All book-collectors, all list-makers, all minimalists, all monomaniacs, all connoisseurs of second-hand bookshop owners and of things people say in bookshops, all who like finding letters, shopping lists, tickets, cheques, postcards, enigmatic numbers and other inclusions (©) in books, all wanderers in the backstreets of cities and of provincial towns, all fastidious arbiters elegantiarum (that's your actual Latin, to adapt K Williams, who also appears) of book design, all paperback writers (paperback writers, pa – per -back, der der der der dum dum de der, der der der der dum dum de der), all those who now think that though it wasn’t perfect far from it actually it had some things going for it did the 1970s, all those who fret about whether ‘the 1970s’ is or are singular or plural, all who would like to meet the Albanian Ambassador and his wife, all who wonder whether the difference between A-format and B-format is really the secret key to a Thomas Pynchon novel, all who study the dated plastic ties around the puckered tops of bread packets, all who read the preliminaries and the apparatus of books and want to know whether this one can be lent, resold, hired-out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s permission in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published, and whether Granjon is the name of a dragon in a high fantasy epic, or a font designed by George W. Jones for the British branch of the Linotype company in the United Kingdom, all who wonder how many Nicholas Royles there are and whether really we could do with a good few more of them, should at once get a copy of White Spines, or a wall-full.
(Mark Valentine)
