Back in November I admitted that I had finally given in and bought a Kindle, the main reason being that I could download, for free, vast numbers of classic books, in French and German (and no doubt many other languages) as well as English.

Now I have to add another reason for kindling.  While browsing Amazon’s Kindle pages I noticed that it was possible to download a free app to allow you to transfer any books you had bought for the Kindle itself to your PC or Mac.  And that’s what I have done.

The result of taking photos of your computer screen is never going to put you up there with the likes of Capa, Cartier-Bresson and Lebowitz, but the photo above will give you some idea of how good a page of text can look on a computer screen.  Ok, my MacBook Pro is not as portable as the Kindle itself, but I do take it away quite often just so I can get on with writing, play DVDs or whatever.  And, compared with the Kindle, it seems to be easier to get around a book, as well as providing quite startling clarity.

I say ‘get around a book’, but in the case of the page in question it actually comes from the complete works of Dickens, with copious examples of the original illustrations, the whole shebang costing less than two quid. (The complete Henry James and complete James Joyce, both of which I’ve also downloaded this last week, come in at the same modest price).

You might just be able to make out that the illustration shows a crowd of people up in the gallery (of Astley’s Theatre, as Dickens specifies). Sitting enthralled in the front row is young Kit Nubbles, his proud mother, younger brother Jacob and the baby, together with their guests, Barbara (Kit’s fellow employee at the house of the kindly Mr and Mrs Garland) and Barbara’s mother.

All of these feature in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, which I am currently reading aloud to Jane, every morning after breakfast in bed. All I knew about this novel was that (SPOILER ALERT) something unfortunate happens to Little Nell, though the person who originally put that particular spoiler in was that thoughtless fellow Oscar Wilde, so I’m in good company..