The rather raffish town of Wells-next-the-Sea, North Norfolk, is always worth a visit for The Old Station Books & Pottery, which sells an unusual selection of second-hand books, curios and ceramics. We once found ourselves locked in here as the proprietor did not realise we were still wandering around its many nooks, and had closed up for the evening. Fortunately, a hand-bell at the foot of the stairs summoned him from his upper quarters, though there are worse fates than an enforced sojourn in a second-hand bookshop.
The bookshop once had for sale in a glass case a copy of Through Beatnik Eyeballs (1961) by R.A. Norton, depicting a bearded guitarist and a girl in a min-skirt. I must admit this was tempting, especially as it included a ‘complete glossary for squares’. I suspect there could be nothing squarer than my own liking for second-hand bookshops, tea shops, walled gardens and ancient monuments, so this might have been highly educational, but it is a collectible book, especially among what I believe are known as hep dudes, and it was priced accordingly.
There was a further mysterious second-hand bookshop in the town. Carousels of crumpled holiday paperbacks could be discerned through the window, and miscellaneous correspondence scattered on the doormat, but it was seldom found open. It did once display a rather sunned Len Deighton first edition, though this might, of course, have been a clandestine signal to an espionage contact. At any rate, it has now closed.
However, Wells proved to have other arcane attractions. In my story ‘The Prospero Machine’ I wrote about seaside fortune-telling machines, and we chanced upon one just like these at the entrance to an arcade: Zoltar, an exotic mannequin in the garb of a sultan, with tarot cards spread out in front of him. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he demands, ‘I am a magic gypsy’: and, in return for £1 (it would once have been a penny) he issues a card with your ‘fortune’ on it.
It was while perambulating through Wells that I also had an encounter with a giant upturned plastic ice cream cone. This unexpected apparition made me wonder about a slightly alternative world where the cone has become the subject of rumours and legends.
The result was a brief one paragraph prose fiction, and associated image, and ‘The Cone’ has just been published at Ice Floe Press, a website journal based in Canada and edited by Robert Frede Kentor, Moira J Saucer and colleagues. Their Autumn 2026 running issue has the theme of ‘Dis/enchantments/Anomie/Spectacle’ and includes a selection of multi-media, visual and literary work.
(Mark Valentine)
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