I was a brick setter – which means I placed the bricks in the kilns, stacked neatly in rows of five with a finger breadth between them and built in pillars 10 high, before building a wall across them to the ceiling. You lifted 28 a minute, and each weighed around 4 kilos (actually just over 7lbs). Forget any idea of doing weights – this was a gym you got paid for working in, and it was warm too – so you only worked 30 minutes on, and 20 m inutes off.

Back to the bookshop. I took a book off the bookshelf that was just about exactly the palm spread of an uncooked brick! Remember I know this – Every half hour in the kiln I lifted and stacked hundreds of them. It was of course a fraction of the weight of a clay brick, but its dimensions were uncannily similar. And so, for £6, I bought volume one of Raymond Brown's commentary on John's Gospel. In 1972, £6 would buy you 19 gallons of petrol – I'll leave you to do the maths of 86 litres times the current cost of petrol.

I came back a month or two later for volume 2. And those two volumes, published by Geoffrey Chapman before Doubleday, and now Yale took over the series, remain lifetime companions in the study of John. I later bought Brown's volume on the Johannine Epistles. It's just as thick, magisterial and impressive, but by then I had lived with Brown on John's Gospel long enough to appreciate the spiritual investment of buying the right commentary, at the right time.

So this post is by way of a plea, a prayer even. Richard Bauckham on John, Tom Wright on Philippians, Walter Brueggemann on Psalms – These three things Dear Lord I pray!

The Mayfield Brockworks closed at the end of 2011. Look here and  you can see a slide show of the whole process and the remains of the Works, including the interior of the kilns. I worked there from 1970 to 72, night shift, from 7.00 pm to 7.30 am Monday to Thursday, and Friday 1.00pm to 5.00pm, and Saturday 7am – 12 noon!