Dan is great with the public and loves books. He doesn’t seem to covet personal wealth, an attractive trait in a person but puzzling to those that harbour more commercial ambition. A customer thinks Dan is missing a trick by not advertising Tylers’ historical credentials; using the bard and Glyndŵr as a ploy to pull in the tourists. I think Dan can go further still, it being likely that Thomas De Quincy passed by the shop during his wanderings in North Wales. He even took lodging in a ‘small neat home’ in Bangor; his landlady having been a servant in the family of Bishop of Bangor. In Confessions of an English Opium Eater, I hazily recall De Quincy’s praise for Bangor’s cemetery but I haven’t been able to find this passage again in the book. Did I dream it?
Leaving 44 rue de l’Universite, 1998
I am on the phone to Eddy, moaning. In the morning, there’s a Mary Celeste feel to the place. Afternoons at least bring in more punters. I estimate that 75 per cent of the books are sold after 3 p.m. ‘Why not open the shop then?’ Eddy suggests. I laugh, tempted and Eddy goes on: ‘They say the Christmas period for Harrods represents 70 per cent of its annual turnover. Maybe they should open only for those few weeks. You might start a revolution in the retail trade.’
It might be the routine, but the shop is now energy sapping; I’m reading less too. I start to covet customers’ occupations, which is always a bad sign. I meet an Englishman who assembles cranes for a living in Southern France. As if erecting towering structures of metal was not difficult enough, he’s chosen to exercise his trade over here. My first thoughts are of how he managed to acquire the scores of certificates that French bureaucracy would demand. By good fortune, it turns out he met an employer prepared to take his word on previous assignments and a joint effort was made to translate the relevant qualifications. Crane assembling isn’t the sort of job in which you can easily bluff it as an experienced hand. He leaves the shop with a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
The itinerant bookseller John Edwards turns up, with his adorable dog, in his big red transit van. He’s come from selling Wordsworth Classics and remainders to shops in Paris. In comparison, he sells little to me but doesn’t take umbrage at the paucity of my orders. After a cup of tea and chat, he sets off for Barcelona, anticipating a swim en route in the sea at Sète. It’s enough to bring on a strong dose of wanderlust.
It’s no contest; football wins over shop management. I’m on the road, albeit until England are knocked out. A friend, working as a translator for the England Supporters Club, has got me complimentary tickets for all of England’s World Cup matches. There are vast swathes of England shirts, bands playing the Great Escape theme tune and thousands of supporters milling about the stadiums without tickets; their dedication humbling. The games go by in a blur: a Scholes cracker in Marseille, disappointment in Toulouse (no second-hand bookshops either), more hurt in Saint Etienne. Thousands make do with TVs in the French bars in order to witness Owen’s legendary goal before the inevitable let down. I return to Montpellier, deflated and once more shop bound.
There is, however, an escape route, one that biker Pete has helped to provide. Thanks to this maverick software designer, I am given an early introduction to the web’s book selling potential. Receiving the first order (for a 1938 Penguin Gulliver’s Travels illustrated throughout with wood-engravings by Theodore Naish) from my website was akin to an epiphany of sorts; I could trade without a retail premises in bricks and mortar.
The geography of the road was against us all along. Even friends have confessed that they can’t face climbing the hill into the city’s centre. And the promise of human traffic from the new tram stop proves illusory. With heavy hearts and an unacknowledged relief, we close the shop, placing a sign in the window: ‘Words failed me.’
Catalogue Gazing, Bangor, 2009
For O-Level we studied Lord of the Flies whose author, William Golding, had taught our English teacher, and I used to wonder if Mr Whiteside was privy to the allegorical novel’s finer interpretations. Whenever the book comes up at auctions, as one did last year at the Dominic Winters Auction House near Cirencester, I do a double take. I was, though, and remain more appreciative of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the other major work of literature that Mr Whiteside selected for study. Especially that revelatory passage when Huck rejects the advice of his ‘conscience’, which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson’s property. Telling himself ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell!’, Huck, listening to a deeper ‘conscience’, resolves to free Jim.
I am gazing at a first edition of this book, or rather a photograph of it in the pages of a Dominic Winter Catalogue for an auction in 2008. The book is bound in green cloth which bears a picture of Huck on the cover, standing in a field of corn, blocked in gold. (1st American Edition, mixed issue, Charles L. Webster, New York, 1885, wood eng. frontis and numerous letterpress vigns., heliotype port. title-page with copyright notice on verso dated 1884, occn. creasing to corners, and pp. 163/4 with piece missing from upper outer blank corner, some light soiling, modern bookplate, orig. pictorial green cloth gilt, spine ends frayed with sl. loss, corners showing, 8vo)
I try to interpret what the book’s image in the catalogue means to me. It’s a false dichotomy; the book as a physical object and the story within. For they become intertwined. Mark Twain’s book, commonly recognised as one of the great American novels, inspired us to ‘play hookey’ and smoke cigars on the banks of the Thames. But more importantly it made us realise that stories are not the possession of any elite. When it came to respective social backgrounds, I was Tom to Eddy’s Huck. Eddy said recently himself that for his mother ‘scrawling a note to the milkman was breaking new literary ground’.
From the photograph in the catalogue you can clearly make out the novel’s title. Bundles of sticks, also blocked in gold, depict the first letters of Huckleberry Finn’s name, H and F. And the full title is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade). Upon completion, the novel’s title closely paralleled its predecessor’s. Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not have the definite article as a part of its proper title. Essayist and critic Philip Young states that this absence represents the ‘never fulfilled anticipations’ of Huck’s adventures — while Tom’s adventures were completed by the end of his novel, Huck’s narrative ends with his stated intention to head West.
If I had £3000 to spare, I’d be tempted to invest in such a book. Not that it’s the pinnacle for Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) collectors. *A blue cloth edition, which is more scarce than the green cloth edition, was issued in a smaller quantity. A three-quarter morocco leather edition was also issued. It is extremely scarce. There were only five hundred of the leather bound copies issued.
Paris 1991, Second Stint
The bank is expressing its mounting frustration in the letters sent to my parents’ address.
Unwittingly, I have discovered that an overdrawn account cannot prevent the holder from cashing in travellers’ cheques, regardless of when they were issued. I have used the money to pay two months’ rent in advance. Delgado insisted.