Richard Rathbone | Reading at Night

Richard Rathbone

We were very touched to receive the following short piece by Slightly Foxed reader Richard Rathbone, found on his desk by his widow after his death.

Reading at Night – Richard Rathbone

As an only child in an unhappy household, reading was always a comfort. Before the thrall of television imposed itself, I escaped into anything and everything that beckoned from the shelves of our local libraries and school collections. Thankfully there was a lot of it about, its abundance being especially valued in the long, cold nights of winter. Reading in bad light delayed the completion of both undressing and redressing, and I remember sitting, shivering, with one sock off and the other awaiting my attention, into the small hours. Reflecting on more than seven decades of night-reading, I realize that now my reading habits have changed dramatically. My younger self could and often did read until sheer exhaustion took over. But now, minutes after my head comes into contact with a pillow, I float off to sleep.

That sleep rarely lasts all night. Instead, I parachute into consciousness and the need for things to read. But at 2 a.m., I am inattentive and only intermittently truly, madly or deeply engaged with unravelling text. Literary reviews are, I find, rather good at leading me off once again into sleep. But while reviews of books that remain unread are excellent at suggesting exciting future engagements, they are necessarily partial in all senses of the word. And, as I am clumsy, they flap about in away which M. R. James would have recognized. What might fill the gap between the slow loss of sleep and its comforting reassertion? The answer might be found in the brevity of pieces in what my teachers would have called ‘little magazines’. They are sadly a dying breed. I used to write for a ‘little magazine’ – The Contemporary Review. Its many merits included publishing short, non-specialist articles on a huge variety of topics. Some grabbed that odd mood that passes for attention when owls do hoot, and some failed to do so. Sadly, after a long life (146 years), it closed in 2012.

My present comfort blanket is a lovely quarterly called Slightly Foxed. Its mission and hence that of its mainly excellent writers is to give an airing to the vast number of books which its editors rightly regarded as ‘wonderful titles that were lingering unloved on publishers’ backlists’. How often do we talk about the unjustly neglected books that have been overshadowed by the powerful selling machines that publishing houses have become? It’s a formula that works. This little magazine is now twenty years old and a pile of back numbers teeter on my bedside table. Not all the pieces are bull’s-eyes but many of them are. And I know of few better publications that are so good at giving me a little help in getting through the night. I must add that I have no interest financial or otherwise in this lovely publication.

RICHARD RATHBONE was Professor of African History at the University of London, SOAS.


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