Nickie Muir: Hooked on bad books

The only time I've ever felt like a woman of loose morals and easy virtue was on selling my first collection of books in my second year of uni to pay the rent in exam week.

It just felt so sleazy. Surely if I'd had any sort of ethical back bone I would not have had to resort to selling "my precious" to cover something as fleeting and worthless as a rent payment.

Ironically, I sold them to a second hand book dealer - an ageing Russian guy who ran the bookshop as a cover for his other business "Club Exotica" which he ran upstairs. His bookshop assistants were usually half dressed and seemed to need his assistance to sit in the old wicker chair he had at the back of the shop - they never managed the task alone. So wrong - on so many levels. The rent got paid the exams passed and eventually the book collection replenished - even the 1920's reprint of Aprha Behn's Two Tales rescued from a St Vincent de Paul's shop in the back of Levin, shipwrecked among jars of illegal marmalade and mismatched egg cups.

The thing is I'm not even a discerning collector - this is not a collection that avid buyers will peruse the obituaries for - waiting for a chance to pick up literary gold. Sure, there are the old blood-red canvas covered colonial doorstoppers on lighthouses and early New Zealand life. The engravings - the gold embossing and the marbled end pages - I love them all as passports to another time, another country.

Most purchases however I could never defend to an accountant that they were anything like an investment. The main reason being that I have a fondness for books that are outstandingly bad. Some of them have been bought because the writing itself is so appalling that it provides comic relief in almost any awful situation life can throw.

John Kirwan copes with depression by being "an active relaxer" cooking or swimming with the kids. As long as I have a copy of ACC Lock's Random Journey Round the World at hand I need never be sad again. Purchased in Brisbane on a sailing trip, I got out of night watch more than once by threatening to read it aloud. It's billed as a book for men, a sophisticated and graphic account of exciting places visited and interesting people met.

Essentially it's a drifter's porno-lite guide to girls and really is rather special. I'll share, shall I? On Tahitian dancing: "The zestful gyrations increased in speed as the tempo of the music also increased. Franz suddenly lost his nostalgia for Vienna. The girl's navel fascinates me," he declared. "It reminds me of a blanc mange," commented Blake. And later ... "Here's my favourite," he announced. "I'm going to dance with her. You watch how she clings."

The other favourite companion is the 1950's Good Housekeeping Guide which some friends gave as a joke - knowing I have never even owned an iron. Really. It has black and white photos of 25 different cleaning brushes and how to arrange them in a cupboard and tips on how to take care of your furs. It's a blissful world of women blithely spraying DDT round the home in "becoming" aprons, with "gay ribbons" tied into pony tails to cheer work weary husbands and there are flow charts for optimal hair curling.