as posted here
TIM ELLIOTT
November 14, 2009
Contrary to received wisdom ... Parnell McGuinness with some of the books she will be selling at her father’s former house in Darling Street, Balmain; (inset) Paddy McGuinness. Photo: Peter Rae
HE HAD been called a "pompous blowhard", a "muddle-headed wombat", a fraud, a turncoat and a hypocrite. To ASIO he was ''a non-conformist and an anti-authoritarian'', while Paul Keating called him "prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt … a vitriolic liar with the morals of an alley cat".
Now you can take away a piece of one of Australia's most controversial intellectuals - the private library of Paddy McGuinness will go up for sale next Saturday.
Held in the suitably overgrown garden of his Balmain home, the Paddy McGuinness Last Drinks Book Fair will offer up to 10,000 titles for sale, the very embodiment of an intellectual adventurist who was rarely boring and seldom silent.
"Dad used to love playing devil's advocate," says his daughter, Parnell McGuinness. "He believed that ideas were all about finding the best possible outcomes, and that it was ideologies that kept you in corners."
From eugenics to chess, Darwin to creationism, the library reflects over 50 years of inquiry, an open-cut mine of ideas and obsessions that speaks volumes about its owner.
An inveterate Francophile - McGuinness first cycled from London to Paris in May 1968 and became a fluent French speaker - his collection includes a substantial French language section, books on everything from cooking to cinema. There is also a surprise shelf for Japanese fiction, plus collections of Irish myths, guides to morals and manners, five separate copies of Madame Bovary ("if Dad couldn't find what he wanted he just bought another one"), not to mention such intriguing marginalia as Cricket and the Law and E.O. Parrott's How To Become Ridiculously Well-Read in One Evening.
McGuinness had what his daughter calls "an idiosyncratic clustering system" - the Science and Quackery section is particularly fun - and the habit of tearing out relevant newspaper articles and using them as bookmarks. Some inside covers feature Post-it notes from "Les" (Les Murray, with whom he worked at Quadrant) and notes from McGuinness regarding pages of particular interest.
"I've just left all that stuff in there," Ms McGuinness says. "So you never know what you might find."
McGuinness didn't fetishise books - there are only a few rare or out-of-print editions. "Books had a function for him, and that was to impart information."
All proceeds from the book sale will go towards publication of Binge Thinking, a journal collection from Shaken and Stirred, the series of discussion evenings organised by Ms McGuinness and Leonie Phillips. "It's nice to think that Dad's library is helping to sustain his great tradition of contrarian thinking in Sydney."
The Paddy McGuinness Last Drinks Book Fair: 437 Darling Street, Balmain, 10am to 4pm, Saturday, November 21.
as posted here
