Shadow Lines - Nicholas Royle

In July 2021 we drew attention to Nicholas Royle’s book-collecting memoir White Spines, which chronicles the author’s quest for Picador paperbacks, offering on the way many diverting reflections on second-hand bookshops and their owners, on wandering in back-streets in search of them, on the habits of book-collectors, and on many other matters of interest. Salt have now published Shadow Lines, Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf, a sort of sequel, in which Nicholas Royle writes in a highly enjoyable way about further aspects of his book-collecting.

Keen book-collectors know that the printed text of a book is not its only attraction: the covers themselves, worn and stained, may have the lure of a work of abstract art; ownership inscriptions may forge a link for us over the years with a former reader; booksellers’ labels may preserve the memory of a long-lost bookshop; marginalia may enhance our appreciation of the text, or simply puzzle us. Sometimes on endpapers there are scribbled figures or characters that look like an elaborate code.  Gift inscriptions make us wonder about the giver and the receiver, and what became of them.

In White Spines, Nicholas Royle drew attention to another source of extra bookish pleasure. He suggested the term “inclusions” for any items found by chance inside books: letters, postcards, tickets, receipts, business cards, advertising ephemera and so on. Such pieces of paper flotsam often have a curious interest, revealing a fleeting moment in a previous reader’s existence, or suggesting a tantalising segment of biography.

The title of Shadow Lines refers to a top tip from the author for collectors of inclusions: look at the top edges of the pages in a closed book: things tucked inside will show as a fine black fissure. Open the book and see what you find. But he carries his fascination several steps further than most idly interested browsers. For example, he buys books he already has because he wants the inclusion: most collectors will understand that. But he also buys books that are of no particular interest to him, including technical works, for the sake of the inclusion. And he follows up the clues offered on these stray scraps, texting, telephoning or messaging numbers he has found, often with surprising results.

Other sorts of encounters happen because he reads while he walks, an occupation, he explains patiently, that may be done perfectly safely and considerately. He finds this leads to conversations with strangers, mostly women, who ask him what he is reading and why. Sometimes it is just a few words of shared interest, but occasionally a wider conversation follows. The sight of a book seems to stimulate curiosity and shared enthusiasms. From the brief, chance contacts formed from following up inclusions or from his ambulatory reading, we are treated to a series of fascinating micro-histories, glimpses of lives, each one of which, like most lives, has implications of enigmatic possibilities.This is a book about books and bookshops that will bring joy to every reader and collector, but it is also about the strangeness and sublimity of individuals, and our tender contacts with each other.

Mr Royle also has the habit of picking up pieces of paper he finds on his walks, typically shopping lists and fragments of flyers, but often of somewhat cryptic text. This led one literary colleague of his to propose that supporters of his work should creep out each morning to scatter mysterious messages along his way, and thus keep him fortified in his quest. It was said in jest, but I now begin to wonder whether some great bibliographical genius may not be sending out agents ahead of him to plant inclusions in the bookshops he visits, and to station well-trained actors on his routes to waylay him with bookish conversation. He thinks this all happens by chance, and celebrates serendipity and the lure of the inconsequential, but really an inscrutable mastermind is choreographing every move, in a work of high art-magic.

Someone—or something— is writing a novel called Nicholas Royle.

(Mark Valentine)

One Book Leading to Another

I must admit to being an inveterate reader, in most cases, of all parts of a book, including the apparatus, the ‘by the same author’, the footnotes and end-notes, the marginalia and, especially those enticing publishers’ catalogues sometimes printed at the back. Browsing through these, in particular, has led me to some interesting, unsuspected titles. There is something in the description, or in the press opinions, that suggests a glimmer of the fantastical or mystical which must be investigated.

In this way, for example, I was led to Bernadette Murphy’s An Unexpected Guest (1934), a timeslip haunting, to Ivo Pakenham’s Fanfaronade (1934), another enjoyable timeslip tale, and to Herbert Asquith’s Wind’s End (1924), where the description of uncanny happenings in the English countryside didn’t quite work out as I supposed, but was nonetheless of interest.

On the same principle of serendipity, I also look out for any bookish memoirs that might have mentions of otherwise forgotten titles: and recently the £1 shelves outside the Cinema Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye yielded just such a book. I usually browse through these rapidly, picking up anything of potential interest without pausing to deliberate too much, given the asking price. Admittedly, considerations of space ought to enter into my calculations too, but this is a matter no keen book-collector allows to intrude itself.

Here I picked up, among, well, several other things, a publisher’s memoir, Adventures with Authors by S C Roberts (1966), an urbane and ambitious gentleman who made a career in the Cambridge University Press and in due course became its head. He was, in fact, appointed to one of his posts at the press by M R James, who, in his university administrative role, was also on the governing body of the imprint. He reproduces James’ letter offering him the job, which rather sternly reminds him that he is expected to make the press his life’s vocation. Later, on James’ departure from the role, Roberts wrote him a valedictory sonnet, which he also reproduces.

The book was of considerable interest for its discussion of life and business at a great university press, complementing, for example, accounts of Charles Williams and colleagues at Oxford. I wrote about a fictional press at a smaller university in my ‘Masque and Anti-Masque’ (Possessions and Pursuits, a shared volume with John Howard, Sarob Press, 2023).

But I also hoped Roberts' book would have allusions to little-known authors, and so it proved. Two in particular caught my interest. Roberts discusses Susan Hicks-Beach (nee Emily Susan Christian), who sent the press her 200,000 words long A Cardinal of the Medici: being the memoirs of the nameless mother of the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici (1937), an immensely learned work written in the form of a novel, a somewhat awkward mix: too imaginary for the scholars, too dense for the general reader. But it was impressive, and Roberts took a chance on it. So far as I can see, it remains little-known. Under her maiden name of Susan Christian, she had contributed a story to The Yellow Book in 1895. She was later the model for Britannia on the Edward VII silver florin.

I was sufficiently interested to seek out a copy, and it turns out her book is a highly convincing, picturesque chronicle somewhat reminiscent of Baron Corvo’s historical romances, though without his exotic phraseology. Presented as a memoir of a lady in waiting at the court of an ill-omened Italian duke, it is richly fascinating, a lost romance of the Italian Renaissance, a remarkable achievement, possibly rather long and leisured for current taste, but absorbing and beguiling. The author was evidently steeped in the culture, politics and society of the period, but conveys this through vivid and convincing incidental detail.

Roberts also gives a brief account of the parson and psychic A F Webling, who offered him Something Beyond: A Life Story, an autobiography telling of his journey from his job as a warehouse clerk in London to taking Holy Orders and becoming an Anglo-Catholic priest, then discovering psychic research. He had been Rector at Risby, Suffolk, and later had a success with a historical novel, The Last Abbot, set in nearby Bury St Edmunds. He writes lyrically in his memoir of his childhood apprehension of wonder and mystery in the landscape, and this I think may be more to modern taste than the rather archaic history yarn.

Now admittedly this is an example of one book leading to only two others, or possibly more if I decide to explore the authors’ other works too, but it does not take too much arithmetic to work out that such a proceeding is certain to be cumulative. Indeed, it is the sort of sum that used to be taught in schools, albeit with less interesting objects such as apples. If Mark has one book, and that book leads him to two or more books, and those books in turn each lead him to a further two or more, how many books has Mark now? It is a problem to which the answer is not, and never can be, ‘too many’. Perhaps, on reflection, it would be better taught under the Higher Metaphysics.  

(Mark Valentine)

A Bishop Out of Residence - Victor L Whitechurch

One hundred years ago a Buckinghamshire clergyman with a cure of about one hundred souls and a Gothic Revival church saw three of his books published, all quite different. One was a murder mystery, another a tale of village life, and a third poked fun at bishops.

I was once highly fortunate to find half a shelf of his books in a shop in Holmfirth, whose owner also kindly fosters cats, which are an extra adornment as they wander among the bookshelves. The volumes were all very moderately priced, and I came out with a tottering tower of them. Partly because of this haul, I have a fondness for his fiction.

Victor L Whitechurch (1868-1933) was the son of a parson. He was born in Norham, Northumberland, but educated in Chichester, Sussex, an ancient cathedral city, where he went to theological college. The “L” stood for “Lorenzo”, chosen because his mother was half-Spanish. As an Anglican clergyman he wrote a few devotional pamphlets, but also about twenty novels and a few volumes of short stories. He seems to have been a likeable and rather flamboyant character who also enjoyed amateur Shakespearean acting and conjuring.

He is most known now for creating Thorpe Hazell, possibly the first vegetarian detective and certainly among the most notable of railway detectives. Quite a lot of C of E clergy have been keen railway buffs. When members of A Ghostly Company visited the Deanery Garden in the close of Wells Cathedral some years ago, a local churchgoer kindly regaled us with her recollections. “Of course,” she said, “a railway used to run through here.”

There was a pause, while we tried to picture how it could have been allowed anywhere near the great cathedral. “The Archdeacon’s railway,” she explained, “ran through the rockery.” This was of course a model railway, but the Revd Mr Teddy Boston used to run a full-scale steam railway in his Leicestershire rectory garden. Admittedly, it only ran a few hundred yards but it had its own timetable, station, a midway halt, and engine shed, and it was highly popular for rides at the church fete. Victor L Whitechurch was evidently of the same cloth and uses his specialised railway knowledge in Thorpe Hazell’s cases, which were collected in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912).

He also wrote half a dozen crime fiction novels in the Golden Age period which are neatly done and have their admirers. They include The Templeton Case (the crime story from 1924) and The Crime at Diana’s Pool (1927). Whitechurch’s first parish as Vicar was St Michael’s, Blewbury, in Oxfordshire but close to the Berkshire Downs. He evidently greatly enjoyed this country, and also wrote several volumes of village life set there or on the South Downs in Sussex, such as Off the Main Road: A Village Comedy (1911) and Downland Echoes (also published in 1924).   

However, in his time his most popular book was The Canon in Residence (1904), which was one of a number of yarns of that period in which eminently respectable individuals are jolted out of their usual routine by a series of unexpected adventures. In this case a parson has just been appointed to the titular office at a cathedral close and is on holiday abroad when a bounder steals his clothes, and then begins to steal his identity too.

Obliged to wear the villain’s somewhat loud attire, the new Canon finds himself seeing life from a new angle. Rumours of the impostor’s racy lifestyle in the guise of the Canon soon reach the close. And when the Canon takes up his appointment, his own interesting experiences give him a new campaigning zeal against social problems. The combination of gentle humour and mild thrills with a reforming message was enjoyed by Edwardian readers.

So well-liked was this book that Whitechurch in due course did several others in a similar vein.  He was still doing so some twenty years later, with A Bishop Out of Residence, the third of his 1924 books, which celebrates its centenary this month. In this case, in another convention of this sort of yarn, a Bishop is advised by his medical man to have complete rest and a change of air for six months. This opening often leads to ghost stories in which unrest is more in evidence than rest, and the reader will already be enjoying the venerable set-up.

Another Bishop, an old college friend, invites him to look after a quiet, lonely downland parish, incognito, while the incumbent also takes a break. During this temporary charge he finds that rural parsons have chores he had never suspected, like coaxing the church stove to work, putting up the hymn numbers, and filling out all the church school paper-work. He also feels the loneliness of being the only ‘educated’ man in the village, yet finds his shrewd and robust charges have a different sort of education. Complications ensue when he is confused with a disreputable and bibulous cleric with a name similar to his adopted one.   

A Bishop Out of Residence is not fantastical, nor is it criminous (except incidentally and very mildly), and it does not have the colourful eccentricity of the Thorpe Hazell stories. Yet it is just the sort of agreeable, amiable light reading that is occasionally a pleasant diversion and is in a charming minor tradition of clerical farces in English literature.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: A young Victor L Whitechurch