SALT PUBLISHING 2024
My previous reviews of Nicholas Royle: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/14748-2/ and of Salt Publishing: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/salt-publishing/
When I read this book, I may comment on it in the comment stream below…
“…trains and trams were inconvenient, and I don’t like buses, so I started walking in…”
I have read the first two numbered chapters in this book, a compelling and enjoyably idiosyncratic audit trail within an eclectic treasure trove of books connected by reading and buying them sometimes in and around lockdown time, often older books, a few marked in some way by their previous readers. The first chapter deals, inter alia, with the Rev. W. Awdry train books that I do not remember from my own boyhood but from my son’s. And the second centres on ‘walking and reading’ which I rarely do. But I felt a strong connection between the central subject matters of these first two chapters. One that not even the author of this book may have thought of. One chapter absolving the dangers of the other, face up front while tracks guiding below…
Loved the Magritte connections in the first chapter.
Yellow Pages Let Your Fingers Do The Walking
3
THE NUMBERS
Finding telephone numbers in old books and having the cheek to follow them up.
So many of these discoveries for this writer, one wonders whether such exposing oneself to books and their places of being sold, are in cahoots with what I do with the printed words themselves in the same books by means of my ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ processes which bring out the connections and synchronicities and spiritual assonances like a plague, along with my own handwritten aide-memoire review marginalia for others to find one day.
So many bookshops visited in this quest, and it is a delight to read here about their idiosyncrasies, but I wonder if this writer is old enough to have visited The Croydon Bookshop near Carshalton, a secondhand book emporium I once regularly visited many years ago and where Nicholas Royle spent a chapter telling us about visiting in his recent book ‘David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine’.
Yellow pages with numbers may have let my fingers do the walking, now I see I have already ridden off the back of the numbers themselves…
I have now read chapters 4 & 5, and I have been consumed by them in one sitting, full of the autonomous connections of book-places and publishing-type people, some of the latter necessarily redacted. I have realised what ‘shadow lines’ really are regarding unread books and the discrete things inside such books. It is the most mazy rollercoaster ever that seems as if it is still being built even as you take its exciting reading-ride … and then I reached the tantalising tangents of bookishness surrounding the PENGUIN MODERN STORIES series (1969-72) that I was recently inspired by this writer to obtain when he posted the striking numbered covers to match each date he posted them, only made possible by means of his duplicated sets of this series, upon what was previously called Twitter, a social media that has now been named after its own redaction! Well, to cut a long short story short, I myself have since been ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ this Penguin series, story by story — reviews with their own spin-offs and synchronicities. Many of this series’ authors and stories mentioned in ‘Shadow Lines’ are listed here with links to my reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/penguin-modern-stories/
This book is subtitled ‘Searching For The Book Beyond the Shelf’.
I think that, for many years, I may have been Searching For The Book Beyond The Self!
Cross-referenced the Awdry chapter here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/03/06/mooncalves/#comment-28259
The next chapter is a delightfully crammed cornucopia of Books and Films, not Books of Films or Films of Books, but Books seen IN Films, whether identified merely by being referred to as ‘first editions’ or actually spying the title and author. I was particularly struck by ‘Catcher in the Rye’ in ‘The Shining’ and the thoughts surrounding the book in ‘Don’t Look Now.’
Then Chapter 8 deals with three fascinating reminiscences, one being the writer’s times at school and the influence upon him and his bookishness by a particular teacher who was later murdered. Thus, I discovered a connection with myself who also had an influential teacher later murdered, i.e. Anne Cluysenaar who taught me Literary Stylistics (see the murder reference in her posthumous Wikipedia.)
Also a reminiscence of JOEL LANE, who died far too young in 2013, and he was a big influence on me although I was somewhat older than him. I found this book’s A-Z approach to Joel illuminating as well as reawakeningly confirmatory about things I already knew. Just a bit disappointed that it mentions several publications wherein his work ws published, but not a mention of NEMONYMOUS (see Wikipedia for further info, the nature of which magazine might excuse the omission) in which Joel was published twice, one of the stories never having been published elsewhere so far. My own Joel Lane page here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/1479-2/
PS Despite the lack of a perceptible shadow line, the edition of this book I obtained had a complete issue of ‘Nemonymous Six’ between pages 164 & 165.
The final three involuntarily page-turning chapters start with “Mike Nelson’s Books”, Nelson being someone of whom I know nothing until now, other than my past review of his story ‘On Monkeys Without Tails’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/12/10/the-new-abject-tales-of-modern-unease/#comment-20530 — I suppose if the monkeys had been without tales, the plays of Shakespeare would never have been written? Nelson is seemingly an installation artist with lots of books. “For Nelson, everything is connected. He may appear to jump from one subject to another, but there’s always a through line.” A shadow line, too? In fact that quotation seems to sum up the contents of this book itself and, also, to embody the ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ process, as does the following quote, in hindsight, from Nelson’s Monkey story: “a silent anagram waiting to be unearthed.” Often, hidden anagrams from the text of fiction books and from authors’ and characters’ names, I have often found, are more revelatory than authorially intentional factors and more meaningful than chance synchronicities of a lesser nature.
The concluding two chapters, beginning with a Nightjar Press delivery, are teeming with many more book discoveries and discoveries inside books, and with all-too-human book-homing attempts, deploying connections too numerous to be itemised here, and I enjoyed the journey and view immensely. One particular work, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is majored upon in this context, a work which I have shamefully failed to have read, I think. Perhaps little chance, now. Perhaps, not, but the chapter on this work was awesome to pilot myself through, nevertheless.
I did once, however, review at length Paul Auster’s massive work 4,3,2,1 here in 2017: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/4-3-2-1-paul-auster/ Which brings us back to the numbers, I guess. And as to anagrams, the best attempt I can make is SLIDESHOW and SNOWSLIDE.