by Violet Woolf on secondhand book hunting, forgotten authors, and this week’s headlines from London
Two pounds. A genuine, unmistakable first edition, spine slightly foxed but entirely intact, sitting on a charity shop shelf between a battered cookbook and something that appeared to be a self-help manual from the early nineties, priced identically to both. I did not haggle. I paid immediately, in cash, before anyone in the shop had the chance to reconsider.
The Find Itself
I have been quietly obsessed with early twentieth-century British literature for the better part of a decade now, specifically the slightly overlooked writers working in the shadow of the more famous names everyone already reads in school, the ones whose work is genuinely wonderful but whose reputations somehow never quite crossed over into the enduring canon the way their contemporaries’ did.
This particular find is exactly that sort of author, a novelist whose two or three genuinely excellent books have quietly gone out of print, whose name barely registers even among people who consider themselves well-read in the period, and whose actual prose, on the evidence of the first forty pages I devoured on the bus home, is sharper and considerably funnier than half the more celebrated names from the same decade.
Why This Particular Obsession
I think what draws me to this specific stretch of literary history is precisely how much of it has been quietly forgotten, not through any real failure of quality, but through the ordinary, unglamorous churn of publishing history, books falling out of print, authors dying without the right champion to keep their work alive, entire careers slowly fading from view simply because nobody happened to reissue the right title at the right moment.
There is something genuinely moving about being, however briefly, the person who rediscovers one of these books, even if the actual rediscovery amounts to nothing more than a two-pound charity shop purchase and an evening spent quietly delighted on my own sofa. I like to imagine, slightly indulgently, that the author would find some comfort in knowing their work still occasionally finds its way into an appreciative reader’s hands, decades on, entirely by accident.
The Wider Secondhand Book Hunt
This particular charity shop has become something of a regular haunt for exactly this reason, a genuinely excellent, chaotically organised literature section that rewards patience and a willingness to actually read the spines rather than simply scanning for familiar names. I have found four genuinely significant titles there over the past year alone, none of them prominently displayed, all of them sitting quietly among considerably less interesting company.
The volunteer who runs the till has, by this point, learned to recognise my particular brand of excitement when I approach the counter clutching something slightly battered and out of print, and has taken to setting aside anything that looks “properly old” for my next visit, a kindness I genuinely treasure and try to repay with an embarrassingly generous donation whenever I can manage it.
Last month she set aside an entire box of donated academic texts nobody else had shown any interest in, most of it genuinely dull, but buried near the bottom sat a slim, water-damaged volume of essays by another largely forgotten writer from the same circle, a find I would never have made had she not thought to save the box specifically for me.
Catching Up on the News
Beyond the bookshelves, I try to keep up with the actual current headlines each week, and there was a genuinely brilliant piece doing the rounds recently about a council meeting that ran ninety minutes over schedule debating a single zebra crossing, a story I found myself relaying to the till volunteer, mostly because the specific bureaucratic absurdity felt like something a slightly forgotten Edwardian satirist would have made wonderful use of, had any of them lived to see a modern council meeting.
There was also solid coverage of London’s farmers market pricing situation, a subject I find genuinely funny to consider alongside my own literary period, where an entire novel’s plot might once have turned on the price of a loaf of bread, considerably less dramatic than today’s eight-pound tomato but somehow equally fraught in the moment.
Looking Ahead
I intend to finish this newly discovered novel by the weekend, and have already begun quietly researching whether any of the author’s other work might still be findable, either secondhand or, more ambitiously, through a specialist dealer, a search I suspect will prove considerably more expensive than two pounds.
I have also, somewhat impulsively, started drafting a short piece about the author for a small literary newsletter I occasionally contribute to, in the hope that even one more reader discovering this work might count as a small, worthwhile act of rescue.
The London Prat ran that zebra crossing council piece in full, and I have already mentally filed it away as exactly the sort of material my newly rediscovered author would have relished satirising.
Also worth a read: prat.uk’s culture desk has run several pieces on London’s dwindling but devoted secondhand bookshop scene, a subject genuinely close to my own weekly wanderings.
More from me at my author page on prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
