The House of Twenty Thousand Books (37 page)

40. Chimen reflected in his hallway mirror.

41. The Machzikei Hadath Synagogue, Brick Lane, where Yehezkel was once the rabbi. It is now a mosque.

42. The master bedroom at Hillway.

43. Chimen’s ‘study’ at Hillway, long given over entirely to piles of books.

44. Woodcut from William Morris,
News from Nowhere
(1890). The author’s manuscript was one of Chimen’s most treasured possessions.

45. ‘À Versailles!’ A Communard with a red flag proclaiming ‘The Commune or Death!’ points his cannon towards Versailles, the base of the anti-Commune government. From
L’Actualité,
no. 3, April 1871.

46. Illustration from an early eighteenth-century
Sefer Evronot
, from Central Europe, in Chimen’s collection. This was a book used for calculating Jewish calendar dates.

47. ‘The Friends of Order’. Anonymous satirical print, 1871, showing the murder of the Republic by the French government led by Thiers.

48. Title page of the first complete translation of the Bible into Yiddish, printed in Amsterdam in 1678.

49. Chimen’s first edition of Spinoza’s
Opera Posthuma
(1677).

50. Illustrated manuscript wall placard for Sefirat ha-Omer, ‘Counting the days’ between Passover and Shavuot.

51. The eighteenth-century Armenian bible found in an unopened envelope in the study after Chimen’s death.

52. Letter from Chimen to Isaiah Berlin, 6 June 1969. One of several hundred letters from a correspondence that lasted for nearly forty years.