Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle #ABookADayInMay Day 20

Today’s book is another one I can lay at Karen’s door, with her recent review, but I was always likely to get hold of Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines (2024) since I enjoyed White Spines so much. That bookish memoir was centred around Royle’s need to collect all of the white-spined Picador books. Shadow Lines has less a throughline – it’s really just an ambling non-fiction around the joy of books, with chapters on topics like reading while walking, the different Penguin Short Stories books, books in films etc.

It could feel self-indulgent, and perhaps some sections go on slightly too long – the books in films is an endless topic that does begin to feel a touch endless – but it’s really a delight because you are in the hands of such an ardent bibliophile. And I use bibliophile in its true sense – Royle loves reading, but he really loves books. It’s a distinction that not everybody would understand, though I suspect most readers of this blog would. Book shopping, book hunting, book collecting, book browsing. They are all pleasures that are only tangentially linked to reading – and Royle fully understands the validity of those pleasures.

I felt affinity with him in broad themes rather than individual mentions, for the most part. Our tastes in literature are clearly very different, and I hadn’t heard of many of the authors he prizes. He, in turn, didn’t instantly know who Clive Bell is, which suggests he’s spent less time than I immersed in the interwar years. But none of that matters. I was in such good company with a bibliophile that I lapped it up – there is no pretension to Royle’s tastes or writing, or any attempts to cloak the reality of his interests with what Should Be Liked. It’s all from the heart, albeit filtered through the recognisably British deflection of dry humour and self-deprecation.

Oh, and occasionally I felt truly like I was with a brother. I marked out this section:

If we agree that it’s impossible to read everything, then we have to choose which books to read and which books to leave on the shelf. Assuming the act of choosing is more sophisticated than flipping a cooin, it is surely not unreasonable to apply criteria. For mine, see above. I’ll read just about any other adult fiction. Apart from historical fiction, romance, and novels over 400 pages long (with exceptions).

Amen! Both in person and in the blog I’ve had people get slightly irked when I say I don’t want to read historical fiction, as though there were only a thousand novels in the world and I’d limited myself from a large swathe of them. I could say ‘I only want to read novels set in mid-century America by authors beginning with G’ and I’d probably still find enough to last me a decade. Part of coping with the vast and growing world of literature is to demarcate the bits you’re not going to invest in. One day I’ll write out my full list of ‘no thank you’s.

So, what of the title? A ‘shadow line’ is the indication, looking at the top of a book, that there is something physical hidden inside – an ‘inclusion’, as Royle terms them. I don’t think he ever explains quite what attracts him to these, but he buys a lot of books simply because of these inclusions. Bookmarks don’t cut it. Here are some examples of things he does like:

I love a bus, tram or train ticket. I love a boarding pass. I’m more than happy to find a postcard, business card or Debenhams store card (inside Irene Nemirvosky’s Fire in the Blood, which I found in Mark Jackson-Hancock’s extremely well-kept Chapter Two Community Bookshop in Chesham. Mrs M Sussum, get in touch if you’d like it back). I’m over the moon if I find a PR’s request for support for a book addressed to a former member of Blur (PG Wodehouse’s Blandings) or a personal message on hotel memo paper for a founding member of Del Amitri (Anais Nin’s Little Birds).

To do Royle his due, please know that the two missing accents/diacritics in the authors’ names above are my own laziness, not his. Any typos, it goes without saying, also my own.

Like most people, I imagine, I often find things tucked in books and I throw them away. It’s seldom anything more exciting than a receipt or business card, though I did recently find a birthday card with a tenner in it (sadly one of the old paper ones, so no longer in circulation). But it draws Royle, and he adds duplicate books to his collection if they have something tucked away inside. As when I read White Spines, I marvelled at the enormous house Royle must have, to house many duplicates of books for any number of reasons. (And I reflected that he bought books for very odd reasons, until I realised I do too, but for different odd reasons – see that time I wrote 27 Genuine Reasons I Have Bought Books.)

Would I phone someone if I found their telephone number in a book? No, and I’m not sure what conversation Royle expected to have if anybody answered, which nobody seems to. Would I return a book to an old address I found in it? No, but it does seem rather a lovely thought. I guess my point is that I am a very different book-lover from Royle in my activities and my tastes – but we are birds of a feather when it comes to loving books as objects and as histories of their owners’ experiences. I absolutely loved reading Shadow Lines because that love comes across so strongly. If you solely love stories, just as happy to have them as ebooks as books, then this particular book probably isn’t for you. If you are a bibliophile in the purist sense of the word, then race towards Shadow Lines. And if you end up giving it away, make sure to leave the strangest possible inclusion inside it.