A Telephone Box Library: A Guest Post by R.B. Russell

In the 1980s and 1990s many communities struggled to retain their red telephone boxes as British Telecom did their best to replace them with modern glass and steel booths. Those that survived are now seen as a part of the historic landscape, but very few now have telephones inside. The box in our village does because we have no reliable mobile phone signal, but in neighbouring Melmerby the box has been converted into a community library.

Of course, it is not a proper library with computers, dvd players, specialist support services, and areas set aside for a range of community groups, with cheerful librarians failing to get to grips with barcode scanners. No, this is a library with shelves of books, albeit one that holds less than a hundred, and into which only one person can enter at a time. The Melmerby phone box library is an heroically archaic idea, but it is cramped, so if you have brought the wrong glasses with you, you can’t take a step back to read the spines of the books.

When I visited earlier today, the shelves were the usual mix that would cause any professional librarian to have a panic attack. With a casual disregard of the Dewey Decimal System, there were cookery books, religious texts, self-help manuals, thrillers and romances, many of which seemed to have survived at least two divorces, a fire and a flood. In its time, the shelves have been tainted by the various hagiographies of the now discredited Lance Armstrong, and the less than literary works of Russell Brand and Jordan. But I am not a complete snob; I was delighted to see there were still books by Barbara Taylor Bradford, James Clavell and Jane Fonda.

I know our neighbour Edgar uses the phone box library; he recently donated several novels that had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This struck me as both generous and faintly intimidating. I half suspect he also slipped in an early printing of Richard Powers’s The Overstory as well, a book so big each copy must account for a tree in itself. It was next to a colossal fantasy novel by Chaz Brenchley that occupied most of a shelf by itself, the way a large cat can monopolise an armchair. It seems to be smugly aware that it was even bigger than The Overstory, even if it never had the same critical reception, or sold as well. Somehow, I am sure this wasn’t donated by Edgar.

Local people obviously supply the telephone box library, although I suspect that holidaymakers in the area probably contribute to the stock. People arrive for a week with three novels, read half of one during a rainstorm, and then deposit the remainder in the telephone box as though it were a literary compost heap. Last year, I discovered a small, old, French-language edition of The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, and at first I was rather struck by the idea that such a book had travelled all the way to a village phone box in the Dales. Then I realised that if it had been left by a French tourist, they had decided they couldn’t be bothered to take it back home with them.

The lack of order in the phone box is a part of the charm. Immediately inside the door there are three books shelved with the look of people forced, unwillingly to share a bus seat. I am intrigued by how a book on the Bhagavad-Gita and another on the Lost Art of Scripture can have a slim volume entitled The Sacred Neuron shelved in between them. The arrangement made me feel as though I had stumbled into a Radio Four debate. Very close to these, on the same shelf, were three Colin Forbes novels. Someone had bound them together in string with a note in careful handwriting attached:

 

Old Books but a very good read. Enjoy x

I appreciate the optimism of the ‘x’. It suggests the writer believes the next reader may be a close friend rather than, say, a wet walker seeking shelter. However, what that wet walker might really need is at least one good thriller to pass a few hours until the rain stops.

Right beside the Forbes novels sits Sartre’s Iron in the Soul trilogy, which has not been tied with string nor endorsed with affectionate punctuation. No one has written: 

Very cheerful read. Enjoy x

Elsewhere, the juxtapositions become more surreal: Terry Wogan’s autobiography leans companionably against The Gardening Year, and next on the shelf, like a guest nobody quite remembers inviting, is a well-thumbed copy of Foucault’s Pendulum. The three books together create a small cultural sandwich: Irish broadcasting legend, seasonal horticultural advice, and a 600-page Italian conspiracy novel which may or may not be a comedy.

Then there is the science-fiction section, which appears to consist of exactly one Star Wars omnibus placed next to a book called Fleeing Isis. I don’t know if this is deliberate or if the phone box simply has an ‘all rebellions welcome’ policy.

While browsing I was alone, though not unobserved. A tractor passed slowly along the road, its driver giving me the sort of look usually reserved for people who might be up to no good. More unsettling were the cows in the adjacent field; they gathered along the stone wall and watched me with quiet interest, as though waiting to see if I would give them access to this literary cornucopia.

I have contributed to the phone box myself. Some years ago I placed several Tartarus Press volumes inside, feeling momentarily noble. Unfortunately winter arrived, bringing with it the sort of damp that used to make traditional telephone directories bloat. Tartarus dust jackets are not laminated, so when I returned a month later, they had begun to develop delicate constellations of furry mould.

I also left a copy of my own magnum opus Fifty Forgotten Books. I was pleased to see that it was soon snapped up, and I was feeling quite pleased with myself, not that telephone box library loans mean I can claim anything from the Public Lending Rights office. I like to think that Fifty Forgotten Books ought to be a book anyone would want to keep, but I later noticed the borrower felt obliged to return it.

Of course, I haunt the telephone box library, because, occasionally, treasures do appear. I found novels by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, there, a great book on The Craft of Literary Biography, and quite a few Peanuts paperbacks. My most recent discovery was a copy of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. I read it with a growing appreciation of the author’s craft until I reached the final scene, which was so startlingly bad that I had to check whether the last page had been replaced by a substitute from the novelisation of a 1980s James Bond film starring Roger Moore.

What I like most about the Melmerby telephone box library is that every book in it raises questions about who donated the books, and why? Was my game-dealing neighbour once a fan of Penny Vincenzi? Did the farmer who lives opposite us enjoy origami? Of course, as with The Devil in the Flesh, I have to ask these questions in the past tense because they are obviously no longer wanted. But, who, locally, thought anybody else would be interested in a 1970s Pontefract bus timetable?

Red telephone boxes were once as indispensible as we now regard mobile phones and the internet, but today the box in Melmerby has another role. It hosts strange negotiations between readers who might only ever meet by chance: the cook who trades a book of casserole recipes for Sartre, the French holidaymaker who abandons a classic of their own literature for the biography of Terry Wogan, the mysterious person who ties together three Colin Forbes novels like a literary bouquet.

You step inside for a moment, browse a little while the cows watch and tractors pass, and the discoloured Perspex of the windows rattle with the passing shower . . . and you leave with something unexpected. It is, in its own small way, the most perfect library imaginable.

(R.B. Russell) 

 

The Path to Reading

Often, but not always, there are external reasons as to why one might be reading any particular book. This story starts some ten years ago. I have attended the annual Medievalist's Congress in Kalamazoo since 2001, save for the covid years. One of the pleasures used to be a large winding room of booths for booksellers and publishers. Alas, a few years ago, the old building which housed the book room was razed, and the Exhibits Hall was moved into a smaller cramped and sterile place in a new building, with a doubling of prices for the booths. Many dealers and publishers ceased coming, to the detriment of the entire Congress.  

Around ten years ago, on one of my surveys of the book room, I found someone selling rare books and manuscripts, who also had some Ballantine Adult Fantasies and some early Tolkien paperbacks. We started chatting, and he saw my name tag and said:  "I quote you in my recent book!"  The book, it turns out, is called The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus (2014) by Thomas A. Bredehoft, and my “Note on the Text” to The Lord of the Rings is quoted with regard to a view of textual scholarship, and sources of textual errors, in the late twentieth century.

Since meeting, Tom and I usually chat and catch up at some point during each Congress.  Last year he gave me a copy of his newest venture as the author of a mystery with a twist.  It’s called Foote: A Mystery Novel, and is published by West Virginia University Press, out of  Morgantown, West Virginia, where Tom lived for years. Oddly, the blurbs on the rear refer to it as a hard-boiled thriller, but it’s not at all what I think of as hard-boiled. It concerns a private investigator in Morgantown who finds himself involved in two murder investigations. The tale mixes the small town life of Morgantown and the country life of the lands surrounding the town.  The first murder took place at a ramps festival—something I’d never heard of before.  “Ramps” are wild onions (or leeks) that are cooked in a wide array of ways that sound delicious. Other gatherings visited by the plot include an airstreamer group (airstreamers are aluminum travel campers), and a civil war reenactment.  

The twist (and I am not giving anything away here by mentioning it) is that the P.I. Jim Foote, known as “Big Jim,” is not human. He is a bigfoot, a long-lived sasquatch, who works in Morgantown to shield the nearby Homelands of his people from human meddling, and vice versa.  The questions surrounding the two murders make Foote wonder whether there might be bigfoot involvement.  Big Jim’s musings at the civil war reenactment gives an interesting perspective: “The whole idea of historical reenactment must be an exercise in imagination. It is one of the greatest differences, I have always thought, between bigfoot and humans: for most bigfoot, life in the forest is life in the present, in our minds and hearts it is a kind of unchanging and eternal present. For humans, as long as I’ve known them, and even longer, life in the forest is life in the past.”

The pace of the narrative is slow and easy, and the plot stretches over about ten days. The set-up is refreshingly different from many mysteries, which is of course part of the appeal. Even the Medievalist Congress makes a brief appearance, as one character describes the paper he is working on for it:  “about medieval wild-men: big, hair-covered guys, living outside of civilization, out in the woods,  The payoff will be where I look at the Middle English poem, Sir Orfeo as making use of the wild-man motif.” 

Tom has posted some small Jim Foote adventures at his substack, and a longer story, “Ghost in the Machine” (more comedic than the mystery novel, with more fantastical cryptids), came out this past Christmas at Booktimist, the official blog of West Virginia University Press.  I hope this bodes well for further “Big Jim” novels in the future. 

The Centenary of 'Amazing Stories' (Part 2): A Guest Post by John Howard

  

 An Amazing Centenary 2: A New Sort of Magazine

The first issue of Amazing Stories appeared in early March 1926, with a cover date of April. Its publisher, who also exercised the final say in its contents, was Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). Born in Luxembourg, Gernsback had emigrated to the United States and established himself as a pioneer entrepreneur in electronics and radio, promoting and growing his businesses by publishing his own technical magazines. Gernsback soon began to include ‘scientific’ fiction, and in August 1923 his magazine Science and Invention was a special ‘scientifiction’ issue.

I discovered the story of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Gernsback’s science fiction publishing empire in the first volume of Mike Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, where he also discussed in detail the precursors of Amazing Stories. Ashley covered the brief belle epoque when Gernsback was publisher of the only true sf magazines in the field – before the forced bankruptcy in 1929 when he lost control of all his businesses, including the magazines. Undeterred, Gernsback came back almost immediately as publisher of Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories. He soon combined them as Wonder Stories, now merely one among other sf magazines, including Amazing, that competed for their readers’ hard-earned cash.

I eventually came to own a few scattered issues of Amazing, mainly bought from dealers’ catalogues or from Fantasy Centre, that much-loved (and still missed) haven in the Holloway Road. There collectors could work their way along shelves containing hundreds of magazines, seeking those elusive missing issues, or, as I did, buy representative copies featuring favourite covers I’d seen reproduced in books, or which I simply found intriguing.

Under Hugo Gernsback all issues of Amazing featured cover paintings by Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), who also provided many of the interior illustrations. Paul’s architectural training showed. His artwork was visually striking and much more detailed than it might seem at first glance. Paul’s gigantic city vistas and towering buildings, mighty and ingenious machines, menacing (and sometimes rather whimsical) aliens were all shown against garish skies of solid red, yellow, or blue – intended to catch the eye and make the magazine stand out among all the hundreds of others ranked on the stands. And Amazing was printed in a larger size (often referred to as ‘bedsheet’) than the standard ‘pulp’, and on thick, heavy paper with trimmed edges. At the beginning it was not a true pulp: Gernsback always meant his Amazing Stories to be ‘different’ – and a cut above any other comparable magazines.

In November 2020 I had the chance to buy a long run of Amazing Stories, from the first issue to September 1939, bound in 24 hefty volumes. The boxes were wheeled into my hallway, and as soon as the van had driven away I fell to opening them and reverently extracting the bulky volumes, arranging them in order in tottering piles on the floor of my sitting-room. The binding had been professionally, and probably somewhat economically, done; but the volumes were complete and their contents secure. Most of the boards – a night-sky blue – were now warping slightly and the gold lettering on the spine of each was no longer bright. I had been able to afford the set because all covers, contents pages, and other front and end matter had been removed. No true collector would have wanted them. The fan (and I’ve no doubt it was a ‘he’) who had had his collection bound only kept the stories and editorials. A few pages with adverts and readers’ letters were preserved – but only if they had text from a story. In the front of each volume was a loose sheet of paper, which must have been laboriously typed out, neatly listing the contents issue by issue with page numbers.

Until last summer the volumes lay massed on the floor of my workroom in a sort of low rampart or even platform. When I finally bought some new bookcases I arranged the magazines, nearly five feet of them, in a row along the top. I reach up and pull Volume I from its place. This contains the first six issues of Amazing, April to September 1926. As I open it, the boards crackle and that unique, time-spanning smell of old magazines is released. It is not at all musty; it is a heady, stimulating perfume. The pages are browned and a few are faintly foxed but none seem brittle: I am always careful in turning them, but they would have to be deliberately handled roughly to seriously damage them. The first page has Amazing Stories printed in the same comet-tail logo style used on the cover, and subtitled ‘The Magazine of Scientifiction’. We are informed that the Editor is Hugo Gernsback F.R.S.; the Managing Editor is Dr T. O’Conor Sloane M.A., Ph.D. (He at least was a ‘proper’ scientist!) Beneath the names a heading claims ‘Extravagant Fiction Today - - - - - Cold Fact Tomorrow’. The rest of the page is taken up by Gernsback’s editorial “A New Sort of Magazine” – with his often-quoted definition of a genre.

 ‘Another fiction magazine? […] True. But this is not “another fiction magazine,” AMAZING STORIES is a new kind of fiction magazine! […] There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America. By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. […] How good this magazine will be in the future is up to you. Read AMAZING STORIES – get your friends to read it and then write us what you think of it. We will welcome constructive criticism – for only in this way will we know how to satisfy you.’

 Were readers satisfied? It would seem so – at least, at this beginning. Certainly science fiction fandom was born. In his editorial “The Lure of Scientifiction” for the June issue, Gernsback remarked on ‘…the tremendous amount of mail we receive from – shall we call them “Scientifiction Fans”? – who seem to be pretty well orientated in this sort of literature. […] There is not a day, now, that passes, but we get from a dozen to fifty suggestions as to stories of which, frankly, we have no record, although we have a list of some 600 to 700 scientifiction stories. […]’

The stories, all reprints, selected for the first issue were: Off On a Comet by Jules Verne (the first of 2 parts); “The New Accelerator” by H.G. Wells; “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker; “The Thing from – ‘Outside’” by George Allan England; “The Man Who Saved the Earth” by Austin Hall; and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe. Although missing here, the cover by Frank R. Paul is familiar from reproductions. I recall beaming ice-skaters enjoying themselves against a background of mountains of ice with ships frozen in place, all beneath an intense yellow sky almost overwhelmed by a gigantic Saturn floating close by.

I notice that from the outset Gernsback adopted the practice of running more than one serial in an issue, overlapping them. What Went Before – Now read on! When Off On a Comet and The Man from the Atom concluded in the May issue, Verne’s A Trip to the Center of the Earth began in three parts; and as that finished in July, a three-part serialisation of Station X by G. McLeod Winsor was started.

Although Verne and Wells dominated the reprints in the early issues, along with Poe, stories by other writers, often already well-known to fiction magazine readers, were also used. The June issue featured “The Runaway Skyscraper” by Murray Leinster, while the August issue began the serialisation of included the beginning of A Columbus of Space by the astronomer and novelist Garrett P. Serviss. Popular authors George Allan England and Austin Hall were also represented with stories in the first volume. It wasn’t until the third issue, June 1926, that a new story appeared. This was “The Coming of the Ice” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, in the June issue. Mike Ashley reprinted the story in his book, where I had read it for the first time. “It is strange to be alone, and so cold. To be the last man on earth…”

At that moment there was a 16 year-old earning his first wages entranced by the early science fiction magazines, and especially Amazing Stories. It was not long before just a little of the awe and wonder was dispersed by ownership: but my fascination and interest has continued unabated. Decades later, the glamour remains. 

(John Howard)

 

The Centenary of 'Amazing Stories' (Part 1): A Guest Post by John Howard

 

 An Amazing Centenary 1: The Lure of Scientifiction

For me 1977 was a great time to up my game as a serious reader of science fiction. I was 16 that year and in the summer left school for my first job. I considered myself rich at £96 per month. I was living at home and had few expenses after I had paid my father for ‘board and lodging’. The remainder of the money I earned was my own to spend. And because in those days saving towards a pension never entered my mind, most of my free cash went on science fiction.

In retrospect, many factors seem to have come together around the same time. London was an hour away by train; I was used to ‘going up’ on Saturdays. Instead of wandering the streets around the West End or the South Kensington museums I would first head straight to my favourite recent discovery, Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed – a large bookshop up an alley in Soho devoted entirely to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Those afternoons of browsing and buying banished the routine and mundane.

Crucially, too, as well as new paperback fiction and magazines, Dark They Were stocked books about sf. At the same time as having the chance to examine and buy sf in considerable quantity and variety, I was introduced to the history of the genre and the work of those who illustrated it. Numerous books of sf art and heavily-illustrated histories and surveys of the genre were being published in those days. I found Brian Aldiss’ Science Fiction Art (1975, slim but wide-ranging – and huge in height and breadth) and Fantastic Science-Fiction Art 1926-1954 (1975) by Lester del Rey. Both compilations concentrated on the cover art of sf magazines (although Aldiss’ included much interior artwork too). I bought the first volume of Mike Ashley’s The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, newly published in paperback (still extremely useful, and the thoroughly revised version from 2000 is surely definitive). I was swept into the world of the American pulp magazines, and especially Hugo Gernsback and his magazine Amazing Stories – the first issue of which appeared in early March 1926, dated April.

I had also found that Dark There Were kept a shelf or two of second-hand sf magazines, which I knew about from the books on sf art. On those shelves I found copies of The British Science Fiction Magazine (with its proclamation inside that the contents were ‘ALL BRITISH’). This was edited by ‘Vargo Statten’ and featured much work by him and ‘Volsted Gridban’. Because I had started to read about the history of sf at the same time as immersing myself in the product it wasn’t long before my incredulity concerning the child-naming policies of the parents of Messrs Statten and Gridban was vindicated by the knowledge that both were house names created by the publishers, and used by two other prolific contributors to the magazine. Vargo Statten was John Russell Fearn (1908-60), while Volsted Gridban was almost exclusively E.C. Tubb (1919-2010) – both also authors of many paperback novels which were extensively promoted in the magazine. I bought the February 1964 issue of the aristocratic large-size Analog which had an almost serene (considering what was happening in the story it illustrated) cover by John Schoenherr. And there was an issue of Amazing Stories from August 1939, which seemed an artifact out of deep time, although it was still less than 40 years old – something that a magazine from 1988 or so could never feel like, to me, now.

It was something else to see for myself the magazines I had only previously read about, to be able to make them my own, to open and read them – and sniff them! To inhale the smell of old sf magazines was to invoke, as it still does, a past time that stands comparison with M. Proust and his tea-soaked cake. Time can briefly be regained. Those magazines with their gaudy wonder-filled covers and interior illustrations smeared across their brittle pages gripped me with a nostalgia for something that I had never known or experienced – and which I now know will remain out of reach, except during exceptional, almost sacramental moments. Those old pages (always growing older) continue to induce a homesickness, a form of Sehnsucht, for those times of my own when all this was new, unsullied, to be experienced for the first time.

After I had visited Dark They Were I would often stroll on to Soho Square and, if the weather permitted, sit on a bench in the gardens and browse through my purchases and perhaps read a story from one of the collections or anthologies. I don’t recall that I ever inhaled ‘pulp’ in public!

It was later the same autumn that I discovered the Vintage Magazine Shop – I’m sure that was its name as well as its business. It was just off Cambridge Circus, not very far from Soho Square. There were now two sources of old sf magazines. My recollection is of magazines of all kinds and ages piled haphazardly on tables and the floor – you just had to sort through them to find what you wanted. There was an upstairs room too. I found a couple of issues of Science Fantasy from the early 1950s, and excavated issues of the British Reprint Editions of Amazing Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, and Thrilling Wonder Stories from the same era. There was the May 1933 issue of Wonder Stories which included stories by two writers I was already reading, Clark Ashton Smith and John Beynon Harris – who I knew had re-invented himself as John Wyndham. And from somewhere in the shop a proper American issue of Amazing, one from the period of a few months in 1933 when the magazine had a new Art Deco logo and featured modernistic poster-like covers by ‘Sigmond’. (I no longer have that copy, which I have since identified as the February issue.) Then one afternoon the door wouldn’t open. I stepped back and realised the shop was closed. Gazing through the dusty window I saw that the place was empty. It had been stripped bare. 

(John Howard) 

‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”’: An Edition of M. R. James’ Manuscript

  

Crumpled Linen Press, run by Mark Jones and Paul M. Chapman, is a new publisher devoted to ‘beautiful facsimile manuscript editions of great literary works, annotated by world-leading scholars’.

Their first project involves annotated editions of the ghost story manuscripts of M.R. James, starting with  ‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”’.

The edition will include a reproduction of James’ original manuscript for the story, with his deletions, amendments and second thoughts; a scholarly introduction, and notes; newly commissioned illustrations; and supporting articles.

Contributors include Jim Bryant, Peter Bell, Thom Burgess, Brian Corrigan, Jon Dear, Helen Grant,  Darryl Jones, Robert Lloyd Parry, Roger Luckhurst, James Machin, Rosemary Pardoe and Mark Valentine.

It will be published as a dustjacketed hardback in a limited edition of 250 copies. A fundraising campaign is due to be launched in March. The Press invite you to join their mailing list to be notified of this and other news.

The Press hope to follow this with an edition of the manuscript of ‘The Mezzotint’, and are working with the relevant libraries and archives on further James stories too.