It has long been my practice that when I’m in bookshops, often, and I see a book I like, frequently, but not keen to buy it then and there, I add its ISBN to the note section on my phone. Potentially I can find it much cheaper online or perhaps more info, reviews and indications of whether it’s any good or whether there might be a better book on the same topic. Or even, given my fetish for nice bindings, a nicer edition. Or just simply the space to have second thoughts.

Having run out of storage space on my phone for such notes, here is the current list. This way at least, they’re stored somewhere vaguely useful.

• Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara [9780199226894]
• Ideas That Matter by A.C. Grayling [9780297856764]
• The Atlas Of Secret Societies by David V. Barrett [9781841813356]
• Science And Islam by Ehsan Masood [9781848310407]
• Treasure-house Of The Language: The Living OED by Charlotte Brewer [9780300124293]
• Historical Atlas [9780731813810]
• The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie [9780755344567]
• Cities Of The Renaissance by Michael Swift & Angus Konstam [9781906347109]
• Encyclopedia Of The Scientific Revolution: From Copernicus To Newton by Wilbur Applebaum [9780415988469]
• The Templars by Michael Haag [9781846681486]
• A Universal History Of The Destruction Of Books: From Ancient Sumer To Modern-day Iraq by Fernando Baez [9781934633014]
• Decoding The Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer by Jo Marchant [9780434018352]
• Age Of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes [9780007149520]
• A Companion To The History Of The Book by Simon Eliot, Jonathan Rose [9781405127653]
• The Hidden by Tobias Hill [9780571218387]
• The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 by Chris Wickham [9780713994292]
• A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past by Colin Wells [9781599211220]
• Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft by H. P. Lovecraft [9780575081567]
• The Historians’ Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time by Peter Charles Hoffer [9780814737149]

There was actually more fiction on the list but it appears that I’ve managed to buy most of the fiction I was keeping track of. There’s a few books I keep meaning to buy but never quite get round to, for which I haven’t recorded ISBNs such as Romulus, My Father, Cloud Street, a couple of those classics that have been reprinted in nice leather plus a few penguin classics. That’s all that comes to mind for the moment. I daresay there will be more.