Iulius POPA - Biblioteca Ştiinţifică a Universităţii de Stat

Confessions
I was in the ninth form, when I bought the first book in
my life : “ Hamlet” by Shakespeare translated by Andrei Lupan. A
year before, accidentally, I watched the film with the same title.
The leading part was played by Inokenti Smoktunovski. I liked it
and that is why I bought the book.
In the autumn of 1967 and the spring of 1968, being
already a first year student in Bă lţi, I bought some books from the
old book shop in Bălţi. They were in Romanian (that is in the
Latin alphabet published in Romania). I still keep one of them:
“Litanies” by Tudor Arghezi. It was also in 1967 that I first heard
about this author on the occasion of his funerals. It is a volume
with a gentle cover like a cushion. I suppose that it w as the cover
that made m e purchase that book.
By the age of 27 I had already had a bookstand full of
books, half of them consisting of books on Methodology and
Linguistics. I was a numismatist but I had not heard of the word
“bibliophile”. I had seen some private libraries with well-arranged
shelves, with books selected to the owner’s taste. I admired that
passion, envying in a w ay the home library holders, although I
was obsessed by the idea that in order to gather books I had to
have access to the bookshops of big c ities. So, I was 27 when one
of the happiest events of my life happened: I got a flat in a
district, which was new at that time – Dacia. There were three
rooms in it. I told myself I would keep one wall for a showcase
with books. I bought 24 shelves, I fixed them one above the other,
from the floor to the ceiling. I moved the books from the
books tand on to the showcase and I noticed that the s howc ase was
almost empty: there was one book here and there. I had to fill the
showcase and thus I bec ame a bibliophile.
In the 80s I used to go to the decades of the Romanian
book at the end of August in Moscow, Odessa and especially in
Cernăuţi. One could find good books those days. In Cernăuţi, I
got acquainted with the shop assistant of a bookshop who held
bac k books for me if I did not manage to arrive on time.
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