You can keep your ancient temples and majestic mountains, your magical rainforests and incredible beachside restaurants. What I most enjoy about holidays is making a list of books I want to read while I’m away.

I spend far longer over this than deciding what to wear (and if I’m honest, even choosing where I’m going). Deliberating between ploughing through the literary flavour of the month against something left unread for years on the bookshelves is as vital as remembering to pack my medication.

I’m not alone. One of the annual traditions of Barack Obama’s presidency was the announcement of his annual summer holiday reading list. This was his final selection in 2016:

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

This seems a fine list to me, not because I would have chosen these myself (though I did enjoy The Underground Railroad) but because they look like books that somebody might actually read while on holiday. As opposed to Anthony Gottleib’s biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes chosen in the Guardian this year by William Boyd for his summer fun, or Surviving Rome by Kim Bowes (chosen by Mary Beard in the TLS “about the economic life of the poor and middling sort in the Roman Empire”).

In the same journal, Andrew Motion picked Shane McCrae’s New and Collected Hell: A poem (2025) which he described as “as unflinching as the title suggests, and the paperback version, which adds work to the original hardback publication, brings its severities and their bleak comfort into even sharper relief.” To be fair he did say it was not exactly beach reading, but qualified that by adding “but a tonic nonetheless”. The only tonic I want on holiday is a nice one with my gin.

As always Monica from Friends was right when she argued that “rules are good, rules help control the fun”. So here are my six fun rules for picking a summer holiday read:

1. No hardbacks: The champion of book formats at home, they weigh too much in your luggage and are too clunky to hold comfortably while in a hammock. The paperback format is far more suited to sand and being looked after poorly. And no e-thingies; this is your chance to escape the dungeon of the screen.

2. No rereads: I do like a reread, I am Team Reread, but holidays are a time for something a little different, an opportunity to live a little. Leave the reread for when you’re in a nostalgic frame of mind, not on a train with a marvellous view.

3. No poetry: Poetry is great and a winner in terms of baggage allowance, but it’s too taxing on the old cerebrum when you want to drop down a couple of gears.

4. Nothing too long: A 900-pager is likely to take up your whole trip, which is great if it’s a cracker, but if not, not. I’m not a betting man, so it’s too risky for my blood.

5. Nothing too difficult: See Mary, William, and Andrew above. Just no.

6. Nothing too new: I’ve been caught out this way too many times before, relying on the latest hot new thing that everybody’s yacking about, only to find out 10 pages in that it’s all publisher hogwash.

I’ve just got back from a week in Spain and here’s what I read. For a holiday of that length I took four books (two normal length, two short) to ensure that I didn’t run out, and these where the lucky winners this year in the order that I consumed them:

• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard: I saw this earlier in the month at The Old Vic and was absolutely bowled over so decided to read the playscript. It did not disappoint, an excellent way to pass some time on the plane once I had made myself familiar with the brace position.

• Flashman on the March by George Macdonald Fraser: I read my first Flashman as a young teen, then some of them randomly, and over the last decade have been reading roughly one every summer holiday in chronological rather than publication order. Except this one which is actually the last one he wrote. It shows. There are some good moments but it’s not Flashy at his best, it’s Flashy by numbers. A sad way to end the sequence.

• The Cuckoo’s Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place by Michael J Warren: Lauded by a friend of mine whose taste I respect and with a tremendous cover, this was not one for me. Some interesting bits, but it felt too digressive, an interesting long read article steroided up into book length.

• The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese: A slim novella in translation from the original Italian which has been hanging around the ‘to be read’ area of the bookshelves at home for some time. A coming of age story about a 16-year-old girl, I found it grindingly dull, perhaps because the 1955 translation is now showing its age.

So overall, it wasn’t the best holiday reading experience I’ve enjoyed. I now wish I had fallen back on the books which nearly got packed, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood which I have nearly finished and is fantastic, Helm by Sarah Hall (packed by my wife and which I would have had a go at instead of the Pavese but had forgotten about), Time by Eva Hoffmann (loved her Lost in Translation), and Long Island by Colm Tóibín (loved his Brooklyn).

As always, I’d be interested to hear if you have any rules, if you think my rules are rubbish, and what you read or are planning to read on your holiday this year.

Since ancient times people have jotted down their favourite quotes, recipes, and other written bits and bobs in notebooks called commonplace books or florilegium. Famous folk like Erasmus, Virginia Woolf, and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi - about whom I have been writing this week for one of my works in progress - all had them. Some have even been turned into printed books; I have copies of Alec Guinness’s, Anthony Powell’s, and publisher John Murray’s on my shelves which are all smashing for dipping into at bedtime, and Miranda Mills has done a couple of recent versions which are rather pleasant too. Any blank notebook will do to fill with your own favourite textual bits and bobs, but I really like the handmade ones produced by bookbinder Ursula James, an example of which is pictured above.

I also keep a kind of digital commonplace book and this week added the following to it after a trip to see Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia in London:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

While some commonplace books gather entries together under headings, mine is a bit random, just things that for whatever reason resonate with me, usually in a slightly philosophical sense but also sometimes just for the way the words work with each other; I could pick dozens of examples for example from Edith Sitwell’s Façade about which I’ve nursed a bit of an obsession since I first read it as an impressionable teenager but this is one I particularly like from her ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’:

Don Pasquito

Hid where the leaves drip with sweet...

But a word stung him like a mosquito...

For what they hear, they repeat!

I’ve not analysed why I like it, nor do I want to explain it, it just appeals to me and that’s enough to note it down. It speaks to me.

Here are a few more examples, and I’d be delighted to read anything you’re particular fond of in the comments section below.

First, Titania, right at the start of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

Anthony Powell musing on Poussin’s painting A Dance to the Music of Time in his novel A Question of Upbringing, again from the first few pages:

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

From John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, the snatch of song Kay Harker hears a man singing while he is looking for the Punch and Judy man. :

Though blind the seed, and dull the earth,
Yet sweet shall be the flower.

I also include song lyrics in my notings. This is from Wetsuit by The Vaccines:

With a cool, cool breeze and dirty knees
I rest on childhood memories.
We all got old at breakneck speed.
Slow it down, go easy on me,
Go easy on me

I would not describe myself as a Kipling fan but I love his poem The Roman Centurion’s Song which ends:

Legate, I come to you in tears – My cohort ordered home!

I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?

Here is my heart, my soul, my mind – the only life I know.

I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

as well as this, from near the end of his The Children’s Song from Puck of Pook’s Hill:

Teach us Delight in simple things,

And Mirth that has no bitter springs;

Forgiveness free of evil done,

And Love to all men ‘neath the sun!

There are also some bits from films in there. Some of you know that I have a very soft spot for Alan Jay Lerner’s musical Brigadoon in which Mr Lundie says, quite rightly:

Oh, there must be an awful lot of folk out there searchin' for a Brigadoon

and the even shorter snippet from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City:

Just keep telling the story

I heard the following before I read it, from John Marston Advises Anger by Peter Porter, which is used in John Betjeman’s landscape documentary The Queen’s Realm:

Love goes as the MG goes.
The colonel’s daughter in black stockings, hair
Like sash cords, face iced-white, studies art,
Goes home once a month. She won’t marry the men
She sleeps with, she’ll revert to type – it’s part
Of the side-show: Mummy and Daddy in the wings,
The bongos fading on the road to Haslemere
Where inheritors are inheriting still.

as I did with this, Betjeman’s own Youth and Age on Beaulieu River which appears at the end of the superb Nigel Hawthorne adaption of his poems in Late Flowering Lust for the BBC:

Early sun on Beaulieu water
Lights the underside of oaks
Clumps of leaves it floods and blanches
All transparent grow the branches
Which the double sunlight soaks
To her craft on Beaulieu water
Clemency the General’s daughter
Pulls across with even strokes

My father introduced me to Thomas Love Peacock. Here’s my favourite bit of his Headlong Hall:

Squire Headlong, in the meanwhile, was quadripartite in his locality; that is to say, he was superintending the operations in four scenes of action — namely, the cellar, the library, the picture-gallery, and the dining-room, — preparing for the reception of his philosophical and dilettanti visitors.

I had to read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People for my undergraduate degree in history. This is the standout section for me, advice to the 7th century Northumbrian King Edwin from one of his counsellors during a debate about the pros and cons of converting to Christianity:

The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

Three final examples, the first from Matthew Francis’s The Mabinogi, his take on the Welsh national epic, followed by two lines from John Mason’s hymn How shall I sing that majesty, and then Joan Lindsay’s wise words from her mesmerising novel Picnic at Hanging Rock:

Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is riding
through the space between one world and another . . .

Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere.

Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.

Perhaps you’ll find something to note in your new commonplace in my latest book, The Philosophy of Sheds, published by the British Library and available everywhere decent people sell books.

Nosing along friends’ bookshelves is interesting, but poking around on the bookcases of famous writers, even virtually, is even more so. This is something I particularly enjoy and indeed I am about halfway through writing a book on the home libraries of the likes of Oscar Wilde (pictured above), Jane Austen, and Ian Fleming, both the physical structure and the actual contents. This is a subject that combines elements of books I’ve written before such as Improbable Libraries and Rooms of Their Own, and it’s something of a follow-up to the latter which is still selling well.

Rather than offer you any first drafts featuring absolute howlers (as opposed to the final published book featuring absolute howlers), I thought you’d like to read something along similar lines I included in my A Book of Book Lists (still very much in print and available from its publishers the British Library or your local independent bookseller). Enjoy!

When Thom Gunn was asked by the Academy of American Poets to suggest which books he thought would be most engaging for English students at High School, he came up with a list of which the Nobel Prize in Literature awards committee would have approved.

The Poet’s Tongue edited by W.H. Auden and John Garrett.

The Beatles Song Book

The Bob Dylan Song Book

Howl and Other Poems and Planet News by Allen Ginsberg

Lupercal or Selected Poems by Ted Hughes

Selected Poems by DH Lawrence

Collected Poems by Wilfred Owen

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Selected Poems by Ezra Pound

The Back Country by Gary Snyder

“The first aim of someone teaching poetry in a high school should be to continuously demonstrate that poetry is of many sorts and is all around us,” he replied, “that a rhymed political slogan is poetry of a kind, for example, and the lyrics of a song by the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan may be poetry of a very high order.” His letter especially picks out Eleanor Rigby and Pound’s The Ballad of the Goodly Fere.

Gunn emphasises that Snyder and Ginsberg are particularly good at speaking to teenagers. “True, there are references to sex and drugs,” he wrote, “and I don’t know what school policies may be about these. I think poems about sex and drugs are particularly good for teenagers to read.”

Poetry also features on Leo Tolstoy’s list of books he felt had the greatest effect on his life. In a letter to a friend, he divides up his reading life into five sections, so that from childhood to age 14 he was especially impressed by (in his original order):

Tales from The Thousand and One Nights

Napoleon (poem) by Alexander Pushkin

The Little Black Hen by Antony Pogorelsky

The story of Joseph from The Bible

The Byliny (folk tales)

And from 14 to 20 by:

The Conquest of Mexico by William Prescott

Tales of Good and Evil by Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne

A Hero for Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

The Hapless Anton by Dmitry Grigorovich

Polinka Saks by Aleksandr Druzhinin

A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev

Die Räuber by Friedrich Schiller

Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

The Gospel of Matthew

The Confessions by Jean Jacques-Rousseau

Emile: Or on Education by Jean Jacques-Rousseau

‘Viy’ from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Ernest Hemingway was another writer fond of making ‘best of’ lists and frequently handed out reading advice. In a 1935 article for Esquire magazine - in which he suggests that writing about shooting is actually more enjoyable than shooting itself – Hemingway names 17 books he would rather read for the first time than have an annual income of a million dollars a year. These were:

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Far Away and Long Ago by WH Hudson

Dubliners by James Joyce

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

La Maison Tellier by Guy de Maupassant

Hail and Farewell by George Moore

Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

A Sportsman’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Autobiographies by WB Yeats

He also put together a slightly overlapping “list of books any writer should have read as a part of his education” for his friend and protégé Arnold Samuelson, who wrote about their time together fishing and sailing in his early bibliomemoir With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. “ Some may bore you,” wrote Hemingway, enticingly, “others might inspire you and others are so beautifully written they’ll make you feel it’s hopeless for you to try to write.”

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane

The Open Boat by Stephen Crane

The Enormous Room by EE Cummings

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson

The American by Henry James

Dubliners by James Joyce

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham

Hail and Farewell by George Moore

The Red and the Black by Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Oxford Book of English Verse

My latest book The Philosophy of Sheds is available widely around the world, including to my certain personal experience my local branch of Waterstones and the newly-opened Toppings in York (which is a really splendid bookshop all readers will enjoy visiting).

Perhaps the most intriguing part of a book is an element that readers add themselves, something that increases its aesthetic value while also offering an insight into the history of the volume and the personality of its owners, the bookplate.

So while the 1479 first edition of Platina’s Lives of the Popes sold by Christie’s in 2021 for $18,750 is of obvious interest in itself, the story of that volume is augmented since it comes with the bookplate of its contemporary German Renaissance humanist owner Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530) which was designed by Albrecht Dürer, plus a later bookplate designed by Pablo Picasso for its 20^th century owner, art dealer and book collector Alexandre Rosenberg (Picasso also designed bookplates for Vice President of the United States Nelson A. Rockefeller).

Indeed, the bookplate’s history is almost as long as the printed book itself, the first recorded examples dating from around 1470-80 belonging to German monk Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach (an angel with a shield decorated with an ox). And interest is strong in the 21^st century; last year the Sylvan Cole Gallery in Sitges, Spain, successfully put on The Bookplates of Benito Mussolini exhibition, and this spring Queens College, City University of New York has held The Bookplate: Imprints and Impressions celebrating the bookplate’s history.

They are also collectible in their own right. The Victorian illustrator Kate Greenaway was also a fine bookplate designer and Peter Harrington is offering the only original artwork by her printed in colour for a client for £3,000. Greenaway’s usual charge for a bookplate was around £5 and she worked on this one using ink, pencil and watercolour on and off for more than two years.

Early bookplates were very much a mark of rank utilised by their proud wealthy owners, usually featuring their coats of arms (such as diarist Samuel Pepys), but by the end of the 18^th century more varied motifs had emerged, sometimes depicting visual plays on the owner’s name, or simply using books, libraries, flora, and fauna as an attractive emblem.

“Today, leading Chinese and Japanese printmakers create multicolour woodcut bookplates, while artists in Eastern Europe and Russia produce mezzotints and aquatints,” says James P. Keenan, Director of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers (bookplate.org) and author of Bookplates - The Art of This Century: An Introduction to Contemporary Marks of Ownership.

“The tradition of exchanging ex libris prints dates to the 1890s. Our mission is to assist booklovers with their bookplate designs and promote printmakers’ talents through exhibitions and publications, strengthening this global community. Furthermore, you can commission custom bookplates from top artists in person at congresses.”

James has more than 125 different ex libris bookplates in his name but describes himself as a small player in the field.

“In comparison, several aficionados have commissioned hundreds of different bookplates to represent various collecting interests within their libraries or simply to be used for exchange. For example, Ichigoro Uchida who is a professor of English at a college in Tokyo has over 500 different bookplates in his name, designed by top artists worldwide. Mario de Filippis, a restaurateur from Arezzo, Italy, has commissioned more than 3,000 different bookplates! These are exceptional cases, most collectors commission only a few.”

At the most basic level, bookplates show who owns a book – a civilised step up from the medieval curses that rained down destruction on anybody considering pinching a signed book - and that’s what makes it particularly useful for those in the rare book world, especially those following a trail or establishing provenance. “Though pleasingly there seems to be a resurgence of book curses on contemporary plates and you can find lots of examples on places like Etsy,” says Dr Eleanor Baker, author of the recent excellent compendium Book Curses.

Indeed the identification of non-bookplate user Oscar Wilde’s personal library has been possible only because of the bookplates that other people stuck into the copies they bought at his bankruptcy auction. After his death, Oxford butcher Stanley Revell bought a large part of J. R. R. Tolkien’s library to which he added a self-adhesive ‘bookplate’ of his own design - ‘From the Library of J.R.R. Tolkien’ (pictured top) – and which he sold to fund his actual collecting interest, the work of poet T. S. Eliot.

“Tracing provenance is an important aspect of my job,” says Sophie Floate, rare books cataloguer for five colleges at the University of Oxford, “and bookplates are invaluable in this respect. That said, it can still be problematic tracing the actual person since some bookplates are not very explicit in naming such as cypher-style or monogram bookplates.”

A perfect example of how useful bookplates can be is the work being done by Jane Austen scholars Deb Burnham (owner of Bygone Books) and Peter Sabor (Professor Emeritus at McGill University) on her brother Edward Austen Knight’s library at Godmersham Park in Kent, England. Their hard work has resulted in the marvellous online catalogue Library of Godmersham Park (www.readingwithausten.com) where you can virtually explore the shelves in the library as Jane would have done, and read what she would have flicked through or borrowed when she paid her brother a visit.

Their fine work is ongoing thanks to The Godmersham Lost Sheep Society (GLOSS), a scholarly group which is looking to track down the remaining dispersed volumes.

“It is fascinating to find these books all over the world, most in the US, many in the UK, and others found in Australia and elsewhere,” says Deb Barnum. “Sometimes, people email to say they have a book with the family bookplate, the most recent a gentleman in Germany whose father collected books on Africa. The 12-volume set he had all had the MGK bookplate and they had been in the 1818 catalogue of the Godmersham library and we were able to raise the money to purchase them. A fabulous find!

“Working on this project these past nine years has been very rewarding but there are also disappointing stories. A gentleman contacted me to say he had various book covers with the family bookplates on the front pastedown, but just the covers, no books! So these are lost to us.”

Bookplates can even help open up previously closed avenues of research. “There have not been as many female book collectors as their male counterparts,” says Deb, “but the study of women owning books has of late taken on scholarly dimensions and it is fascinating! Bookplates are also a way to find this history - if a woman had a bookplate, she likely had a private library of some consequence.”

A version of this article appears in the latest issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine where you can also look at some of its readers’ bookplates.

If you buy my latest book, The Philosophy of Sheds, you can then add your own bookplate to it.

This is a picture of where Bagpuss was born, in the village of Blean near Canterbury. Or to be more exact, it’s the barn in the back garden of the former home of Smallfilms co-founder Peter Firmin. He and Oliver Postgate shot the Bagpuss series inside, and used one of the windows in the house for the shop window in the series. And you can now buy it all and live there for as long as you want.

Literary tourism has a long history (my book Rooms of Their Own tells part of this story) and people flock from around the world to explore Thomas Hardy country or have a peak into Virginia Woolf’s writing shed. But you can go a step further than just looking at their spoons or sitting room wallpaper, you can actually buy their houses too.

So the Firmin property is currently on the market with Finn’s for £1.2m for which you get a four bedroomed detached farmhouse, 6 acres of land, aforesaid barn, stables and paddock, and also according to Finn’s “Huge Potential” which sounds a bit ominous. Do take a look at the photo carousel via the link above, the house looks charming.

If you’ve got a bit more than that knocking about idly in your bank account, say £45m, then why not snap up the The Edgcote Estate in Northamptonshire which is being marketed by the fine folk at Savills.

Here, as well as the rather pleasant Grade I-listed Georgian country house pictured above (25,900 sq ft, 8.6-acre lake, bits of an Roman villa, plus 31 houses, cottages and flats, two racing yards, gallops and a private racecourse, and “attractive mixed woodland offering sporting potential”) you also get Mr Bingley’s Netherfield as Edgcote stood in for the annoyingly taciturn young chap’s home in the 1995 television series of Pride and Prejudice. The previous owners list is impressive too, including Henry VIII’s ‘colleague’ Thomas Cromwell and the same king’s wife Anne of Cleves who got it in the divorce. Viewings are, as you might expect, strictly by appointment only but the good news is it’s a freehold tenure.

If you’re down to your last million quid, then you could invest in something with a Beatrix Potter vibe in the Lake District. The author-illustrator liked Skelgill Farmhouse in Newlands Valley, Keswick, so much that she used it as the inspiration for the Little Town Farm in The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Offers over £975,000 will net you this six bedroom property which is on with David & Robertson.

Those who prefer something more urban with a whiff of hobbits will be intrigued by J.R.R. Tolkien’s old home in Leeds where he worked as a professor of English for the university for five years in the 1920s (he produced his iconic version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during this time). Adair Paxton have this house - now turned into three self-contained apartments - in Darnley Road, West Park, on their books at £500,000. You also get the Blue Plaque confirming Tolkien’s ownership on the front. Note the hexagonal tower turret thing which looks a bit Lord of the Rings-ish.

Happy househunting!

In this hot weather, what could be more appropriate than a book about sheds. This is that book. And it’s quite slim. And has lots of excellent pictures.

Rather than the usual muse about the world of books, here’s a pleasant five minute excerpt from my A Drink with the Idler talk last week with the Idler magazine's editor Tom Hodgkinson about my latest book The Philosophy of Sheds published by the British Library. It’s already been described as the perfect gift for Father’s Day, although also equally suitable for every other gifting occasion.

There is always a lot of interest when things owned by famous writers come to auction. Sylvia Plath’s rolling pin, Jane Austen’s childhood cup-and-ball ‘bilbocatch’ game, and Evelyn Waugh’s telescopic ear trumpet have all gone under the hammer in recent years and made very respectable sums, and this week Sotheby’s announced some similar, though rather more literary lots.

So coming up next month you will be able to get your hands on Sir Alec Guiness’s annotated copy of Hamlet marked up for a production and (pictured below) Virginia Woolf’s copy of Thomas Hardy’s, signed by her “V Stephen” before she became V Woolf. In the trade, volumes such as these are known as “association copies”, books which were owned by the author or have some connection to them, and are more valued by buyers as a result.

Woolf was a big fan of Thomas Hardy and thought Far From the Madding Crowd was his finest work. She bought a copy of the novel in her twenties ('“I do nothing but read Mrs Carlyle and Thomas Hardy” she confided to her diary on May 30, 1909, a year after the book was published) and kept it for the rest of her life. Indeed, she whizzed down on the train to Dorset to meet Hardy on July 25, 1926, and took this copy to read on the way from London to Dorchester. The book is not a first edition, and its worn covers show that it has been well read, but if anything I feel that adds to its charm.

There are obviously endless examples of association copies (in fact, my feeling is that there’s a book in this…) but here are a few of my favourites:

• Marilyn Monroe was a bigger reader than many people realise and in 1955 photographer Eve Arnold took various photos of the actress reading a 1934 Random House second edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (pictured top - she appears to be near the end and so perhaps reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy). The copy came up for auction at Christie’s in 1999 and sold for $9,200, well above its high estimate of $500.

• And if you like that, you might be interested in Vladimir Nabokov’s annotated teaching copy of the same edition of Ulysses, now part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library

• A few years back rare book dealers Peter Harrington took a first edition 1942 copy to the Firsts London rare book fair of Pilote de Guerre by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Flight to Arras in its simultaneous English publication). It was inscribed to the muse for his novella The Little Prince Sylvia Hamilton who was the inspiration for the fox in the book, and whose doll was the model for the little prince himself. “Pour Sylvia Hamilton, Avec la profonde et tendre amitié de son vieil ami, Antoine,” he wrote inside it.

• The prop book that Disney used to open its animated version of The Jungle Book in 1967 is the same copy that Jon Favreau used in his 2016 live action version, on top of which it was also used for the start of the 1973 Disney animated Robin Hood

• Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s mum gave him a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim on the day in 1910 he set off towards the Antarctic with Captain Scott. He was a huge Kipling fan (“Today has been the greatest fun,” he noted in his diary on arrival at his new hut home in the ice, “fitting up my bunk, fitting up shelves, unpacking my Kiplings.”). Reading the book repeatedly sustained him during their expedition and when he returned to England in 1913 he sent his copy to Kipling with a note: “I can say quite truthfully that there were no books which we had which were so much used, gave so much food for conversation or more enjoyment.”

• In 2019, the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover used by the judge in the famous Old Bailey obscenity trail in 1960 Sir Laurence Byrne was bought by the University of Bristol thanks to a crowdfunding campaign. Its particular interest is that it was annotated throughout by the judge’s wife Lady Dorothy Byrne who underlined the raunchier sections and produced a list of the allegedly dubious passages (she also made a special damask bag for Laurence to take it into court incognito).

Many thanks to all of you who came to my Idler magazine talk this week about my latest book The Philosophy of Sheds. It was marvellous to see so many people interested in micro-architecture and singing along to Bing Crosby at the end. Published by the British Library, it’s available from all good bookshops and from them direct.

I was at the Firsts London rare book fair at The Saatchi Gallery last week and wandered around in the company of various fellow representatives of the media at a preview session. There were plenty of intriguing items proudly on display but what struck me was the “wow, how much?” reactions to some of the prices being asked by the exhibitors from some of the other journalists who are not in the books biz.

In fact, by complete chance we were in attendance when the award for Best Book at the fair was awarded to the charming folk at Douglas Stewart Fine Books who had come all the way from sunny Melbourne in Australia. Their prizewinning book was a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species which they had shown me only a few minutes earlier. For a 170-year-old book it was in pretty good condition, and was being offered for £335,000.

The media is full of the astronomical prices paid for paintings, beach huts, and litres of petrol, but rarely uses its column inches to chart what people and institutions are paying for the finest volumes known to man, so I thought I’d pass on a few details of recent auction sales that I’ve written about to remedy this omission.

Earlier this week for example, the copy of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit pictured at the top of this newsletter was sold for $450,000 at Heritage Auctions in the US. You can get a really nice hardback facsimile copy of this from Blackwells for £22 which includes the original cover design, colour plates of Tolkien’s own paintings, excellent new reproductions of all thedrawings, and colour versions of both maps. So what made the Heritage copy special?

It was a first edition, and not merely that, a first impression, or what is known as a “true first”, the earliest printing of the book (in truth there are plenty of additional complexities when it comes to first editions and there’s a good explanation of these on the Peter Harrington site). In this case it means it is one of just 1,500 such copies ever produced, on top of which it’s unrestored (which collectors and sellers value) and comes with its original dust jacket “unclipped” which means its price, in this case “7s 6d. net” has not been snipped off the inside cover.

On top of a fine dust jacket, the 1949 first edition copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four above which went under the hammer at Freeman’s earlier this month also came with the original wrap-around Evening Standard band which proclaimed it as a Book of the Month recommended by The Book Society. As a result, it made six times its low estimate and was eventually sold for $48,000.

Another element affecting a book’s value is if the author has scribbled something inside. So in that same auction featuring the copy of The Hobbit above there was another one, this time a first edition, second impression. So in this sense not as valuable, but it made up for this since Tolkien had written in it and then gifted it to the family’s housekeeper as a Christmas present. Sold for $100,000.

Then there are special editions. Stephen King’s 1980 novel about a young girl with pyrotechnic powers Firestarter is not just available in paperback but also in an aluminium-covered asbestos cloth binding which is fireproof (a neat idea - you can get similarly fire-unfriendly copies of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - geddit? - and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood). Only 26 were ever produced - the story goes that only 25 are now left in circulation since one was ironically lost to fire - and the one owned by Sid Altus, head of the publishing house that published it Phantasia Press, was recently sold for $75,000.

And while your old copies of Whizzer and Chips or Tiger and Scorcher probably won’t fund your retirement, other rather rarer comics will do the job very nicely. In November last year a copy of Superman No. 1 from 1939 went for $9.12m. That’s a world record but not entirely exceptional - last week if you wanted to stock up on the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics No. 1 and Batman’s debut in Detective Comics No. 27 you would have had to shell out $1.4m and $1.5m respectively.

Book art is also highly collectible. The biggest name in the business is Frank Frazetta. Last year, the cover painting known as Man Ape that he produced for a 1967 Lancer/Ace paperback edition of Conan the Barbarian short stories sold for $13.5m. I’m a big Tintin fan so I also keep an eye out for Hergé’s original art coming to auction. Here are some recent sales over the last few years:

• the first original cover art for Tintin in the Land of the Soviets - $1.12m

• the original drawing for the 1942 cover of Tintin in America - €2.15m

• a pencil drawing for page 42 of Coke en Stock (The Red Sea Sharks in English) - €216,480

Indeed, writing of any kind can be worth a few bob. Coming up at Julien’s Auctions early next month are various items which belonged to Marilyn Monroe. Among them are annotated scripts, an early contract, and her recipe for turkey stuffing (“No Garlic” prominently scribbled on the top). It could be yours but beware that you’ll almost certainly have to cough up a lot more than the $2,000-$3,000 estimate.

Much cheaper and almost certainly just as good an investment as any of the above is my new book The Philosophy of Sheds published earlier this month by the British Library. I’ll even inscribe a copy for you to make it even more valuable, even if you’re not my housekeeper.

Third time’s the charm. Following my first published book in 2010 Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution, and then the Haynes Shed Manual (co-authored with John Coupe) in 2019, this is my final book concerning the type of micro-architecture that is most commonly found in back gardens/yards around the world. It also looks at variations on that standard format, plus the ethos behind the creative life which this simple but spectacularly longlasting construction encourages. I’m very pleased with it, and it is very nicely illustrated too. And it’s an ideal size to give as a present. If you catch my drift.

It’s published by the British Library as part of its excellent The Philosophy of… series (which takes in the likes of beards, curry, and tattoos), and is now officially available to buy direct from them or wherever you buy your books (ideally from a local independent bookseller but online from reputable folk like Blackwells).

You can read the introduction to the book in a previous newsletter here, so as a kind of literary bookend, here is the short Afterword at the back which gives a flavoursome roundup of the contents:

The idea that size isn’t everything has a long history. In ancient Rome Seneca (“Non refert quam multos sed quam bonos habeas”) and Pliny the Younger (”multum, non multa”) talked about the importance of quality not quantity, while ancient Greek philosopher Chilon of Sparta empasised the importance of keeping it brief (Το λακωνίζειν εστί φιλοσοφείν).

Leading 20^th century German-American architect and academic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe translated these thoughts into his oft-used design mantra ‘less is more’, accompanied by a secondary expression ‘almost nothing’ (‘beinahe nichts’ in German). For him, architecture was at its finest, its most elegant, when it was kept minimal and simple and restrained.

While he never explicitly mentioned the category in his theorising, nevertheless the shed – whether used as a place for working, playing, resting, or living - is the finest example of how a multifunctional, pared back space can be central to all aspects of life. A shed is not just a building, it enables its dweller to concentrate profoundly on what truly matters.

As E. F. Schumacher wrote in his 1973 collection of essays Small Is Beautiful: “I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

My father used to have a notebook in which he sensibly jotted down books that he liked the look of so that he would not forget them. I don’t have such a formal aide memoire, but I do have about half a dozen such lists in various places on my computer and phone. So I thought I would share some of these with you on a monthly basis, things that I’ve seen over the previous few weeks that in some way tickled my literary fancy and perhaps might interest you too.

Not actually a new book, it came out in 2017, but was recommended to me recently by novelist and Personal Anthology curator Jonathan Gibbs. It’s a memoir of how music is a backdrop to growing up, for both girls and boys, or as the blurb has it “the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world.” I am definitely going to buy this.

Also recommended, this time by historian Catherine Clarke, it’s a kind of Shakespeare mash-up poetry collection. I’ve had a look at a couple of samples online and while I’m not fully convinced or know anything about Shakespeare Okuni I think I am more likely than not to give it a go.

Loved his novel Leaving the Atocha Station, did not love his The Topeka School, but I am definitely going to give this 144 pager a go (but perhaps in paperback). Here’s the bumph:

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device - a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

I interviewed Professor Beard for a magazine I edited about 20 years ago, before she had become widely known as a media don and she was marvellously entertaining. I have enjoyed her books, especially the one on Pompeii and her essay collection It’s A Don’s Life. But I’ve just finished reading my friend Adrian Murdoch’s recent book on Herculaneum, Echoes of Ashes (strong recommend), so this one about the relevance of antiquity to our present times will be for later in the year to prevent me getting ancient history ennui and leaving it unfinished.

No idea what this is like but I’ve been a huge fan of the Smiths since teenage years and you don’t come across them that often in fiction (Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan is a marvellous example). And this is the stuff from the publisher which sounds like it could go either way, but I’ll still buy it:

Wildly inventive and magnificently surreal, The Smiths: A Novella recounts the impact of an unconventional pop group from Manchester on one man’s life. Taking the form of a flâneuring journey through the landscape of memory, our anonymous protagonist is accompanied by the iconic French actress Carole Bouquet, who becomes his guide and interlocutor, asking about his life during the years The Smiths were together and the profound effect of their music upon him.

As the unlikely couple perambulate from the old Selfridge Hotel to West Hollywood by way of a park bench in Cavendish Square, their conversation interrogates and celebrates the joys of outlandish pop genius, the zealous dedication of fans and the cult of outsider disaffection given uproarious voice. As such, this is not a book about The Smiths but one that emerges from their music, their emotional register and their literary resonance.

I’m reading this next. I’ve seen Big Country several times in concert, both when Stuart was at the helm and in the band’s slightly strange afterlife following his early death, and they’re one of my very favourite pop combos, although I do hope it will be a little cheerier than its promotional thingy implies:

Stay Alive is about alcoholism, abuse, family, fame, addiction, depression and working-class pride. And along the way there are stories of drug busts, debauchery, flag burning, fist-fights, prison escapes and riots, with a revolving cast of characters from The Clash to the Rolling Stones. 

Coming May 5…

I am currently reading Nicholas Royle’s latest book Finders, Keepers which is the concluding volume in his marvellous trilogy about his personal book collecting odyssey chronicled previously in White Spines, and Shadow Lines. Nicholas (whom I have interviewed but not met in person, even though he’s briefly visited the front door of my house) is a spectacularly enthusiastic collector but he’s certainly not alone, and I suspect that you are among the many people reading this newsletter who curate their own personal slice of bibliophilic heaven.

To my mind, there’s a difference between simply accumulating books and building up a specific collection. I have three shelves of cookbooks and cooking-themed titles but I don’t collect them, I just acquire them (legally, of course), unlike, say, food writer Nicola Miller whom I interviewed for Fine Books & Collections magazine who concentrates entirely on the subject and has somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 titles (again, just to make clear, all obtained lawfully).

More of a grey area is assembling all the titles in a given series. So I’d say my parents’ collections of King Penguins and The Saturday Book definitely qualify, but my own childhood efforts at gathering every copy of Alfred Hitchock and The Three Investigators on my wobbly bedroom bookcase didn’t. I have several different editions of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time - the Folio Society’s illustrated four volumes in a slipcase, the original 12 Heinemann hardbacks, the unfinished Penguin series with the Osbert Lancaster cover illustrations - but I don’t see this as a collection, even though I’m always on the lookout for copies of the Heinemanns in better condition (I don’t have all the dust jackets or all first editions). Perhaps I’m being overly pedantic. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I would be very interested in hearing what you collect/accumulate/acquire so please do comment below. These are what I’ve focused on over the years:

Eagle annuals

Wherever we went on holiday when I was small we would always go to any secondhand bookshops in the area, and indeed outside the area. I loved annuals - Beano, Dandy, Tiger & Scorcher, Whizzer & Chips in particular - but developed a special fascination with Eagle annuals, Dan Dare, Harris Tweet, et al, especially those that came out before I was born. So I started buying them up. I don’t have a full run, but I do keep a piece of paper in my wallet listing the missing years just in case I come across them.

Chess

I played a lot of chess up to the age of 18 at a decent standard. I received a couple of chess books when I was pretty young as birthday and Christmas presents, and quickly noted that while new books on the subject were a bit pricey, secondhand bookshops were full of titles at pocket money prices. I’ve got about 100, split now between my home and my parents’ house. Sadly, rarely consulted nowadays.

Jennings and Darbishire

I liked the William books as a nipper but much preferred Anthony Buckeridge’s prep school tales of JCT Jennings and his pal Darbishire (one of my treasured moments in journalism is interviewing Mr Buckeridge about 25 years ago and receiving a letter from him thanking me). Naturally, I tried to force my children to read them too, and in doing so reignited my own love for them. My childhood collection had numerous gaps so I started filling these in, though my efforts have slowed in recent years.

Spain

There are strong links with Spain within my family and I lived in Madrid for several years in my 30s, so picking up books about the country and its culture was not really a conscious decision, more a natural agglomeration. As such, I’m unsure if what I have is a collection or an accumulation, but although there’s no really collectible/valuable single volume it’s quite a wide ranging selection of books covering history, food, literature, sport, culture, and nature.

Gawain and the Green Knight

Perhaps my favourite story, but sadly my 14th century Middle English is not good enough to fully appreciate its genius so I fall back on the work of better folk than me. I have eight translations plus various bits of ephemera (a play for children about putting on a production of Gawain, a book of Clive Hicks Jenkins’ illustrations for Simon Armitage’s translation, a programme for a modernised play version I saw a couple of years ago, etc), plus other bits and bobs such as Mark Haddon’s reworking of it as a short story Wodwo in his The Pier Falls collection.

Books about books

This collection is also a crossover with my work, a working collection which I use when writing my books about literary themes, volumes which are useful to my work as online editor at Fine Books & Collections magazine, and books about books which simply catch my fancy. I’ve not counted how many I have and again there’s nothing really rare therein, but it’s the only one of my collections which is starting to spiral out of control.

Coming soon…

There are so many passages in Nick Hornby’s monthly Stuff I’ve Been Reading essays for The Believer magazine about which books he bought and which books he read that I could probably begin every newsletter with one (I strongly recommend buying them, available as The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, if you’ve yet to make their acquaintance).

One theme that he returns to frequently is modern poetry, and points out that even though he sometimes makes critical comments about collections, he is at least among the dozen people who actually buys new poetry books. I’ve not looked up the figures, but I suspect he’s not far wrong. I talk to my friends about novels, non-fiction, children’s books, cookbooks, and travelogues, but I can’t ever recall discussing poetry.

It’s very much our bad, and I do make an effort to include poetry in my reading rotation, some of it modern, some of it not (a sample from my poetry shelves are pictured above). One recent delight was discovering the work of Grace Nichols whose work I write about in the latest issue of the Idler magazine. I reproduce it here below for free, but if you like it, please do consider taking out an annual subscription as there are plenty more excellent pieces inside every month (including my column on sheds):

Travel certainly broadens the mind. Some time ago I found myself working on the Guyana section of an atlas for schoolchildren, tracking down statistics on rainfall and waterfalls, national birds and national flowers, the natural attractions of the forested Potaro-Siparuni region and the urban delights of its capital Georgetown. And that’s when I came across Grace Nichols.

Nichols was born in Georgetown in 1950. The fifth of seven children, she then grew up in a little village on the coast before moving to the city when she was eight. After working as a journalist and teacher she began to write poetry and fiction before moving to England in 1977 where she has lived with her fellow poet and husband John Agard in Sussex ever since.

There is not a huge canon of poetry on the theme of idleness. John Clare has been perhaps the finest general explorer of its pleasures, and certainly individual works such as Robert W. Service’s ‘Laziness’ (“Oh it’s noble to sweat, pounds and dollars to get/But - it’s grand to do nothing at all”) stick in the mind. Any such list would certainly not be complete without Nichols’ 1989 collection - her third after her awardwinning debut ‘I Is a Long-Memoried Woman’ (1983) and ‘The Fat Black Woman’s Poems’ (1984) - ‘Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems’, written while she was pregnant.

Sitting firmly in the Wendy Cope and Stevie Smith zone where dry wit can be found alongside piercingly perceptive insights, an early heads up of Nichols’ playfulness is that even though the title of the collection is ‘Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems’, there is no such eponymous single poem inside. The nearest is the marvellous The Body Reclining (which comes with a note “With a thought for Walt”).

While Whitman prefers to sing the body electric, Nichols prefers a more relaxed, recumbent, and frankly more comfortable position. “I sing the body reclining,” she writes, pointing out that:

“Those who dust and dust
incessantly
also corrupt the body”

and, she adds, consequently incarcerate themselves in a prison of their own construction.

The poem is littered with idler-friendly motifs, a “cushioned head”, a “lolling breast”, a “horizontal neck”. It also introduced me to a new term for the kind of indulgence on which readers of this magazine thrive, “liming”, which a Nichols footnote indicates is a “West Indian expression for standing around, idling away the time.”

Another favourite is ‘Grease’ which recounts how the substance gets everywhere in the kitchen, on the cooker, on the knobs, on the cutlery, on the tablecloth, ending with the conclusion that “Grease is obviously having an affair with me.”

Elswhere, while the theme of idleness is not specifically explored, the small delights of everyday domestic life are very much to the fore, such as shaving (she refuses to take a blade to her armpits or bikini line), and a slightly rueful reflection about the childlike pleasure of collecting conkers and why adults seem to lose their delight “for gathering the magic shed of trees”.

It’s not a gag-a minute collection though. Lazy Thoughts has a sensual physicality running through it and does not shrink from addressing key societal issues in poems such as ‘Spell Against Too Much Male White Power’ and ‘Of Course When They Ask for Poems About the ‘Realities’ of Black Women’ which cover the kind of ground indicated on the tin.

Other pieces include observations on Caribbean migration. Coming to England and adapting to its ways is at the centre of Wherever I Hang, where the protagonist learns key English etiquette such as:

Never visiting anybody

Before giving them clear warning

Pace Marvin Gaye and Paul Young, the poem has a marvellous final line: “Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home.”

Throughout, Nichols lightly mixes Creole as well as standard English, explaining that: “I tend to want to fuse the two tongues because I come from a background where the two worlds were constantly interacting.”

It’s not only a very readable interaction, it has also been a very successful one that has seen her write for both children (her poems have appeared on the GCSE English literature syllabus) and adults, appointed as Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020, and winning The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2021. “It’s not going to change the economic system,” she has said about poetry, “but it can enrich, comfort and provide ammunition to go on living.”

The latest tome from my stable of scribbling is not yet available as it’s published in May, but please do feel free to pre-order it from wherever you normally buy books.

Mr. Lundie, the schoolmaster in the 1954 MGM musical Brigadoon with which I am unaccountably rather obsessed, wistfully tells Gene Kelly: “Oh, there must be an awful lot of folk out there searchin' for a Brigadoon.”

Brigadoon has always reminded me of the equally marvellous but sadly equally mythical community of Shangri-La about which I wrote in one of my regular columns for the Idler magazine and which you can read for free - free! - below (but if you like this kind of stuff, do consider a subscription, details here).

It’s May 1931. The ever-efficient 37-year-old British consul Hugh Conway has organised a plane for the last minute evacuation of a handful of white residents wanting to escape a dangerous revolution in Baskul, Afghanistan. Their destination is India, but once up in the air the pilot unaccountably veers hugely off course, escorting Conway and the three other passengers into a remarkable adventure…

Writer James Hilton (1900 – 1954) wrote more than two dozen novels and screenplays, winning an Oscar for the 1942 Mrs Minniver. But his fame today rests largely on two bestsellers, Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934) and Lost Horizon (1933). The latter focuses on the discovery by Conway and his fellow kidnappees of Shangri-La, a remote lamasery high up in the mountains in Tibet, which – don’t worry, no spoilers - appears to have discovered the secret to living a good life.

When we first meet Conway he’s basically had enough. After winning a DSO in the war, he’s spent a couple of years as a don in Oxford and now a decade in the consular service. Regarded as a brilliant but mercurial chap, despite his nickname ‘Glory’ he’s never been significantly ambitious – “He preferred the less formal and more picturesque jobs that were on offer” is how Hilton describes him - and now he’s rather world weary and burnt out.

At Shangri-La he finds a Utopian community, a civilisation in all senses of the word, run along guidelines of Aristotelian restraint. As one of its more important residents Chang puts it: “Our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds - even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.”

This is the essence of life in Shangri-La, the Buddhist concept of the spiritual kingdom of Shambhala made flesh. Chang goes on to explain that people who live in the lamasery and the valley below (known as the Valley of the Blue Moon) are moderately sober, moderately chaste, moderately honest, and moderately heretical. He even tells one of the passengers from the plane who heartily endorses the lamasery’s pick ‘n mix approach to religion that the community is only moderately certain they’ve got the mixture right.

Conway – Hilton’s composite of mountaineer George Mallory and soldier-philospher Sir Francis Younghusband - is understandably very much attracted to the setup in Shangri-La. Another revealing moment occurs when he makes a throwaway comment to Chang about ‘slackers’ back in his homeland, a term with which his new friend is unfamiliar.

“’Slacker,’” explained Conway, “is a slang word meaning a lazy fellow, a good-for-nothing. I wasn’t, of course, using it seriously.”

Chang bowed his thanks for the information. He took a keen interest in languages and liked to weigh a new word philosophically. “It is significant,” he said after a pause, “that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Conway answered with solemn amusement.

It’s by no means an entirely sedate lifestyle, but the pace is certainly much calmer than that of the international empire-building beyond the mountains of which Conway is sick, what he describes as “a reek of dissolution”. At Shangri-La he discovers not only a truly beautiful landscape, but also the chance for a contemplative existence (as well as a very Aristotelian kind of love) and a sense of purpose he feels has been missing all his life.

Lost Horizon sold millions of copies to readers disillusioned with the chaotic way the world had turned pre- and post-war, and was one of the most popular 20^th century novels, promoted as the first mass-market paperback in the US. Its success is all the more remarkable in that Hilton had never travelled to the Himalayas or Tibet before writing the novel – Baskul, where the real action begins, is a location he invented - although he did spend plenty of time in the British Museum library reading up on the region’s geography, customs, and religion.

After publication, Conway transferred successfully to celluloid in an excellent 1937 Frank Capra film starring Ronald Colman as the slightly renamed ‘Robert’, and a moderately strange 1973 musical with Peter Finch (again pointlessly changed, to ‘Richard’) with music by Burt Bacharach. Among numerous radio versions is a good BBC one with Derek Jacobi which is available on the YouTube.

Though the book is perhaps a little sentimental, it’s hard not to envy Conway and the engaging new lifestyle he stumbles upon and relishes. “Its atmosphere soothed while its mystery stimulated,” he remarks, halfway through the book, “and the total sensation was agreeable.”

The challenge of deciding what to plump for from your expansive TBR list is an issue I focus on in some detail in the introduction to my recent book My Year of Reading Welshly. While I offer various solutions therein, they are mainly theoretical ones, so here is a practical example below of all the books I have read so far this year and the labyrinthine method of their selection.

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (started 2025)

Recommended to me by my friend (since university days) Judith who is a voracious and eclectic reader, and often suggests interesting titles. In the end, bought for me as a Christmas present by my lovely wife, though sadly not the first edition which went under the hammer at Forum Auctions in mid-December last year featuring a signed presentation inscription from the author "For Arthur Green with all my best wishes and thanks. Irish Murdoch. October 1990", a snip at £1,600.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

I try to add poetry into my reading mix and Sharon Olds has been on my general ‘Something by…’ list since 2015 when she visited the village of Urueña in Spain which I wrote about in my Book Towns book, and dropped in on the bookshop owned by one of the people who was very helpful in putting my book together. I had no idea where to start with Olds so I chose this because it was quite cheap in my local Oxfam bookshop in St Albans.

Alfred the Great by David Horspool

This is the beginning of a long term reading plan to read a biography of every king and queen of England in chronological order (I know, I know, I’ve taken some liberties starting with Alfred rather than Aethelstan but that’s the beauty of making your own plan, you are the absolute final arbiter of the whole shebang).

George Passant by CP Snow

Another Judith recommendation, but this time also backed up by another chum, my snooker colleague Daniel who was very helpful with choosing what to select for my Reading Welshly book. It’s the first of another long fiction series and I was keen to try something along the lines of A Dance to the Music of Time which is my favourite reading material.

Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

I’m a big Rob Macfarlane fan and he’s one of the very few writers whose entire ouevre I have collected. I had my eye on this since it came out a while ago but it came to me as another Christmas present, this time from my father-in-law.

Ale City: St Albans’ Beer History and Remarkable Pubs by Roger Protz

I like beer. I like pubs. I like St Albans. Yep, another Christmas present from my media naranja.

Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson

Similar reasons for choosing this as for the CP Snow, the first of multiple novels in a series chronicling a life in the 20th century (covers of the four volumes of the 2025 Libroj Books US edition pictured top), but with the important difference that the protagonist is a woman rather than a man. I shamefacedly had never heard of Richardson, a forerunner of Virginia Woolf in terms of stream of consciousness writing, until about this time last year when my friend and former work colleague Jonathan Gibbs mentioned her.

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey

Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is one of my favourite reads. I saw this book mentioned somewhere online, thought it looked interesting, and then a couple of weeks ago saw that the publishers Manchester University Press were having a sale which made it look even more interesting, so I took advantage of the impressive price reduction.

Oscar’s Books: A Journey around the Library of Oscar Wilde by Thomas Wright

I’m at the start of writing a book about famous writers’ home libraries so this is really a work choice that research threw up as a must-read rather than a wholly ‘for pleasure’ one, but I enjoyed it so much that I read it all rather than simply gutting it for the appropriate bits so I’m counting it.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning Mrs Dalloway-alike novel which I’d scorned for many years but was mentioned so frequently by Mark Hussey in his book above that I thought I should be less crabby and give it a whirl.

I’d be interested to hear what you’re all reading at the moment and how you chose it.

Meanwhile, as you wait impatiently for my next book, The Philosophy of Sheds, to come out in May, you could do worse than treat yourself to my most recent effort, When Books Go Bad, published by those sagacious folk of the British Library who know a thing or two about fine books.

The last lap of completing a book seems to take an eternity but The Philosophy of Sheds - out May 5 published by the British Library - is almost breasting the finish line now. Here, below, is the almost nearly just about signed off cover and to give you a taster of the delights in store, the Introduction.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1880

They protect our garden tools, provide priceless workspaces, and inspire philosophers. From the allotments of Birmingham to the mountainsides of Norwegian fjords, sheds are not just buildings, they are a way of life.

Humans around the world have been attracted to microarchitecture for hundreds of years. Pavilions in China date back to at least the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC), as do garden structures built by the ancient Egyptians to provide shade, and it’s tempting to speculate that ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Epicurus had some kind of shedlike structure in the gardens where they held court with their followers. Timber Japanese tea houses known as ‘chashitsu’ became popular rustic structures in which Zen monks relaxed in the Sengoku period (late 15th to mid-16th centuries), around the same time that summerhouses began to be built in England.

It’s around this time that early forms of the word ‘shed’ appear in England, though the word’s origin is not entirely clear. Take your pick from Old English and Middle English words such as ‘scheden’ and ‘sceadan’ meaning separation, ‘scydd’ signifying shelter, and ‘shadde’ indicating shade. Whatever its source, the concept of protection from the elements is clear. Variations of the alternative term ‘hut’ are found all over Europe in the same period, with the old Ukrainian equivalent ‘khata’ interestingly also indicating a connotation of private space as much as a simple physical structure.

Which brings us to the thorny question of what exactly is a shed? That early implication of something separate and covered remains the central plank of any shed definition – it cannot be attached to another building, and it must be protected from the vagaries of the weather with a roof and walls (although we will come to some exceptions to this rule in a later chapter…). Most, though not all, consist of a single ground floor room (treehouses offer one major alternative) with at least one window, and are found in back gardens/yards or agricultural locations (yet we shall come across indoor sheds too). Size is not set in stone, though it needs to be on a resolutely human scale since more substantial sheds edge towards something more likely to be classified as a barn. Beyond that, they can be fitted out as low or as hi-tech as the owner desires, with equal opportunities for She Sheds as well as Man Caves, and any shape from circular and octagonal to square and rectangular.

For many people, the archetypal shed is American writer E. B. White’s small and simple timber shack in Maine, New England. Its window offered a beautiful view out to sea, but inside it was furnished only with a modest chair, bench and self-built desk, an old barrel serving as a waste basket and an old croquet set box functioning as a cupboard. There was no decoration. “Tight and plainly finished” was how White termed it. It was here that he drafted his masterpiece Charlotte’s Web on his black Underwood typewriter. 

However, sheds appear in so many other guises, beach huts, shepherds’ huts, garden offices, saunas, home gyms, art studios, yoga workshops, not to mention mini houses. During the problematic covid years, enterprising restaurateurs across the country even experimented with standalone sheds as outdoor dining pods to allow customers to eat in safety. Scandinavia’s marvellous ‘Grillkolta’ huts – multi-sided sheds with sloping walls lined inside with benches and a fire pit barbecue area – are now also popular in the UK where, let’s be honest, the sun is not always guaranteed to garland gatherings.

The long-running and hugely popular Shed of the Year competition, first fought for in 2007, has also highlighted many other popular varieties such as pub sheds, church sheds, hobbit sheds, Tardis sheds, and treehouses which provide both adults and children with a very special aerial den. This type of shed has been around for thousands of years and remains popular today, RHS Flower Shows regularly presenting bespoke models with more modern elements such as outdoor baths. Those which have been handmade, often from bits of found wood, offer a special connection between person and shed, perhaps the ultimate in escape from everyday society. There are even ground-based ‘treehouses’, such as the Bedouin Tree Shed in London which won the 2020 Shed of the Year. Two living trees, an ash and an oak, are literally the centrepoints of this three-floor shed measuring 5m x 5m. Try telling any of the owners of these buildings that they are not a shed and you will receive a frosty response.

You can even live in them. Influential American philosopher and early conservationist Aldo Leopold’s book Sand Country Almanac is a 1949 collection of essays promoting his concept of a “land ethic”, how people should look after the land they live on. In the 1930s Leopold (1887-1948) bought a chicken coop, renovated it and turned it into a sheddish retreat which he called The Shack. It’s currently the only only chicken coop on the National Register of Historic Places. “The Shack was sort of an example of how you didn’t need a palace and all these things surrounding you,” said Leopold’s daughter Nina Leopold Bradley when it was accepted onto the Register. “The general effect was that you can be very, very happy with very little stuff around you.” 

Is this why people love sheds so much? In truth there are numerous factors. Much of it is surely down to the simplicity of the structure, since it has been the basic building block of all architecture since the time of the influential 1st century BC Roman architect Vitruvius who argued that any building worth its salt should possess ‘firmitas’, ‘utilitas’, and ‘venustas’, i.e. it should be sturdy, functional, and aesthetically appealing. 

Benedictine monk Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier went a shedlike step further in his 1753 treatise Essai sur l’architecture promulgating the theory of the ‘Primitive Hut’. Essentially, he contended that his architect peers were guilty of over-elaboration in their work and should always create with the simplicity of the rustic hut uppermost in their thoughts since it links us intimately with the natural world. “The primitive hut is not only the origin of built form but is also the very personification of all that is right in architecture,” he wrote. The frontispiece of the second edition included a bucolic illustration of just what Laugier envisaged, a hut with four tree trunks as pillars, topped with a roof made of branches and leaves. 

Even German architect and theoriser Gottfried Semper, who used part of his radical 1851 book The Four Elements of Architecture to pooh-pooh the theory that the primitive hut was the inspiration for ancient Greek temples, still believed that it represented “the sacred symbol of civilization”.

Certainly it’s a back to nature vision that has endured. In the 20th century, architectural historian Joseph Rykwert in his book On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History stressed that the primitive hut is “a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all building for people”. Similarly, architect Le Corbusier said that all modern man really wanted is a monk’s cell (he walked the walk by building his own hugely pared-down holiday home), while poet Dylan Thomas described his study on stilts in Wales as his “bard’s bothy”, a reference to the simple off-grid shelters used by agricultural workers in rural areas.

Around the world there are numerous examples of thinkers retreating to their sheds the better to do their hard thinking. In the early 1700s, one of the most widely read philosphers of ethics and aesthetics of his day, the 3rd Earl of Shaftsbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, built his two-storey Philosopher’s Tower in a field on his Dorset estate where he went to cogitate (you can spot it today from the B3078 between Wimborne and Cranborn). His contemporary, the 18th century Swedish philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg built a wooden garden summerhouse (or ‘lusthus’ in Swedish) which was, according to the Rev. Nicholas Collin of Philadelphia who visited him in 1766, “a kind of temple, to which he often retired for contemplation.”  

More recently the prolific spiritualist writer Thomas Merton author of Thoughts In Solitude (1958), which makes the cases for solitude and reflection in our increasingly hectic modern age, spent several hours a day in deep thought in a tool shed just outside the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, USA. In the same country, in rural Connecticut, writer Michael Pollan offered an interesting mix of philosophy and shedbuilding in his book A Place of My Own (1997), an account of how he built his writing hut but also discussing the role of work in our society, and how architecture can shape our lives.

It’s not hard to understand why so many of our finest minds have been partial to a shed. Where else can you get some proper me time, away from the hurly burly of life and the constant demands of other people? Laugier talked about the importance of humans constructing a dwelling “which covers but not buries “. That’s a shed. Sometimes, you need to think small to think big. 

Last year’s strenuous efforts to secure a publisher for a book on snooker have not (yet) proved successful, but hope springs eternal in the half-decent player’s breast. Meanwhile, here from the proposal is a sample chapter, ‘The wrong kind of silence’, about the unusual sporting atmosphere at the annual World Snooker Championship in Sheffield:

In a world increasingly polluted by beeps and alarms and notifications, the silence during play at the Crucible is as tangible as the roar of the crowd at Twickenham. Rustle a cough sweet wrapper a little too boisterously and brace for the referee to lead a very public witch hunt.

I went to a Quaker school in York and so grew up with the daily extended periods of silence for worship that are that faith’s signature component. As a result, I’m fully trained in sitting for long periods in large warm rooms in almost total quiet, and only occasionally falling asleep. But what makes for a contemplative atmosphere of self-reflection is usually more unnerving when it comes to professional sport arenas.

This was particularly evident in 2020 when the covid lockdown regulations bit hard into the world snooker championship. Football and cricket matches played under lockdown conditions without its raucous spectators reduced the contests to what felt more like training sessions, and organisers consequently began experimenting with adding fake background crowd noise for viewers. Ironically, it was also true that watching snooker at home without its sturdily quiet spectators also felt strangely uncomfortable with its wrong kind of silence, a sterile absence rather than the customary muffled reaction. Snooker needed its hushed hordes back.

Very few Quaker meetings are in fact noiseless. People often feel moved to speak, and simply stand up and share their thought with everybody, what Quakers describe as ‘ministry’. While this would be frowned upon in the Crucible, the world championship is not played in a noiseless vacuum. Yes, the arena is an almost wordless space for spectators, an oasis of quiet as the outside world squawks about its daily business, but spectators do sneeze, cough, and fiddle with confectionery (somebody sitting next to me a few years ago ate about two dozen Starbursts that he’d unwrapped before play started and transferred into a piece of noise-cancelling Tupperware).

And of course there is regular mild clapping as well as delighted whooping at remarkable shots, both entirely permissible. Only between frames, once the action on the table is temporarily over, is a restrained noise level briefly acceptable, and even here the referees repeat their ‘Quiet please’ calls, aided by spectators self-policing themselves with the occasional pointed Paddington glare, sometimes even cranking up their displeasure to the highest notch of a ‘sshhh’.

The unspoken issue of silence – strangely not a concept mentioned at all in the governing body World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association’s rulebook – came noticeably to the fore in 2020 when the championship was moved into the television timeslot vacated by the postponed Tokyo Olympics. The concerns of the organisers on day one when a limited number of socially distanced spectators were allowed in were fully realised on day two when Boris Johnson’s updated protocols halted even this restricted gathering. However, the play went on until some clever production person realised that an unexpected vital ingredient in the television coverage was missing. Noise.

So in came an audience applause track that played over the speakers in the Crucible itself, not just on the television for viewers at home. It was, well… better than nothing and certainly less annoying than the canned laughter on early Scooby Doo cartoons, but it just didn’t sound very natural. As well as the absence of coughing and mobile phones pinging off, it didn’t have those restrained ‘oohs’ when a long pot rattles in the jaws, or the light chuckles when there’s a fluke or a fly bothers the player at the table slightly.

It wasn’t even clear to the players what was going on sometimes. In the middle of a break during his first round match against Thepchaiya Un-Nooh, Ronnie O’Sullivan looked completely mystified when the virtual crowd suddenly went wild, and only slightly less baffled even after referee Marcel Eckardt explained what was happening (Matthew Stevens had made a century break behind the curtain on the other table – to be fair, it also appeared to puzzle Stevens too). There were definitely mixed reactions to the piped-in ripples of clapping which also featured at key moments such as the end of frames and impressive shots, but John Higgins, who beat Stevens 10-5, gave it the thumbs up compared to what he said was like a church mass atmosphere without it. He also mischievously suggested adding an occasional missing audio loop, the sound of somebody opening a packet of crisps.

Some silences simply reflect what’s happening in the wider world. In 2021 the Crucible held a minute of quiet on the Saturday of Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, and two years later Sunday play was deliberately halted at 3pm during the afternoon session in the Mark Selby-Gary Wilson and Jack Lisowski-Anthony McGill matches while the Government tested its emergency alert system which pinged every mobile phone in the UK. As with the covid noise track, things did not go entirely smoothly – alarms were heard inside the arena just before as well as bang on the promised time, then again just as Selby was about to break off in the 10^th frame, and again once he’d struck the white.

But of course the question of maintaining silence at the Crucible has a much longer history. Of the many, many ways the world championship differs from our weekly Wednesday night sessions at the local snooker club (Luca Brecel, for example has to deal with dried beer spills on the baize far less frequently than us), this is perhaps the biggest. While reasonably peaceful, our club is never definitively tomblike and when all dozen tables are being used there is an appreciable hubbub, although even we drop our trivial chattering when one of us reaches the giddy heights of a 20+ break.

Although everybody hates a heckle (Eckardt had a spectator removed from the John Higgins-David Gilbert semi-final in 2019 for shouting at him to ‘shut up’) my personal pet peeve is the titchy headphone/earpiece many people now use to listen to commentary which makes a tinny buzzing sound at the best of times, and can actually be heard quite clearly if neighbouring spectators have them turned up too loudly. Shaun Murphy called for them to be banned after his tense exchange in live commentary with Dennis Taylor at the 2025 championship about Zhao Zintong’s fame or lack thereof caused a ripple of laughter in the auditorium, entirely irrelevant to the play. These incidents always remind me of the scene in the 1949 film The Third Man when Joseph Cotton’s character Holly Martins is watching a play in German which he doesn’t understand, and the camera shows the audience roaring with laughter while an entirely bemused Holly fiddles with his programme.

Another way that commentators can be part of the problem rather than the cure is simply by yacking too loudly. In 2021 at 4-4 in the match between Murphy and Judd Trump, both players and the referee Colin Humphries were able to clearly hear the sage words emerging from the commentary box and asked for quieter analysis. On the Eurosport commentary – where they were gleefully quick to point out that they themselves were not the guilty party – Dominic Dale very graciously offered that: “Sometimes the commentary boxes are very warm and the door at the back is just left open and the commentators can be heard by the players.”

Probably the biggest bugbear though over the last quarter of a century has been the mobile phones that have not been turned off despite polite requests from MCs and referees. An early example of the havoc they can wreak came in 2002 when Stephen Hendry was put off several times during a potential 147 in his semi-final against Ronnie O’Sullivan. Not only did referee Eirian Williams warn about mobile use, WPBSA tournament director Mike Ganley also stepped into the arena to emphasise that anybody whose phones rang would be asked to leave immediately, sadly a reminder which 25 years later continues to be repeated by Rob Walker before every match. In 2018, Eurosport commentator and 1997 Crucible semi-finalist Neal Foulds came up with an idea – maybe not a good idea, but still an idea – to fix the problem. He suggested fans left their phones outside the arena during play, picking them up again on leaving, strangely not a solution picked up on by the organisers.

This is another of my pieces for Fine Books and Collections magazine which is an extended megamix version of the article which appeared in the latest Winter edition and had to be cut to fit the space. As I’ve done previously with these things, I’ve simplified my questioning flannel so you get more of the interviewee’s interesting stuff.

Sheila Markham, Librarian of The Travellers Club in Pall Mall since 1994 and from 1998 to 2022 Library Scribe at Brooks’s, has reached a new landmark in her ongoing project to interview book dealers and collectors with the publication of A Third Book of Booksellers.

After developing a taste for rare and antiquarian books while a student as Treasurer of the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles, she joined Marlborough Rare Books, where she says: “It was here that I first met the book dealers and collectors whose passion, eccentricity, expertise and occasional roguery inspired the idea that perhaps I would one day write about them.”

She later worked with the distinguished bookseller Colin Franklin and then Christer von der Burg’s Han Shan Tang before setting up her own bookselling business in 1991. That year Barry Shaw, editor of Bookdealer magazine, invited her to write a series of profiles of antiquarian booksellers and she continued for a decade until it ceased publication in 2010 at which point she had profiled 117 of the industry’s leading lights. In 2011, Nicolas Barker asked her to continue the column for The Book Collector magazine, and the series is ongoing.

The fruits of her labours can be seen on her website (www.sheila-markham.com) and she has also published two previous related collections, A Book of Booksellers and A Second Book of Booksellers. In December 2025, A Third Book of Booksellers came out with an introduction by the Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, Richard Ovenden. Browsing the archive – which also includes book collectors - is a real pleasure, with several surprising headlines (“Nial and Margaret Devitt: We’ve been very happy in bookselling - whatever Nial may have told you about wanting to run a bordello in Istanbul.”).

What do you enjoy about the interviews?

I was attracted to the world of rare books initially because of their intrinsic interest, but I soon discovered that my colleagues were an amazingly varied, talented and often eccentric group of people, whose working lives were also full of interest. It soon became obvious that there are many different ways to sell a book.

Several interviewees have told me over the years that you need to be a good storyteller to be a bookseller, and I have tried to reflect this in my published conversations with the trade.

In 1995, I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Moore, who had a wonderful bookshop in Hertfordshire. It was a perfect example of the dying breed of provincial second-hand and rare bookshops, and is now a block of flats. Thirty years later, I believe that Eric’s definition of bookselling still holds true, namely  ‘the most humane, sociable, ill-organised, yet absorbing form of commerce to be found anywhere’.

What have you learned through them?

Apart from an insight into different business models - sole traders, large firms, family businesses, shops and offices, specialist and generalists - I have repeatedly been struck by the number of different routes into the trade. As Sabrina Izzard memorably said “Nobody grows up saying that they want to be an antiquarian bookseller. It is not one of the established career options”.

I’ve also repeatedly heard that, as life becomes increasingly digital, there is no substitute for contact between buyer and seller, and indeed physical contact with the books themselves. I’ve been told that the role of book fairs and bookshops is more important than ever for building one-to-one relationships with collectors and indeed colleagues. As it’s based on trust, it’s a relationship that takes time to nurture and, as such, is completely out-of-step with the one-click culture of online commerce.

Do you have a favourite interviewee?

Actually I would prefer not to single out favourite interviewees, but I would describe the experience of meeting William Poole (1935-2021) as the most memorable. He is believed to be the first person to have become a bookseller despite being blind since birth. William entered the trade with the help of an interest-free loan from the RNIB, for whom he had worked as an editor in Braille publishing. With the help of Patrick Pollard, his amanuensis, he developed a respected business specialising in the history of Classical scholarship. When I interviewed William in 2013, we talked about Google’s project to create a monumental digital library of the world’s rare books. It was at a time of much talk about the ‘death’ of the printed book, but William was the first of my interviewees to point out the fragility of digitised text. “We don’t yet know how long these technologies will last, or how stable they are, compared to what we know about the durability of parchment and paper.”

What do the interviews reveal has changed in the trade over time?

I began interviewing booksellers in the early 1990s, when the trade had hardly changed since the invention of printing. Since the project began, interviewees have had to come to terms with the vastly increased cost of running a shop, and business overheads in general. At the same time, the budgets of institutional libraries have been cut, or are now spent on IT rather than rare books. In the period in question, there have also been some high-profile thefts, which have in turn resulted in increased bureaucracy on an international scale, particularly in regard to establishing provenance.

Susanne Schulz-Falster has been in the trade for over 40 years, and is in no doubt that it has become more complex. When I interviewed her in 2023,  Susanne mentioned some of the reasons for the increased complexity: “I’m not just referring to Brexit and increased shipping costs. Many institutions require an unbroken record of provenance before they can make a purchase. It might be possible to provide in the case of certain cultural objects, but is much more difficult for books. The whole point of printing a book is to circulate it as widely as possible. Are we to assume that an Italian book in England must have been illegally exported? And how likely is it that each successive owner of an ordinary 18th century book would have left their ownership mark in it? I don’t deal in stolen books, and I hope I’ve never sold one, but the due diligence pendulum has swung too far.”

Why are the interviews important to share?

I like to think that the interviews convey the voice of experience, and might be useful alongside more conventional methods of educating young booksellers, and inspiring newcomers to enter the trade. As apprenticeships hardly exist these days, and internships are usually only available at a few of the larger firms, I hope that my work will provide those starting out in the rare book trade with a source of useful information and guidance not easily found elsewhere.

Has anybody declined to be interviewed? And is there any interviewee that you wished you could have spoken to?

Several people have declined to be interviewed. I’m particularly sorry that their number included Diana Parikian (1926-2012). Diana was one of the first female antiquarian booksellers in this country to make her mark at a time when the trade was so male-dominated. She combined joie de vivre and great scholarship, and was also an accomplished musician. She met the English conductor and violinist Neville Marriner, her first husband, at the Royal College of Music, where she was studying cello and piano. Her second husband Manoug Parikian, was Professor of Violin at the Royal Academy of Music. She helped him to build an important collection of early Armenian printed books, now in Eton College Library. I admired her enormously when I was working in the rare book trade, and met her frequently on her visits to my boss at Marlborough Rare Books.

What do you collect yourself?

I don’t collect anything for the simple reason that I have impossibly expensive tastes. If I had the resources I would collect early Japanese books and Japanese calligraphy.

Slightly later than in previous years, here is what I read - and in the order in which I did so - for pleasure in 2025, the eighth year on the trot for which I have kept such tabs. As before, I have not included what I read for work purposes, and have put an asterisk by the ones I really enjoyed. I really recommend keeping a similar sort of diary list if you don’t already as I can just about remember what I read last January, but not five years ago.

Reading plans for 2026 include CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, plus the start of a long-planned attempt to read individual histories of each of the Kings and Queens of England in order of accession, starting arguably a bit too early with Alfred of Wessex. I’d be very interested to hear what you read in 2025 and what you intend to read in 2026 (apart of course from my The Philosophy of Sheds published by the British Library in early May).

So, here’s my 2025:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen

* A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell (asterisk for whole series)

A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge

Acts and Omissions by Catherine Fox

Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted by Lissa Evans

A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell

Out There by Jamie Mackendrick

* The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes

To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Blossomise by Simon Armitage (illustrated by Angela Harding)

The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

* Minnow on the Say by Phillipa Pearce

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

At Lady Molly’s by Anthony Powell

Come Christmas by Eleanor Farjeon

The Crucible’s Greatest Matches by Hector Nunns

Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell

Bookish: How Reading Shaped Our Lives by Lucy Mangan

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

* The Card by Arnold Bennett

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle

The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell

The Postal Paths: Rediscovering Britain’s Forgotten Trails and the People Who Walked Them by Alan Cleaver

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Sun Has Got His Hat On by Derek Randall with Alan Lee

The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell

* You Are Here by David Nicholls

Selected Poems by Stephen Spender

Dickens & Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby

Sharpe’s Eagle by Bernard Cornwall

The Soldier’s Art by Anthony Powell

* A Room with a View by EM Forster

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

Floodlights and Touchlines by Rob Steen

The Fell by Sarah Moss

The Strange House by Raymond Briggs [pictured top from excellent new Manderley Press edition]

* The History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke

The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell

* Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills

Greengates by R.C. Sherriff

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Penguin Scribe by Steve Hare

Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell

Midfield Dynamo by Adrian Duncan

Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems by Grace Nichols

Hearing Secret Harmonies by Anthony Powell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

* Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood

Shogun by James Clavell (ongoing)

* Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (ongoing)

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice” wrote E.M. Forster in A Room with a View, which sums up Nick’s experience throughout the Dance. Or as Queen’s song It’s a Kind of Magic puts it:

This flame that burns inside of me
I’m hearing secret harmonies
It’s a kind of magic

The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time

Although I think Harmonies is more of a whimper than a banger (I’m not convinced by Scorpio, the Quiggin twins are tiresome, and Gibson Delavacquerie is a bit dull), it’s still sad to say goodbye to the gang, Widmerpool a man of action (of sorts) to the end, the marvellous Sunny Farebrother about the only one still going strong, Jean still not entirely out of the picture, and the superb Robert Burton quote to bring it all to a barnstorming conclusion.

My father once said that he knew Bertie Wooster better than he knew anybody else because he knew absolutely everything about him that there was to know. I feel a similar bond with the Dance folks, and although I’m always amazed by some people’s inability to divorce their feelings for a character from the actor who portrays them, they do feel very real to me. Canon Paul Fenneau certainly gives me very tangible creeps. As Tony makes clear regularly throughout the series, everybody is extraordinary, everybody has a story to tell.

If this is your introduction to Powell’s writings and you’d like to continue the association, there are plenty of ways to do so. First of all, I’d recommend his earlier novels (I’m less keen on the post-Dance ones), Venusberg, Afternoon Men, Agents and Patients, and especially What's Become of Waring? which are all looseners for the main event.

Then, on a more personal level, there are four volumes of memoir, three volumes of diaries, and AP’s commonplace book published as A Writer’s Notebook which is perhaps the best insight into the man, not to mention nice and short. If you’re really keen, there are also a couple of books of his collected reviews and short essays. The best place for a full bibliography is The Anthony Powell Society’s website (where you can buy all kinds of other Powelliana including a rather nifty tote bag which I can recommend from personal use). Away from the page, the television adaption of Dance is not bad - Simon Russell Beale is a fabulous Widmerpool - but has the impossible goal of squeezing 12 books into 400 minutes, making it more of a soap opera.

Beyond Powell, there are numerous other series of novels with long timespans (and in the case of Ronald Welch’s Carey family books for older children - which can also be enjoyed by adults of course - this stretches to more like 800 years). On my TBR list are C.P. Snow’s series of novels Strangers and Brothers which covers a very similar time frame to Dance, and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence which runs to a baker’s dozen and has a female rather than a male central narrator. For a Welsh angle, consider trying How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn which is much more famous than its three sequels which follow little Huw Morgan from the valleys to Patagonia and back again.

I’d also put in a good word for Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (a shorter series, between 3 and 5 long depending on how you count), Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazelet Chronicles (five, but her niece is writing a continuation…), Jonathan Coe’s kind of trilogy comprising The Rotter’s Club, The Closed Circle, and Middle England (1970s-Brexit), and the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser (1830s-1890s and not for those looking for any kind of politically correct hero). And then of course there’s Proust. There’s always Proust.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed getting to grips with this waltz through the decades. It’s been a real pleasure to read it along with you month-by-month and to hear your considered thoughts about the experience, both in the comments section and directly to me off-Substack. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the sequence coming to an end, and while a reunion to celebrate the 100th is possibly a little optimistic, perhaps we can all gather together again for the 60th?

The shortest of Advent reminders that this year’s crop of my titles are I think particularly giftable, as well as readily available from your local independent bookseller, the High Street chains, and the usual folks online. I also have a small supply of them - and others from the back catalogue - at home and would be delighted to sign/inscribe them for your chosen recipient.

So, pictured above is When Books Go Bad, the most recent offering and published by the cheery folk at that bastion of bookishness, the British Library. Inside are insults, fisticuffs, books as weapons, bad romance, and mucho, mucho more, all delivered in a sprightly red package. Get it now before the film rights are snapped up and you can only get copies with garish Hollywood glitter all over them. There’s even an accompanying playlist about books on Spotify which is gratis, sale or no sale.

My Year of Reading Welshly came out in the summer to popular acclaim (“It’s designed to be fun, and it is” Nation Cymru) and would make an ideal gift for anybody thinking about a reading programme for 2026 or is interested in Cymru. Lots of new writers to explore (mostly, but not all Welsh) and books to discover (all about Wales and Welsh society and language) are picked out and dissected without offering any spoilers. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a playlist for this one too available for the same low, low price of nothing.

Finally, my first book of the year was While There Is Tea There Is Hope, a stocking-sized volume if ever there was one, all about the important part that tea played during WWII on the frontline and the home front. Richly illustrated, it is published by HarperCollins in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum.

Even better, you can get 20% off if you order it before December 18 by clicking through to the IWM here and using the code WHILETHEREISTEA at the checkout stage. You can also win a bumper bunch of related While There is Tea goodies worth £75 at the publishers’ site https://collins.co.uk/pages/christmas-tea-giveaway which includes a nice cup of tea (cue Gracie).

Happy holiday reading! And purchasing.