I find myself reading Jay Mcinerney’s Bright Precious Days - post-9/11 New Yorkers snorting coke (and worse), fornicating with their best friends’ wives, spending money and setting a bad example to their offspring. More interesting is the way I acquired it.Recently our supermarket set aside a table for unwanted books. Collection boxes prodded the consciences of those who took away their choices. An optimistic project, I thought. Hereford is notorious for mean-spirited tipping. Happily I was wrong. Quite quickly several thousand pounds were accumulated for local charities and the scheme continues.
Eventually I was drawn in. I say “eventually” because the scheme first needed to pass through its self-purging stage – ridding itself of Da Vinci Codes and of Fifty Shades of Greys. An invasion of Readers Digest collections, bound in shining (ie, unread) false leather, further hindered the commercial flow. Then, predictably, Ian McEwan titles started appearing and I could start playing Spine Game.
How is it one can narrow down second-hand book searches via the meagre information on the spine? Often it may depend on a no-longer-fashionable typeface. Or less lurid colours. Or a more modest rhetoric in the title. Another giveaway is whether the cover is scuffed, for scuffing is a sign of love. No one reads Dan Brown twice.
More important still is the conviction that in swathes of junk treasures will be rare. One must pay attention. My friend the late Joe Hyam was especially good at this. How galling it was to see him picking out a horribly shabby Everyman of Burke’s essays which my eyes had slid over. I mean Everyman spines are immediately identifiable by their poorly conveyed information.
No Everymans at the supermarket. But the first fifty pages of BPD were dense and technically well written. Spine Game continues.
As I read my curiosity had me wondering where this was going. Perhaps you becoming the leading light, organising, classifying, and encouraging a specialised section for the more intellectual members of Belmont society, but then I realised that would not fit well with your anathema for socialising. My daughter has a similar gift to Joe whilst traipsing round charity shops picking out nearly new, expensive brand children's clothing (Katie always has that well dressed middle-class appearance) and Jill's talent extends to books including her penchant for fantasy fiction and the latest in children's fiction, the latter keeping her up to speed with her pupils as head of English at her school.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Had you known where this post was going I would have preferred you to let me know so I could have deleted it. My aim in Tone Deaf is never to set off for a predictable destination.
ReplyDeleteDesconstructing book spines is a mysterious process since there is so little to go on. Being able to do it well means you can ignore the majority of books in front of you - it works in libraries too. By the way, I'm not entirely sure whether you could distinguish between "intellectual" and "educated". My definition of the former is "able to understand and speculate on abstract matters". It isn't the official dictionary explanation but for me it works more effectively.
Or Man in Havana:
ReplyDelete"Why did you choose the Lamb?"
"it was the only book I could find in duplicate copy except, Uncle Tom's Cabin. I was in a hurry and had to get something at the c.t.s. bookshop in Kensington before I left. Oh, there was something too called The Lit Lamp: A manual of Evening Devotion, but I thought somehow it might look conspicuous on your shelves if you weren't a religious man."
That Lit Lamp title is deeply engraved on my mind, although until digging it out again just now I had forgotten the additional bit to the title.
Sir Hugh: I'm surprised that that comic passage occurred in Our Man In Havana. I decided I could not be without it and downloaded it to my Kindle (at full price!) whence I have since re-read it twice. I thought I knew all the details.
ReplyDeleteMore so since in GG's The Human Factor there is also a section dealing with a double-book code. But then one of the most important characters in THF is the dog, a boxer (I think) with a wonderfully chosen name which I have - curses! -forgotten and am unable to re-discover. The spying detail in THF is deliberately underplayed because the emphasis is on the morality of spying and the nature of love.
I delight in OMIH because of Wormold's (another brilliant name) laconic character. And the movie is memorable for casting Noel Coward as the recruiting agent for MI5; in the crucial scene I have often referred to and which always makes me laugh Coward acts with the back of his head or, possibly, his shoulders or (even more implausibly) his ears.
Another snippet that stuck with me is on page 30/31/ and first para of 32 in the Penguin edition where Wormald is saying goodnight to his daughter Milly. It is pushing towards sentimentality but it isn't. GG says what most taciturn males would be embarrassed to say to another about his feelings for his daughter. In the middle of this he reminisces and intermingles the business of bullying at school.
DeleteSir Hugh: Elder daughter, Professional Phlebotomist, presently staying with us, has tracked down the dog in The Human Factor: it's called Buller, a name which Greene uses to great effect. The story has some links with South Africa and I had thought the dog's name might have grown out of these links. This seems possible: among General Frederick William Buller's exploits among our former colonies "he burnt the kraals in the Waterkloof in the Second Kaffir War, and was present at the Battle of Berea". Stout fellow!
ReplyDeleteA note to dog lovers. Don't let this reference to Buller tempt you to read The Human Factor. You may not survive the experience. A reviewer of the novel says the book left him "with a bad taste in his mouth.".
Oh dear! I've just ordered it.
DeleteSir Hugh: Never mind. Perhaps this will be the last occasion when something I say will be misinterpreted as a recommendation.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite the thing these days, giving books away. Here, too. In supermarkets and several city-sponsored open bookshelves etc. I have been told that "the good stuff" is picked up by regulars who then sell the books online. Whatever.
ReplyDeleteI've also dumped my share from time to time, mostly thrillers and cookery books.
The spine thing is interesting. Our local city libraries have a good selection of foreign language titles (how many UK libraries I wonder do that?) and as someone who enjoys a good long library visit, I often walk out with a sore neck as the spines of English books (when shelved standing upright) are written top to bottom, while German books are the other way round. Hence, bending this way and that. You can get a bit dizzy.
Spines are one thing to identify treasures, size is another. The Dan Browns and their airport newsagent companions are smaller than Picador, Faber, Abacus, Bloomsbury and the like, which helps when searching through stalls and boxes. Something I seem to do automatically.
Sabine: There's so much repetitive blather about books; spines seemed like unexplored territory. I'm delighted we share this sub-category of literature and that you pursued it further. I'd forgotten about the head-twisting to match up-down/down-up titles but you've reminded me of yet another problem: it's remarkably different to focus bespectacled eyes on book titles which are usually read at exactly the distance where blurriness starts.
ReplyDeleteMind you I detect a wee bit of self-defence regarding the books you discard. Thrillers, yes, cook-books, certainly. But what about classics that have proved indigestible? Dare you expose yourself? Make yourself vulnerable? I'm thinking in particular about The Brothers Karamazov. The fourth time (or was it the fifth?) I tried I reached page 350-ish. Surely I wouldn't yet again grind to a halt? And it was a new Penguin, bought specially to make things easier. Alas, there was that familiar feeling of hopelessness, then... Intellectually it deserves a place on the Tesco table but it won't make it. Sooner or later the silly impulse will return and I'm damned if it's going to cost me more money.
I wrore an entire post about the day I discarded my grandmother's early 19th century edition of the (almost) complete works of Goethe after I discoverd that with one volume missing (which had been appropriated either for toilet paper or as a souvenir by a member of the US army) it had become unsellable. Otherwise I'd have sold it and spent the money on a fancy holiday. And yes, I did try and find a replacement.
DeleteSame fate to a couple of Lessings, Klopstocks, almost all Kleist and lots of Fontane. I still have the incomplete Grillparzer but only because the Jugenstil covers are so splendid. Alas, unsellable.
As for Heine or Hesse and Rilke, I do read these guys from time to time.
I do cherish my second hand find of War&Peace, only read it in 2016, one chapter a day. I'll read more Russians when I find them - second-hand.
Sabine: Varying prices for Goethe. Vol. 12 (Scientific studies) availlable hardcover (£80.42) or paperback (£53). Faust costs pennies (I have it for nothing on my Kindle). Say £600 for the lot. A fancy holiday... where? Karl-Marx-Stadt or would that be a clash of philosophies? At least you wouldn't be fighting tourists getting on to the U-bahn.
ReplyDeleteNever mind. I'm impressed. You wield the axe fearlessly and don't care who knows it. If the Lessing is Doris of that ilk I'm with you all the way. Paradoxically I have a secret urge to turn at least two or three pages of Klopstock, convinced that his name is somehow onomatopeic. Thank you for being frank even if you do masquerade under the Vorname Sabine