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I recently reviewed This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter – otherwise known as my friend Phoebe – and I really enjoyed reading it. Since she’s a good friend of mine, I did a quick interview with her – asking her a bit about the book and about knitting. The Guardian liked the book, btw, so you should give it a go.

1. What was the genesis of This Golden Fleece?

I’d been a knitter since childhood, but the book started with a present from my Mum – four balls of woollen yarn from Shetland, which she gave me in 2016. At that time, I’d just switched jobs from working in literary heritage and education to being in university administration, and moved to the Fife countryside for my husband’s job, where I was doing a lot of knitting in the dark winter evenings. As an avid reader, I was on the look-out for a history of knitting in Britain, but couldn’t find one in print. So I thought: why not give up this job I really didn’t like and write it myself? Having studied English at Oxford and been a ‘secret writer’ for years meant that I thought I had the research and writing skills to give it a go – and my husband agreed that we would be able to manage on his salary alone for a year, so I handed in my notice and off I went.

I was extremely lucky in that, having given up my job at Christmas, in January I won a Twitter competition called Tweet Your Pitch, where a panel of agents and publishers spend a day reading book pitches on Twitter. From this I secured an agent, who advised me to develop a chapter-by-chapter plan for the book, and write the first two chapters – by early March 2017, so that she could take these to London Book Fair to put them under the nose of interested editors. Fortunately a few publishers were interested in the book, and after a very exciting auction, I signed with Granta.

2. How did you first become interested in knitting and wool?

It was a bit of a circuitous route… I was 5 when my father’s business went bankrupt, we lost our home, and moved from our modern semi-detached house to a tied farm cottage. The best thing about this was that we were now right next door to a working farm, and the farmer – a Mr Walford Arnold Griffiths – was happy to let me and my brothers ‘help’ out with the sheep. So his love of all things sheepy was a strong influence on me, as was my mother’s skill with fibre crafts. She was – and still is – a very accomplished spinner and weaver, and as young children we would pick up all the little grubby bits of wool from around the farm, wash them, and bring them to her to spin. The magic of this transformation never failed to amaze us! But it was my best friend’s mum who taught me knitting: mum’s spinning wheel and weaving loom were a bit too much for my little hands to manage, and so it was Suzanne – who made a lot of my best friend’s clothes – who first placed a pair of knitting needles in my hands. She also taught me to crochet – which I didn’t get on with.  But her daughter is a fantastic crocheter, so I think she’s pleased that we have both continued to develop the craft skills she taught us when we were children.

3. What was the most unusual knitted object you saw on your travels?

Definitely the funeral stockings I found in St Fagans museum in Wales. Very few of these have survived, but they were extremely common and used widely until the middle of the twentieth century. Although this was the first and only time I have seen a pair, I had read about funeral stockings in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), his fictional history of a Welsh family and their farm. Funeral stockings were knitted specifically for a person’s laying out, and, alongside a shroud and funeral cap, were laid aside for use after death. The red and cream pair I saw belonged to a woman called Eliza Lewis, and may well have formed part of her wedding trousseau; they were certainly knitted many years before her death, as it was only because she became ill with dropsy in later life that she was not buried in them.

4. Which knitting project are you proudest of?

I think I am most proud of having completed a gansey, a traditional fisherman’s style jumper. To knit it I had to buy specialist steel needles as it was so large and heavy – it weighs over a kilo and used almost kilometres of yarn – and took me pretty much an entire year to finish. But I was very aware of the tradition in which I was working, where generations of women from fishing communities had made these intricate and elaborately patterned garments, often knitting in almost complete darkness, and I was in complete awe of what they were able to make by feel alone.

5. Which celebrity knitters (past and present) might surprise us?

I think a lot of people know that Virginia Woolf was a knitter, but I was surprised to find that both Lytton Strachey and Adrian Stephen also plied their pins! Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh,– there seems to have hardly been a female star of the silver screen who didn’t wield her needles. And today Meryl Streep, Anjelica Houston, Uma Thurman and even Ryan Gosling all appear to be enthusiastic knitters.

6. What do you think the future of knitting is likely to be?

Hand-knitting is having something of a renaissance; as with the organic and ‘Slow Food’ movements, provenance and sustainability are really important concerns for the international knitting community. Many people are turning away from synthetic fibres because of the microplastics that leech from them, and wool, silk, cotton, linen and other natural fibres are growing in popularity. Racism and white bias is also a big issue in the craft world, and popular fibre website Ravelry has recently taken an important stand in refusing to allow material which promotes the racist politics of Donald Trump. So, like the original Luddites and les tricoteuses, knitters and knitting will continue to be an important and visible force for change in our world.

I went to a couple of bookshops while I was in London last weekend, and they were quite different. About the only thing they had in common was that they are pretty small.

First up was Archive Books, near Marylebone. I thought I hadn’t been there before, but this turned out not to be true. The website said they opened at 10.30am on a Saturday, and I was lurking outside around 10.15. That’s when I spotted a scrap of paper in the window saying that their Saturday opening hours were 11-5, so I sat in a little park around the corner and read a book. I came back at 11.10, when the owner was starting to put some boxes of discounted books.

In I went, and the quiet but friendly owner asked if I needed any help – no, said I, I was happy browsing. Which I was, though I couldn’t see all the shelves. The shop is tiny and the amount of stock is rather larger, so I couldn’t get to all the shelves. But I could get to the fiction and biography, and that’s what I was after really – I picked up R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography, No Leading Lady. Only later did I discover that I’d stumbled across rather a rare book. The cheapest copy online is about £75, and I paid £5 for mine. More importantly, I’m really keen to read it because I love the novels of his that I’ve read.

The copy was in very good condition, with an almost pristine dustjacket. I think it might have been a first edition, because I’m not sure that there was a second edition. It was only when I got home that I discovered I’d torn the back of the dustjacket quite significantly. One clumsy journey in my bag probably knocked off at least half its value. But I was more bothered that it was rather a shame that the dustjacket had survived for decades in the wild and less than a day in my hands. I felt bad. But I didn’t care about the value. I’m not planning on selling it.

Which takes me to the second shop I went to – The Second Shelf. You’ve probably heard about it, if you read some of the same blogs I do. I heard an enjoyable interview with the person who runs it, on The Book Club Review Podcast. In brief, it was set up to combat the marginalisation of women writers in the world of rare books and book collecting. There is a catalogue/periodical, and the bookshop has many fine editions of rare books.

It was a lovely space to be in. And lovely to see beautiful editions of so many authors I love – most of the books were from the 20^th century. But I have to admit that I came away from the shelves feeling rather sad. So many wonderful books – probably to end up unread on somebody’s shelf. Because I can’t imagine there are many readers who will settle down with a cuppa and a novel if they’ve just spent £200 on that novel.

There is a small paperback section, including lots of Virago Modern Classics, where you can come away with something for a fiver. That’s brilliant. But the other novels I picked up had to be very carefully put back again. I’d love to try more Nancy Spain, and they had Murder, Bless It that I’ve been intending to read – but I’m not going to spend £400 trying it. I can’t imagine many people are. There was a Rose Macaulay I’d love to read – £250.

To be clear, this is an issue I have with the whole of book collecting and the rules that have arisen around it. Not just The Second Shelf. I think anything that gets equality in any area has to be lauded, and it’s good that the imbalance in the rare books business is being addressed. But I do still have any issue with books as commodities to be sealed away and kept pristine, worth more for their scarcity and condition than for their contents. My collection of books is dear to me because I love the books – but the 3,000 books I own are collectively worth substantially less than £3,000.

The reason it affected me in this shop is because these are the authors I love. I don’t care if a rare edition of Wordsworth is put in a case and never touched, because I don’t particularly want to read him. It feels closer to home if it’s Barbara Comyns or Dorothy Whipple. It’s not even that I want their books on my shelves – I had cheaper, tattier copies of the ones I saw there – but I want someone to be reading them.

Which does also bring me on the title of this blog post. I can understand people paying a lot for a book that is very hard to get hold of. I can even understand spending more for a signed book, because I like the sense of connection with the author. But I’ve never been able to get my head around a first edition being worth more than any other edition. Why does its being the first make it better than the second or seventeenth? The content is the same, and it’s quite possible that the cover art and other aesthetic elements are worse. It seems such an arbitrary way of designating value. I’d take a pretty reprint over an ugly first edition any day.

I suspect most readers of this blog will be readers first and collectors second (if at all). But I would be intrigued to know if there’s anybody who hankers after a first edition – and, if so, why?

And more power to Second Shelf, why not. I only hope that their well-off patrons are also keen readers, and don’t get too precious about damaging the books they buy.