Royle

Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle #ABookADayInMay Day 20

StuckinaBook All , 9 Comments

Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf [Book]

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.

White Spines by Nicholas Royle

StuckinaBook All , , 24 Comments

About a minute after reading Susan’s review of White Spines by Nicholas Royle, I had ordered my copy – directly from the publisher Salt, which perhaps explains why it came with a surprise author signature on the title page.

It is exactly the sort of book I like: a book about reading, about buying books, and a love for literature that is more idiosyncratic than a slavish devotion to Lists of Great Works. The ‘white spines’ of the title are those that Picador used from the 1970s to the 1990s. If I’m honest, they’re exactly the sort of books my eye flashes past in a charity shop. It’s an era of literature that I know very little about and, except for a few stand-out names, I am pretty poorly read for those decades.

Royle does love some of the writers he buys from this period, but he buys books without necessarily ever anticipating reading them. He is a completist: he wants all of the titles. He wants the anomalies, from when some of the books had black or patterned spines. He wants a ‘shadow collection’, where he duplicates books already on his shelves of white spines. And his buying goes in tangents – an admiration for a cover artist will lead to him buying everything he can with the same artist on the cover, for instance. Almost anything can form the basis of a collection, and you get the sense of Royle’s – surely enormous? – house being a melting pot of different fascinations, grouped in overlapping collections.

Despite not sharing Royle’s particular tastes, and seldom buying books unless I have at least vague intentions of reading them, I loved reading about his bookish adventures. Next to going on a book buying spree, I enjoy experiencing them vicariously – and a lot of White Spines is about his book shopping. Sometimes far afield, sometimes in bookshops or charity shops that are regular haunts. He seldom comes away empty handed, and manages to convey both the excitement and the curiosity of the perennial haunted of bookshops. Here’s a trip to The Bookshop Experience in Southend… which I just kept writing out, because I enjoyed the journey we go on as he scans across the shelves.

As soon as I enter the Bookshop Experience, I know I’m in luck. I’m immediately taking the books off shelves. Paul Bowles – two Abacus collections, A Thousand Days for Mokhtar and Call at Corazon, in the same series, with excellent photographic covers, as two titles I already have. Calvino’s The Literature Machine, in the Brothers Quai (sic) series of covers from Picador (a separate series is credited to the Brothers Quay). And then – increasing heartbeat – I spot an early Sceptre paperback of Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

I love The Blindfold. My edition is later and features a woman’s midriff in a crop top that has always felt wrong to me. I like this earlier, uncredited cover with its blindfold, its disembodied eyes, Chrysler Building and 109th Street sign. Next, a King Penguin edition of BS Johnson’s best-known novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, that, as with The Blindfold, I hadn’t even known existed. Finally, I can’t quite believe it, but, yes, there, under K, a copy of the white-spined Picador edition of Kafka’s The Trial, which I have only seen once before, in the home of writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.

When I saw it at the Gaffney-Conlon residence, I was tempted to become a book thief. The Trial exists in many editions, from different publishers, with different covers. This Picador cover, by Steven Singer, has the distinction of having previously been, to me at least, invisible. Normally, if there’s a Picador I know I want, I don’t order it, as previously discussed. In the case of The Trial, however, I weakened. Having seen it in the wild, having even handled it, I couldn’t resist and did go online and did order, off eBay, what appeared to be the same edition. When it arrived it was a Picador Classics edition. The same translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, but in the black spine of Picador Classics, with a cover illustration by Peter Till. The search for the white-spined edition would continue, but my lesson learnt, only in the real world.

If this sort of thing is your jam, then this is the book for you.

There is a lot else of interest here, including Royle’s own writing career and his experience of sending stories to small magazines, his interviews with people connected to Picador and other publishing ventures, and an entertaining tangent into authors with the same names. He has reason to find this interesting: there is another Nicholas Royle, and they even both appeared in a collection I read about writing. The other Royle wrote a novel called Quilt that I found impenetrable and a book called The Uncanny that was rather too self-indulgent to be useful as the critical text I was hoping it would be for my DPhil. Safe to say, I prefer this Nicholas Royle.

Personally, I seldom care what edition a book is, and the only books I’ll get simply for the series they’re in are Persephone Books and Slightly Foxed Editions. But Royle still conveys much of what most of us will recognise in ourselves: someone who is not simply an occasional reader, but someone for whom books mean an enormous amount. We love reading them, but we also love being around them, choosing them, collecting them, and hunting them down. Royle is a witty, friendly writer, and it was a delight to go on this voyage with him.

3 books about reading

StuckinaBook All , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I am so proud of everybody for the response to my most recent post. You’ve really shown the positives that can come of people coming together on the Internet. It brings a tear to the eye! I’m excited about my Furrowed Middlebrow books arriving, and will certainly report back on what I think of the books.

But for today – let’s look at some books about reading. This has certainly my go-to comfort-genre of choice over the past year or so. I picked up quite a few in my trips to America, and I am endlessly entertained, informed, and charmed by them – thankfully there are plenty more to read on my shelves. As I often turn to them when I want episodic distraction, I don’t always get around to making proper reviews of them – so I’ve grouped three together for mini-reviews. Sound ok?

Why I Read (2014) by Wendy Lesser

why-i-readThe subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.

I would certainly need to re-read to familiarise myself afresh with her lines of argument, and this is closer to a scholarly book than most of the books-about-reading I enjoy, but is still certainly accessible to the non-scholar. Indeed, it would be infuriating in a scholarly context, because there are no footnotes or referencing

Why does she read? The whole book is, of course, building that answer – but I also liked (if did not agree with) the summing-up of sots of ‘I read […] for meaning, for sound, for voice – but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself’. I’d certainly recommend Why I Read – and it is also beautifully designed and printed – but somebody should have a word in her ear about how often one can get away with throwing in Henry James. I shall always wryly smile in recollection of ‘Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading, The Golden Bowl, but we cannot always be reading The Golden Bowl‘. Well quite.

The Art of the Novel (2015) edited by Nicholas Royle

art-of-the-novelI asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.

This was one of the books I read in Edinburgh, and it was entertaining – I was reading it more out of interest than seeking advice – but I did particularly like how each essayist ended their section with a list of books they admired or recommended. It was interesting how often Muriel Spark’s excellent book The Driver’s Seat came up.

The Whole Five Feet (2009) by Christopher R. Beha

the-whole-five-feetThe most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.

The great plants in question are the Harvard Classics – Beha decides that he will try to read all of the Harvard Classics in a year. They supposedly take up five feet on a shelf, hence the title. For those not au fait with the series (as I was not), it was created in 1909 to be the best literature, fiction and non-fiction, made available to the everyman, in 51 chunky volumes. It is quite an unusual collection of works; the blurb describes it as ‘from Plato to Dante, Shakespeare to Thoreau’, but it also includes some more idiosyncratic choices – like Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing by Richard Henry Dana, Jnr.

What makes this book so engrossing is how well Beha combines the reading experience with personal accounts of his own life – losses and illness chiefly – that accompany the year, writing with a empathetic dexterity that makes the reader warm to him and care deeply. The actual responses to the books become less important as The Whole Five Feet continues, and it ultimately seems more of an endurance test than an engagement with literature. In some ways, this is more memoir than a book-about-reading, but it is none the worse for that.