Animal Magic

Just as there are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't (the old ones are the best) - so there are three kinds of books on my shelves: those I've read; those I've not read yet but are on my 'to read' list; and those I haven't read and never will read. Why don't I get rid of the latter? Because they cunningly hide themselves on my 'to read' list. Actually I've just thought of a fourth category: books I dip into occasionally but never read right through. Here's an example:

It was published in 1959 by our old friend Frederick Muller Ltd (see my Worth Fighting For July 13th, 2013 entry), who went on to publish the first Doctor Who books (before they suffered the usual fate and were swallowed up by a bigger publisher - see http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Publisher:Frederick_Muller_Ltd). It has derivative chapters on all the usual things, like elephant graveyards, the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman. Typically, I bought it for the charming cover. That was in pre-internet days, when one had to get off one's backside and hunt books down. Now, if I wished, I could buy its predecessor with a few clicks of a mouse...

But I'd much rather stumble across it one day in some dingy secondhand-book shop.

Pigsticking, Anyone?

Quite a few rants ago (Shot Down in Flames, April 7^th) I commented on the absurd number of non-fiction titles published on the same tired old subjects. One inevitable result of this, due solely to the ignorance of publishers, is that many such titles are hopelessly out of date. It is quite extraordinary, for example, the number of angling guides that are published that still recommend fibreglass rods, when fibreglass as a rod-building material was superseded by carbon fibre in the early 1980s. Occasionally one comes across a book that is not so much out of date as completely out of time, and one wonders how the hell it ever came to be published. One such is this offering, with two chapters on pigsticking by Brigadier C. R. Templer, published in 1973 by the aptly named London outfit Gentry Books, which I picked up cheap in Exeter one time:

What on earth were Gentry thinking of? Who did they think was going to buy the book, other, perhaps, than Prince Philip? Dead people? Unsurprisingly, my copy is stamped ‘Withdrawn from Devon Library Services’. I suspect it was donated to them by the author himself. Born in Assam in 1898, Major-General James Gordon Elliott was an Indian Army man until his compulsory retirement in 1948 following Indian independence the year before. In his later years he settled in Exmouth, where he penned this guide, which is actually a pretty good one, but just so wonderfully anachronistic. 

Such Sweet Sorrow...

Someone in an online forum thread about ‘tackle tarts’ – anglers who always have to have all the latest gear – made the very good point that life is short and you can’t take it with you, so why not treat yourself to the best you can afford? Presumably, like most tackle tarts, he flogs his old gear or stores it away in his loft, but a much better use for it is to pass it on. It’s the same with books. Much as I like the idea of being buried with my rods and books ‘for use in the next life,’ every now and then I much more sensibly have a good clear-out, even of some old favourites. It’s hard to let go of things that are precious – very hard – but they are only things. My kids get whichever books they want, and my son in particular is now building quite an impressive library of his own. As for fishing tackle, I confess I still have a loft full of the stuff, despite occasionally selling bits off second-hand. Really, I must do better. Unlike some, I’m far too selfish to actually give up my time to take people with special needs fishing, but I did once pass on a redundant rod and reel to such a lad who was mad keen on fishing and the delight on his face made me feel ten feet tall.

Down to Earth...

I was in a secondhand-book shop the other day rummaging semi-blindly – it was a dark and dingy place, and having just stepped out of the rain I was having trouble with my glasses steaming up – and I was just wondering to myself why all the stock seemed to be priced (in pencil) at £10.00 when I spotted an unassuming-looking volume called Spies and Saboteurs priced at ‘£1 .00’. Note the space between the 1 and the decimal point. A quick scan of the first few pages was enough to tell me it would be an instant addition to my ‘Best Books Ever Read’ list and I went straight downstairs to pay for it. The owner looked at the price inside and hesitated, but it wasn’t me who had rubbed out the 0 (honest) and he had no choice but to charge only the one pound for it. Anyway, what about the actual book? Published by Gollancz in 1955, it is American psychologist William J. Morgan’s account of assessing OSS (Office of Strategic Services) candidates in England in WWII. Successful candidates were parachuted into France as... spies and saboteurs. Written in wonderfully plain English – one chapter is headed ‘Minefield and Acid Bath’ – it is a fascinating insight into how the brightest and bravest can make fools of themselves when tested under pressure. It is also full of amusing anecdotes. My favourite is how they early on identified one candidate as a German spy, strung him along for months on end then, when they finally dropped him over France, ‘forgot’ to attach his ripcord to the fixing-point in the plane… My copy of the book doesn’t have one, but this is what the dust jacket looked like:

(Apologies for the quality of the pic, but it was the only one I could find online.)

Rights and Wrongs

Someone who shall remain nameless once emailed me with a ‘great idea’ for a book and listed the proposed contents. Unable to tell whether it was supposed to be fiction or non-fiction – no, really – I asked them. ‘I don’t know,’ they replied. ‘What’s the difference?’

A friend of a successful writer friend once badgered her to read the manuscript of their ‘first novel’. Foolishly she agreed. It was irretrievably bad, but of course she couldn’t say that, so she tactfully suggested 'a few changes'. When it was duly rejected by all and sundry, the author blamed my friend for her 'editorial interference’.

Someone else once sent me the manuscript of a non-fiction title together with proposed illustrations, many of which they had simply found online. When I told them it would be essential for them, as the author, to secure the image rights, they poured scorn on my advice and totally ignored it. (I was right.)

The reason why so many people outside publishing think they know more about the industry than those inside it is simple. They look at how little those inside the industry are paid, and rightly conclude that they are idiots.

Worth Fighting For

There can’t be many secondhand-book shops that don’t have a copy of this 1943 Frederick Muller Ltd offering somewhere on their shelves:

Many of the rivers featured are actually in Wales, but no matter – its purpose was simply to say, ‘This is the kind of thing we’re fighting for.’ Here’s a typical sample:

The photographer, John Dixon-Scott (with a hyphen, apparently), spent much of the 1930s travelling around Britain, recording its fast-vanishing landscape. The result was a collection of more than 14,000 photographs, now held at The National Archives in Kew.

Who Fletcher Allen was I have no idea.

Not So Fast...

I’ve not had much luck trawling book fairs, and things were looking typically bleak the other day when a visit to the annual fair in a nearby village hall looked like drawing another blank. Someone did have a first edition Nineteen Eighty-Four on offer, but I was put off by the tatty dust jacket – not to mention the £350 price tag. Finding nothing affordable at eye level, I resorted to rummaging in the ‘bargain boxes’ on the floor, where finally I found this tatty Scholastic Book Services, New York offering for the princely sum of a pound:

A children's book published in 1970, it celebrates the Apollo 11 moon landing, and gushes with enthusiasm about the immediate future of space exploration. ‘For space explorers,’ it says, ‘anything is possible.’ It shows the proposed landing sites of future Apollo missions, up to and including Apollo 20 – Apollo 17, in 1972, would actually be the last – and speculates that permanent moon colonies could be established, and the first manned landings made on Mars, by the early 1980s…