Carnforth: Bookish Encounters

The railway town of Carnforth, Lancashire celebrates its association with Brief Encounter directed by David Lean (1945): key scenes were filmed at the station here, which now has a tea room of that name. During wartime, the town was thought a safer location for filming than the Home Counties, where the story is actually set. The station is on the little-known Lune Valley line from Skipton to Lancaster and beyond that to the seaside resort of Morecambe, and passes through lonely, dreaming country of green hills and woodland and old stone villages and manors.  

But Carnforth also has another attraction, a large second-hand bookshop which bears the painted announcement that it has 100,000 books. I have been calling there for many years. Originally it had three rooms of vintage hardback fiction, row upon row of forgotten authors. It was here, for example, that I found the unusual World War Two novel House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair, later reprinted at my suggestion by Persephone Books: here too were a number of Ronald Fraser books, when I began collecting them. They were all very reasonably priced too. I also once found here a rare and strange slim volume, Mayvale (1915) by H.E. Clifton and James Wood, notable for a preface by Wyndham Lewis.

Alas, old hardbacks now only occupy half a room, but there are still odd finds to be made, and there are good selections in other fields. Usually I manage to turn up unexpected titles, such as on one occasion Sherard Vines’ Green to Amber. He is an interesting character known, if at all, for his fantasy Return, Belphegor!, a satire about a demon sent to stir things up on Earth in the contemporary Thirties, which incidentally involves the Holy Grail. The novel I found is not a fantasy but has satirical aspects, so I thought it might be worth a look. There was also on that visit a rather louche novel by Richard Aldington, two Bertie Wooster paperbacks, an Evangeline Walton fantasy, and a book on Rockall, the island out in the Atlantic best known for giving its name to a zone in the Shipping Forecast. In the late Fifties, the Royal Navy landed and stuck a flag on this remote outcrop to claim it for Britain, and this book recounts the expedition and the history of previous sightings of the island.

At a later visit, after some steady, thorough searching, I had three worthwhile finds here. One was a thriller, Highly Unsafe (1936), in the Buchan style by Max Saltmarsh, who was actually Marian Winifred Saltmarsh, nee Maxwell (1893-1975), the author of just four such thrillers in the Thirties, and then apparently nothing else. Another was a quite scarce vintage crime novel, The Red Dwarf (1928) by Molly Thynne, a writer who has recently been rediscovered by crime buffs, and who sometimes uses folklore and the macabre in her work. The third was a signed copy of The Mocking Star (1931) by Michael Maurice, a Cambridge author of quite strange books I had been researching.

It was on one hot summer’s day that I also found here The Serpent and the Butterfly by Sue Mallinson, a heady 1980 occult thriller that I had never heard of when I chanced upon it, but something of the sultry intensity of the weather seemed to radiate from the book too. A young woman who has been a lifestyle journalist has saved up enough to take a year off and rents a cottage in the West Country: “On her first evening, she and her gypsy dog Imp go for a walk on the moors and are drawn towards a giant Menhir, upon whose face is the ancient carving of a Serpent. The great stone gives Lisa an uneasy feeling and inexplicably she shudders. Just then a butterfly lands upon a small pebble at her feet which takes on a strange, purplish glow." 

Soon she sees signs of a living pagan worship still in play and finds it disturbing and yet alluring. She befriends a young man who is a local bookseller, though he doesn’t seem to spend much time actually in his bookshop:  some rueful browsers might regard this as accurately observed realism. Together they explore ancient sacred sites and stumble upon more signs of something going on.

The book is very much of its time, a curious blend of Dennis Wheatley shockery and the period’s strong interest in ancient mysteries and ancient monuments. On the face of it, the plot follows the traditional lines of many occult thrillers, now seen as ‘folk horror’, where a cosmopolitan city-dweller encounters primitive rustic rituals: however, it goes some way beyond that into wider dimensions. The author’s preface says it was inspired by Castaneda, but also by her researches in mythology, magic and mystery. The novel describes and quotes enthusiastically from a noted ancient mysteries book of the period, Atlantean Traditions in Ancient Britain (1977) by the Glastonbury mage Anthony Roberts.

According to a brief note by David Langford at the SF Encylopedia, this is Sue Mallinson’s only published novel: a sequel, Atlantis Reborn, remains unpublished. There seems to be no information whatever about her to be found, nor did Mr Langford, when I asked him, have any more to offer. Unfortunately, it seems to be quite scarce. But now that there is a revived interest in Nineteen Seventies culture, particularly in the field of the fantastic and uncanny, it seems to me that the book would be greatly enjoyed by a new readership if reprinted.

(Mark Valentine) 

Spitalfields Life: 'The Bookshops of Old London'

   

The Spitalfields Life blog by the pseudonymous 'The Gentle Author' is always full of fascinating information about the byways of London, including interviews with shopkeepers, tradespeople, hobbyists and others which give interesting insights into their life and occupation. 

The latest post celebrates The Bookshops of Old London, with a personal recollection by the author of his days as an impoverished youth still determined to seek out rare books, and with atmospheric black and white photographs by Richard Brown of the bookshops as they were in 1971. These enjoyable depict both neat, orderly, elegant emporia and those with tottering columns and shambling shelves. 'It made me realise how much I miss them all now that they have mostly vanished from the streets,' The Gentle Author repines. 

It is true that many familiar names are no longer to be seen in Charing Cross Road and its purlieus, and quite natural that the glory days of youthful book collecting will be remembered with affection. However, all is not bitter. There are still about two dozen second-hand bookshops in the postal districts of West Central and East Central London, according to the ever-helpful listings at The Book Guide, and of course many more in the widening ripples of the city. Any Machenesque wanderer exploring the obscurer roads and regions of the capital in quest of a London Adventure may still chance upon them. 

I was amused to find the term 'Old London', which to me might denote Victorian or Edwardian times, is here applied to the Nineteen Seventies, a time I remember and still regard as contemporary. But then I reflected that it is, after all, half a century ago . . . 

(Mark Valentine) 

Image:  'E. Joseph of Charing Cross Rd, established 1885', by Richard Brown, from The London Bookshop (Private Libraries Association, 1971)

Through the Golden Valley to the Dark Tower

On a damp late-November morning we went on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, the three of us, Valentine, Howard and Gale, keen book-collectors all. We went from our digs in Abbey Dore, hard by the Abbey itself, through the Golden Valley until we came to Peterchurch, whose church has a slim, needle-point, pale spire, an aerial of elegance.

From here, a narrow, steeply climbing road is the way to Urishay. As we neared the summit, making way for an approaching vehicle, our wheels slithered in the roadside slime, as if to impose upon us a slow, respectful approach. Through the autumnal trees, the last vestiges of gold glowing on their gaunt branches, we could see the high ruinous towers. Here, a Norman baronial stronghold had become over the centuries a ramshackle farmhouse, until finally its owners had been obliged to give up the struggle to keep it intact: its once roaring fireplaces now stood exposed in their walls, dank hollows.

Before its desolation, a traveller, seeking gratefully its lights through a storm, arrived one night, and asked for shelter, and was welcomed by its eccentric castellan: they talked long together by one of those fireplaces, in the marvellously evocative opening scene of Francis Brett Young’s The Dark Tower (1915). In a preface to a later edition, the author says: ‘this early, imperfect book has a deeper claim on my own affections than any other I have written.’

It was bound up with his discovery of ‘that mass of Old Red Sandstone called the Black Mountain, whose sombrely suggestive name and bold outline, filmed by distance’ had haunted him for years. When Brett Young had visited ‘the lonely outpost’ it was ‘still inhabited, through the declining storms of centuries, by the family whose forebears had first held it: a race named Delahay. Now, at last, the Delahays are gone and Urishay a stark ruin . . .’ 

It had been ‘his romantic privilege in those days to know the last of them: a young man, half-squire, half small farmer, who clung to its stones like the last leaf of a dying oak’, and the story of his lineage and the story of the place, had enthralled him. Moreover, he had written the book as a relief from his work as a local doctor, himself convalescent, during the fiercely busy days of an influenza epidemic in 1914: ‘The composition of The Dark Tower, an urgent spiritual necessity, was the only escape a harassed mind and ailing body found at that time’.

All that remains with a roof here is part of the medieval chapel, with whitewashed walls, bare beams, clear, gridded glass, in solemn silence, carefully preserved by The Friends of Friendless Churches. We paid our respects here and then, from the bank on which the chapel stood, I gathered from among the leaf-mulch a pocket-full of fallen, half-formed sweet chestnuts, seized by the wind before they could grow to full fruit. 

We descended to the valley and continued on our way to Hay, passing a sign by a scarlet post-box at the house of Crossway which pointed to Arthur’s Stone. As we journeyed, our talk turned to another early Francis Brett Young book, written with his younger brother Eric: Undergrowth, notable because the older author freely confessed it was a homage to Arthur Machen: ‘the Machen-ery was obvious’, he quipped. Notable too for being hard to find, unlike the volumes of the Severn Edition of the author’s books, with their royal blue bindings and gilt decorations, which are still to be seen at the far end of shelves. So rare was it that I wrote a story, also called 'Undergrowth’, about a young collector’s quest for it.

A few copies have come my way over the years, one of them in the damp shed at the back of an antique shop in Presteigne which mostly sold china dogs. And on a recent sojourn, Mr Howard had found one too, in a cupboard in a bookshop in Brecon. So, said I to John Gale in jest, it is your turn now: you too must find a copy, to join the select sect of Undergrowthers, thinking this was no easy quest.

At the Old Cinema Bookshop in Hay we had already plundered the day before the trays outside where every book is a pound, and we had conducted a first reconnaissance of the shelves of vintage hardback fiction. Here there was a copy of Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw with a pleasing inscription: in the top corner of the front free endpaper, in narrow, childish letters, was an ownership signature: D M Watson, or some similar plain name. But then in bold capitals across the page another, or her own later, hand had proclaimed: THE FIENDISH MISS WATSON’S BOOK. One would rather have liked to know this reader.

And then, as we browsed on, Mr Gale came to us with a look of triumph, mingled with bewilderment. A sign had guided him to a bookcase in a remote corner of the room, for Pocket Editions. Here might be found the red bindings of Nelson’s Classics, a few Cape Travellers’ Library volumes in their deep blue, fewer still of the New Adelphi Library in bottle-green: a Compton Mackenzie, a Norman Douglas. And here too Mr Gale’s gaze had alighted with wonderment on the word ‘Undergrowth’, and underneath the word ‘Young’: a compact edition in berry-red covers. He could scarcely believe it as he drew out the book, like Arthur withdrawing Excalibur from its stone. But there it was, sure enough, overlooked by others, waiting for him.

Afterwards, we wondered about those sweet chestnuts from Urishay: magical talismans? Ought we to wish for another book? Better not, we decided: just accept gratefully the gift of the spirits that haunt the Dark Tower.

(Mark Valentine)

Pictures:

The Ruins of Urishay © John Gale; The Doorway of the Chapel © John Howard; The Sign to Arthur’s Stone © John Gale; The Sweet Chestnuts of Urishay © John Gale.