Becoming a Bookseller

Moomins move in cycles. One day I’ll get some sort of actuarial table made to prove this, but it seems possible to date someone according to if and how they were exposed to Moominmania.

Older, English Moomin fans will remember the newspaper comic strips. This is the first collected edition of those strips, published in 1957 by Allan Wingate (£450):

The best and most baffling thing about this volume is the introduction by acclaimed crime writer Margery Allingham - I’m still trying to work out quite how she came do it.  She effs the ineffable by explaining the eternal appeal of these strange creatures:

“Surely this series is that very rare thing, an instantly recognisable work of art?  To be certain of this, I submit, one only has to consider a single drawing.  Art experts are forever lecturing us about purity and economy of line and sometimes the layman is privately put about to discover precisely what the jargon means.  But here there is perfect line and perfect economy and nothing else whatever to get in the way.”

So the Moomins are art, and this is something we can understand as little children or as adults, however we first experience their curious shapes and indomitable characters.  It’s the saving grace of the Moomin tat industry that a Moomin ennobles anything it touches and cannot really be degraded even in the most pointless and faux-whimsical format.

Older Finnish and Swedish readers will remember (and younger fans can now buy reissued or iPad versions) Jansson’s beautiful cut out picture book Hur Gick Det Sen?, featuring Mymble and Little My (Schildt, 1952, £500):

And, as if to prove the natural link between detective fiction and Moomins, I’ve just discovered that one modern translator of this is book is Sophie Hannah, my favourite modern crime writer.

There you have it - an improbably Venn diagram with at least one Moomin/Allingham/Hannah fan in the centre.  

For the detective fiction fan in an after-dinnerish mood, I’ve got some lovely ‘tec games.

Peter Cheyney’s The Crime Club Card Game (Pepys, 1938, £40) is a natty little thing featuring characters from Cheyney’s books (and, for some reason, Hercule Poirot):

There’s no actual mystery to solve, it’s more of a pick-up-and-discard game where you’re trying to build a winning hand while avoiding penalty cards.  It doesn’t sound like much, but like all the best card games it’s addictive and gets more and more interesting the better you know it.

Also issued by Pepys is Photo Crime (The Crime Club Party Game!  Only £65) issued at some point in the 1950s (I’m trying to find a more precise date):

There are four sets of crime photos with three identical cards in each, so you can have up to 12 players who have 5 minutes to study each photograph, alongside Inspector Cameron’s interview with each witness.  Unfortunately, these witness are lying their arses off and it’s up to you to figure out how Inspector Cameron came to his conclusions.  I solved three of the crimes this morning, but the fourth has me stumped.  The card will sit on my desk until my powers of observation improve.

Walter Eberhardt’s The Jig-Saw Puzzle Murder (Puzzle Books Ltd, 1933, £250 - it’s hard to find complete and in decent condition) is utterly fiendish:

Comprising a slipcase with a book and jigsaw puzzle inside, first you read the ‘corking full length mystery novel’ and then, damning everything else to hell, you complete a 200-piece jigsaw to find out who dunnit.  It’s infuriating and so much fun.  I’m not going to publish a picture of the completed puzzle, but if you buy it and get stuck there are images online and at the British Library’s excellent Murder In the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction exhibition.

From Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links I have ‘an entirely new departure in Crime Fiction’ - Murder off Miami (1936, inscribed to W. Edgeley and with a letter from Wheatley, £100); Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937, inscribed again to Edgeley, £75) and The Malinsay Massacre (1938, £40 - all published by Hutchinson):

These are ribbon-bound folders with police reports, letters, photographs, cablegrams, criminal records etc presented without ‘any extraneous or misleading matter’.  You analyse the documents in the case and, when you think you definitely know what’s what, tear open a further set of sealed documents to reveal the answer along with an explanation from Police Lieutenant John Milton Schwab.  They’re really compelling, despite the unpromising premise of detective fiction sans narrative, and the unnecessarily macabre Wheatley touches (like an envelope of human hair, doubtless shorn from some hapless publisher’s assistant).

These ephemeral items all highlight the Golden Age of detective fiction’s playfulness, the light touch and sporting spirit of the best vintage crime writing.

I love it when this kind of thing happens.  So, here’s this unassuming paperback of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, translated by Dorothy L Sayers when she packed up the Wimsy and devoted herself to theology and theatre:

Then there’s an unexpected (not to mention uncommon) bonus: Dorothy L Sayers’ signature:

There’s another signature inside, that of the book’s owner: Gerard Irvine the High Anglican clergymen, man of arts and letters, who knew Sayers (and other high church literary figures) through St Anne’s in Soho.

As a nice extra, and one that confirms it’s that Gerard Irvine and not a different one, tucked inside there’s a postcard of Dorothy L Sayers (the Hutchison portrait) sent in 1984 to ‘Preb. G. Irvine’ thanking him “for last night’s sermon, which did us all a power of good.”

To descend into bookseller jargon, that story is the difference between a signed copy and an association copy - and whether or not it makes the book more valuable, it’s something to treasure.

For those of us not perverse enough to fast and abstain in the dead of winter, here’s a new crop of food and drink titles.  

From the Home Entertaining Series there’s a 1955 edition of Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How To Mix Them (£50), a classic of the barman-written genre.  

Robert’s neat recipes and his succinct guide to all a ‘gentleman mixer’ needs to stock a decent home bar is prefaced by a sweetly imaginative chapter of nonsense about the origins of the cocktail as word and concept.  Since nobody knows, cocktail writers throughout history have felt compelled to add their own stories to what now amounts to an enormous trove of cocktail lore.  It’s better that it should be this way, a heady mixture of fantasy and accident that someone really should make into its own book.

Cocktails doubles up as pharmacopoeia, though I’d be wary about taking Robert’s prescription for indigestion (half gin and white peppermint, half creme de menthe). His cure for neuralgia is sublime: “A mouthful of neat Absinthe Pernod swallowed very slowly will cure neuralgia.  Its taste is very strong, but the effect on the pain is radical.”

Len Deighton’s Ou Est le Garlic (1965, 1st ed., £30) is a joy, illustrated with his signature cookstrips.

He makes the science of the omelette beautifully clear:

As much as I value style in cookery writing (Deighton’s is breezily straightforward), what strikes me most about this book is its clear-eyed approach to organising information.  Where so much of cooking is a variation on a theme, Deighton explains the theme and gives the variations in a flowchart.  It’s such a simple technique, but it reduces the awful fuss and mither of white sauces to one double page spread.  Sorry to harp, but those damn sauces usually account for whole chapters of cordon bleu cookery books.  

Proving that you can cram a complete cookery course, from slaughter to service, in pamphlet form there’s Cookery for Seamen by Alexander Quinlan and N.E. Mann (1894, £100), issued by the Liverpool Training School of Cookery after the success of their Cookery Classes for Seamen and at their students’ behest:

Some of the recipes I’m just going to follow out of curiosity (having first varnished my eggs and preserved them for five months to see what happens), but the ones I recognise, like Scotch Collops, seem every bit as civilised as the versions I’ve made on land.  Readers by the sea might like to try out baking with saltwater, which the authors aver makes for better bread than freshwater.

But for just reading about food, for haunting long-gone restaurants and revelling in the diner’s wit and wisdom, there are Newnham Davis’ The Gourmet’s Guide to London (1914, 1st ed., £150) and The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe (1908, 2nd ed., £75).  I don’t know why the little gold-stamped maitre d’ on the European edition has ghostly hair, while the London version is serenely bald:

The books are more memoir than review, engagingly written sketches that are sometimes roaring and fashionable, sometimes tender and wistful.  This is a man who ate well, lived well, and took care of his friends.  He is a charming guide to places I’ve mostly read about in PG Wodehouse novels (though even Bertie Wooster never called Oddenino ‘Oddy’).

The European guide is more instructive than anecdotal, characterising the cuisine of each country and naming its principal restaurants and clubs.  His emphasis on history and context is as of one, like Elizabeth David, reintroducing Europe to the English.  His defence of the Turkish kitchen is surprisingly vehement, indeed there’s very little that meets with his outright condemnation - his greatest disappointment is Serbia, a place where people come from miles around to buy the best produce but where one cannot, as a visitor, get a good dinner.

One of the best things about having a bookshop is that my hobby of poking through old books to find things of interest has become a Legitimate Business Activity. De-shelving things and putting them in the drawers, to read later, is less Legitimate but adds a pleasing conjuror’s flourish when people come in and ask for that very thing.

One of the books I’m most pleased with at the moment is this lovely 1961 first edition of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (£60):

Speaking as a collector and fervent Sparkhead, I’m glad to have such an affordable copy to offer a likeminded reader.  Victor Reinganum, a serial Spark illustrator, has done a fabulous job with the dustjacket.  I love the chilliness of it, the cold sun, the ice-crystal flowers, the paper-doll figures of the girls at once awkward and elegant.  And in the centre of it all the sinister, strutting figure of Miss Brodie.

I also like this history of the The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century from 1896 (£175):

It’s available in reprinted form, but mine’s quite unusual for the scarce original in that it wasn’t always issued with its coloured plates and illustrations.  Everybody knows about gaudy old Vauxhall, but there are some fabulous snippets of local history to be had.  Before Finsbury Park was parked, there stood the semi-genteel and entirely unsophisticated Hornsey Wood House, where ‘unlimited tea-drinking’ was as exciting as it got.  But surely there were darker delights on offer when it was kept by two witches? sisters, Mrs Lloyd and Mrs Collier, who were “usually to be found before their door on a seat between two venerable oaks, wherein swarms of bees hived themselves.”  

Here we are, open at last and a few weeks into trading.  Glossing over the herculean task of shelving (dust, injuries, crying because it’s been a too-long day and you don’t know where to put Voltaire’s A Defence of My Uncle), this is the sort of the thing you can expect to find at Pinda Bryars Books:

Mellow, multi-volume loveliness like these illustrated Pickwick Papers and a fine 1799 edition of Johnson’s dictionary.

Histories and lives, and not just of people related to Winston Churchill.

Beautiful things in the cupboard of make-believe, like slipcased Ulysses, the Lord of the Rings trilogy stamped with the eye of Sauron, and a first edition No Name that I covet.

Fascinating oddments like these Dennis Wheatley murder stories complete with evidence for you to literally piece together.  The stuff above that looks like part of the shelving is in fact a 24-volume set of Henry James. I’m thinking of charging browsers a deposit for hauling it down, refundable against purchase.

Naughty Samuel Pepys, and orations and letters of great men (not pictured: the less eminent but scandalously amusing and generally French women).

Stow’s Survey (or Svrvay) of London, and whole shelves devoted to the exploration, understanding and celebration of the city.

Exploration and travels.  This is my favourite, so it lives in the window.

Uncle Quentin guards the twentieth century shelves, with support from Agatha and Zelda.

Every bookseller should have a copy of Knock or Ring, a rattling tale about the dark machinations of the trade.

So much crime, and there’ll be a lot more of this.

I’m not selling online yet, but I’ll be committing regular acts of bloggery about individual titles.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Cecil Court.  This seventeenth century strip of London is a history of the city itself, home to all kinds of people and trades. It’s been no better than a rookery.  It’s been good enough for Mozart.  It’s been a hotbed of treason.  It’s been the crucible of the early British film industry.  It’s been burned down, rebuilt, and it’s endured for centuries.

Tomorrow, it begins enduring me.  I’m getting the keys to number 7, and I’ll open the door for a stream of useful and wonderful people who are going to turn it into Pinda Bryars Books.

Tomorrow, I’m becoming a bookseller.