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Pulsing Hearts beneath the Tweed

Pulsing Hearts beneath the Tweed

Antiquarian bookselling is not a famously perilous profession. In my nineteen years at Sotheran’s, the antiquarian bookdealer in London, I have never had a life insurance policy refused on the grounds of risk to life and limb, and I don’t face mortal danger in my quotidian round of bibliophile duties. It might, therefore, seem fanciful when I say that Bernard J. Farmer’s detective novel Death of a Bookseller (1958) manages to combine a devilish murder plot with a realistic depiction of the London antiquarian book trade, but I promise it isn’t. The book may be over sixty years old now, but much of what it reveals about the trade is as true today as it was then.
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A Gale Called Maria

A Gale Called Maria

I first learned about the concept of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ when I was doing my A levels three decades ago. The furious winds that tore through Wuthering Heights – or across the playing fields of my school in Sheffield – were not actually furious, our teacher helpfully explained, because they were inanimate and so could not be given human characteristics. We diligently took note of the fact that weather was often described in this way, and trusted that if we successfully identified this during our summer exams we could expect to gain some valuable additional marks. As with so much at school, I never entirely understood the significance of the phrase, but it stuck with me. And it came to mind again when I read George R. Stewart’s extraordinary novel Storm (1941) for the first time.
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Voyage to the Blessed Isles

Voyage to the Blessed Isles

I first came across Derek Walcott’s narrative poem ‘The Schooner Flight ’ in the mid-1980s, when I was travelling on a Commonwealth bursary through the Caribbean. I was away from England for two months, on an island-stepping journey whose final destination was St Lucia in the Windward Islands – where I once worked at a radio station, and where my wife and I spent the first two years of our marriage. I must have regarded my return to St Lucia after a decade and a half as a kind of culmination – Ithaca at the end of an odyssey – and I was nervous as I walked across the tarmac at Castries airport.
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Sex and Silliness and Sorrow

Sex and Silliness and Sorrow

I was at the Dartington Festival in the very early 1990s with Esther Freud and Elspeth Barker, whose first novels I had published at Hamish Hamilton. We knew that Barbara Trapido was appearing and we filed into the Great Hall and sat at the back, giggling at the school-like atmosphere. Barbara walked on to the stage, sat down and in a throaty voice began to read from the beginning of what was to become her fourth novel, Juggling (1994). We stopped giggling and leaned forward, trying to catch every word, transported – as if we’d been led through the wardrobe and into a new land. We were in the hands of a magician, a spinner of spells, and afterwards we crowded up to her. We knew we wanted her in our lives.
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Master of Invention

Master of Invention

The Book of Disquiet (1982) is, strictly speaking, a book that isn’t a book by an author who isn’t an author. How does such a thing come into the world? Perhaps only under a very unusual configuration of stars. The great Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa might have been able to tell us: a firm believer in astrology, he would cast horoscopes for the non-existent authors whose many works he wrote. Two of these phantoms are responsible for The Book of Disquiet, although it is credited finally to only one, Bernardo Soares. The first, Vicente Guedes, slowly vanishes over the decades of its creation, lingering only as the ghost of a ghost.
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Hanging Around in Doorways

Hanging Around in Doorways

I first read Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) in my twenties – a teaching colleague had recommended it – and loved it. I took it at face value: I enjoyed its plot, succumbed to its atmosphere, appreciated its descriptions and believed in its characters. I remembered it as a Good Book and sought out others by McCullers (always admiring her titles – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café). But in your twenties you are robust, busy looking ahead and perhaps less inclined to dwell on the past. You don’t necessarily think sad stories apply to you. Now, rereading it several decades later, I am surprised at how moved I am by Frankie, the central character, and how much I identify with her. Which is odd, considering she is a 12-year-old on the brink of adolescence and I am 72.
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Reaching for the Moon

Reaching for the Moon

Edward Hopkins is a middle-aged bachelor, retired from teaching arithmetic to breed poultry in the English countryside. He gardens, he is vainglorious about his prize-winning chickens, and he is a regular attendee at meetings of the British Lunar Society. He is also an arrogant snob, utterly self-absorbed and lacking in self-awareness. He tells us he has a ‘gift for friendship’ and a ‘restful, pleasant personality’. Among his neighbours he has ‘selected’ two gentlemen, with whom he has spent happy evenings ‘discussing my poultry until long past midnight . . . It was a great regret to me when both of them decided to go and live farther away.’ Oh, I thought, this is going to be good.
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Friendship and a Book

Friendship and a Book

The novelist Graham Swift and I first met at a literary gathering on the outskirts of Norwich in June 2005. The university backdrop to our meeting seems strangely extra-territorial in retrospect, as though the campus’s concrete ziggurats had been dropped from Minsk on to a Mediterranean version of East Anglia. The memory is coloured not only by the exotic Babel of writers and languages around us, but also by one of those brief English heatwaves which descends just as the school exams are about to start, a false promise of summer followed by weeks of rain.
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Stumbling with Precision

Stumbling with Precision

According to Dorothy Dunnett’s fans, she is one of Scotland’s greatest writers. They descend on Edinburgh for their annual symposium on Dorothy Dunnett Day. They read the books alongside a 900-page Dorothy Dunnett Companion. They maintain two rival Dorothy Dunnett websites, and a Dorothy Dunnett Twitter feed, squabbling over every detail of the books with a heartfelt but rather off-putting enthusiasm. Since discovering Dorothy’s delights during frequent long railway journeys, I have joined their ranks. What we train commuters require is shaggy-dog stories, the longer the better, funny, intricate and with plenty of dashing about. I close my eyes and listen to the audiobooks, a remarkable performance by the Scottish voice actor David Monteath.
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