Head down the rabbit hole with me into the world of books about books with Kate and Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers podcast.
From meta-fictional narratives to booksellers with shadowy agendas, we’re flagging up some of our favourites both for behind-the-scenes insights into the literary world, and for the way they allow us to discover yet more books we might want to read. From Alberto Manguel’s library of 35,000 titles, to Alejandro Zambra’s essay collection On Not Reading, we’re considering a broad spectrum of perspectives that help us reflect on and enrich our reading lives. And so listen in to hear what happens when two book podcasters get together to talk about their favourite topic.
Booklist
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Packing my Library by Alberto Manguel
The Book Forger by Joseph Hone
Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten
Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati
Further reading / listening
And here’s Manguel sharing his favourite bookstores and libraries with Biblio-file podcast host Nigel Beale
Umberto Eco’s library on Youtube
Kate’s Moleskine reading journal
Read this wonderful review of Shelf Life from Australian critic Beejay Silcox, who lived for two years in Cairo and knew the Diwan bookstore well.
Transcript
Kate: Hello and welcome to the Book Club Review. I’m Kate, and this is the podcast about book clubs and the books that get people talking
Something a little different. This episode, as I invite you to head down the rabbit hole with me. Into the world of books about books. Accompanying us into this particular wonderland is Joseph Dance, host of the Curious Readers Podcast. From Metafictional narratives to booksellers with shadowy agendas, we are flagging up some of our favorites, both for behind the scenes insights into the literary world.
And for the way they allow us to discover yet more books we might want to read from Alberto Mangue’s Library of 35,000 titles to Alejandro Zambra’s essay collection On Not Reading. We are considering a broad spectrum of perspectives that help us reflect on and enrich our reading lives. And so listen in to hear what happens when two book podcasters get together to talk about their favorite topic.
I love the subject of books about books. It’s complete catnip to me. Whenever I come across these books. I snapple them up. I’m always so excited by people who choose to write about the thing that I love so much, and I’m always so interested by what they have to say. How about you? What are your general feelings about books about books?
Joseph: One of the things I like doing is reading about other people’s voracious appetite for books I don’t know about. I haven’t read them, but I can still get consumed by their passion for those books. Which is really what I’m looking for with books about books, especially reading diaries or biblio-memoir.
I’m looking to live through someone’s life, vicariously as a reader, probably a more consistent, more disciplined reader than I am, and I think [00:02:00] that’s what attracts me to the genre as well. It’s quite aspirational and. Potentially, it feels like an extension to the conversations that I’m having with friends and other readers in real life.
Kate: Well, speaking about those conversations since we spoke last on the pod, you’ve started your own podcast, so previously you were podcasting as part of another show. Then you started your own podcast, curious Readers, which I really love. It’s you and your friend Amanda, two, as you say, curious readers swapping information about books.
How is all that going? And has that changed the way that you are reading and engaging with books now that you’re making a show every two weeks? Right. It’s a lot.
Joseph: It is a lot. I used to be part of a podcast called Novel Thoughts with a friend called Sapphire who’s now off traveling the world. I really enjoyed being part of that podcast. It was a lot of work reading for a weekly show. I thought it’d be easier to read for a biweekly show. It turns out, it feels like the same kind of pressure. I think we’re on episode 12 or 13 at the moment, so it’s going great guns. We’ve got past that episode three watermark, which is apparently where most podcasts die in a ditch depressingly.
Kate: I didn’t know about that. So when I listened to the episode where you were talking, I was like, oh my God, I didn’t even know that there was some kind of hurdle to cross.
Joseph: Yeah. Apparently 60, 70% of all podcasts. End after episode three or five or something like that. It’s quite early on in any podcast career.
So it’s good to get past that.
Yeah, and we just really enjoy it. It’s an opportunity for Amanda and I to meet up and talk about books. I think it’s made us more voracious readers actually. It’s made us more curious.
Kate: I absolutely love it and I recommend it to people and when I do, I warn them. I just say, but be careful ’cause you will go away.
A ton of things you want to add to your TBR, which I hope is what people also say about the book Club review, but I feel that that’s how I feel
Joseph: about your podcast. Yeah. When I listen to your show. Absolutely. 100%. It’s like a punishment and a reward at the same time. Yeah.
Kate: Let’s come back to books about books.
Even having said, oh, hey, I’d love to do this as a subject, and you very kindly said, you’d come and chat to me about it. I then realized when I was thinking about what books we were gonna do, even that is quite a broad field, isn’t it? There’s fiction where it’s centered around the idea of a book, and there’s nonfiction about book selling, or I think about Susan Orlean, The Library Book.
Fantastic book about books. One of my all time faves. Books written by booksellers. Quite a popular genre, books set in bookshops, and I didn’t want to rule out any of those categories. So this is a smorgasbord approach, I think, where we’re gonna be picking a few and not worrying too much about how rigidly they fit into the category of books.
About books. Do you wanna kick us off what’s on top of your pile?
Joseph: On the top of my pile is, so it’s the Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón because we were talking about struggling to find fiction that set in a bookish environment and it be a believable story. And I’ve read quite a few books set in bookshops and they’ve been mildly disappointing.
Maybe we can get onto that later on, but I thought this one, the shadow of the wind had a bookish theme and it carried it well. It’s a book that I, I should say I haven’t read for a long time, but I do have fond memories of it. So the book is about a character called Daniel. He’s a young boy. He lives in 1940s post-Civil War Barcelona, with his father, who’s a bookseller.
He owns a bookshop in the city. At the beginning of the book, he gets to visit this underground labyrinth th library called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he finds this very special book called The Shadow of the Wind, as per the title. He discovers it was written by a man called Julian Carricks, and when he goes to look for Julian Carrick’s back catalogs or any proof of his existence, he finds that all the books are being scrubbed from the record and Julian is nowhere to be found.
And basically Daniel has the only copy of the shadow of the wind in existence. The story really gets going from there. It’s very much set in Daniel’s father’s bookshop. There’s a bookseller there who Daniel makes friends with, and they begin to do a bit of amateur sleuthing and digging around Julian’s disappearance.
But as they do so, they draw the attention of. Like it’s nefarious police officer. I’m gonna forget his name. It’s, I want to say Ex Inspector Fumé. But that’s French, isn’t it? It’s probably something like Fumero. He’s this murderous character who we discover is trying to stop people from finding out what’s happened to Julian.
Oh, I should say it has a, and I think this is a big thing about books. About books. It has a book within a book structure. So the central novel is an account of what happened to Julian and his ill-fated love Penelope, the woman he wanted to elope with. And then the surrounding book is Daniel and his bookseller buddy trying to solve the mystery and stay alive in the present day.
And I’ve just remembered another book that’s like that, which is also about books that I could have talked about, which is Possession By A.S. Byatt.
Kate: Oh, of course. Have
Joseph: you read that? I mean, with the two academics? Yeah.
Kate: It’s sort of a book about books, but really it’s a book about poetry, right? It is, yeah.
About Victorian poetry. So I wouldn’t, it certainly didn’t immediately spring to my mind. That’s true. Yeah. But you’re right, you are right. Legitimately. That’s a book about books.
Joseph: Yeah,
Kate: I was gonna say, looking it up, Shadow the Wind. Believed to have sold 15 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best selling books of all time.
So I think the real question is yes. Is it any good? Should I read Shadow of the Wind?
Joseph: Do you know what? I’ve recommended it to a lot of people. I would say it’s 50 50. It’s quite a Marmite book. It’s quite gothic. It’s quite dark. The post-war Barcelona setting is very baroque if you like that kind of thing.
If you like that kind of vibe, go for it. It does have a strong book theme, so it does fit with what we’re trying to achieve here. There’s some annoying subplots in there, but if you focus on the main theme, trying to find out what’s happened to Julian Carricks, I think it works as a page Turner, a thriller.
I think it was first published in the English 2000 2001, and he has been writing, so there’s four books in the series. So the second book is a prequel wall, which I’ve read, and then the subsequent two books are sequels. The last one came out in 2018, and I’ve been meaning to read the last two for a long time, but maybe that tells you everything.
You know that there’s four books in the series. I’ve not read the last two.
Kate: I mean, it’s a bit like Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove is an extraordinary book. Yeah, my friend Andy. Then went on to read the other books in the sequence and there’s a prequel and then there are sequels, and he was like, you know what?
Nah, just not so great. That was my instinct. I was like, this book is so great. I’m not going to venture beyond its pages. Oh, right, okay. A complete, perfect experience and. Not gonna mess with it. And I was pleased to have that endorsed by Andy who did read on and was like, yeah, I mean, I, I didn’t think they were bad.
They weren’t bad. The other books, they just weren’t as good. There’s something about that book, a particular magic of that book. It really, really works. I guess I ask whether it’s any good because it’s so often my experience, I think more in the fiction realm. Books about books don’t live up to my expectations.
So I have high hopes and then I think they fall down. ’cause generally I find them a bit contrived. Just something about trying to make that conceit work. The idea of a book about books or something where, as you say, the meta element to it, where the author’s taking this idea of a book and that’s the central part of the imaginary scenario they’re trying to create.
I think it’s quite hard to pull off. So when I was really trying to think about fiction. Books about books. I struggled to find ones that I really thought, yes, that’s really good. The one that did come to mind, actually, maybe I should do a, an example of one I didn’t think worked, and you might not agree, but for me, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Which I had high hopes of. I thought this sounds great. Really New York Times Bestseller, charming
Joseph: Kate. That doesn’t mean anything nowadays though, does it?
Kate: Charming, lovable, first novel of mysterious books and dusty bookshops. A witty and delightful love letter to both the old book world and the new.
I can’t even really remember. I just remember, yeah, like a young man working in this bookshop. People keep coming in and they’re not really buying things. They’re going to some mysterious area in the shop, and he starts to realize that it’s all affront for something else that’s going on. And then he’s got some friends who ropes into the.
Try and figure out what’s going on, like what’s the story, you know, what is the secret and what they discover is an ancient secret that can only be solved by modern means and a global conspiracy guarded by Mr. Penumbra himself, who has mysteriously disappeared. I cared so little about the outcome of any of these adventures and the characters and what happened to them.
I just never finished it. I read about half of it and I was just like, meh. So it can be risky, but one that I thought, you know what? I think this book is perfection is Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop. Have you read that?
Joseph: Yes. I think it tops the charts in terms of fiction about bookshops. And I was just gonna say about that last book you actually describing, it won me over what put me off instantly, and I think this is a hallmark of fiction setting bookshops or around books, is that they always have cutesy, [00:11:00] zany titles and I don’t know, maybe the literary snob in me just gets put off by that. But The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald is the winner in my book.
Kate: It’s so great. It’s such a classic. I’m sure that most listeners will have read it, but just in case for any reason you haven’t, maybe you’ve only read The Blue Flower and you’ve never got round to reading The Bookshop.
It’s set in a small Suffolk town called Hardborough. Which actually is based in a real place, which I go to every year. This is Southwold in Suffolk, where Penelope Fitzgerald once lived. She wasn’t very happy when she lived there. She didn’t have a great time and she worked in what is now Southwold Books, which actually these days, it’s one of those secret unbranded branches of Waterstones.
It’s a lovely bookshop run by my lovely friend Steph, the manager there, and if you ask her, Steph will take you to the door and she will point you to the shop on the high street, which was Penelope Fitzgerald’s book shop. So she takes this idea of this town that’s perhaps not entirely welcoming to people coming in from outside, and she has her character, Florence Green, who wants to open a bookshop.
She thinks it’ll be lovely to open a small bookshop in this town. She’s got fairly modest ambitions. She’s not trying to change the world. She just wants to open a bookshop and sell some books. And the community are not particularly open to the idea, but at the beginning you feel like it could have gone either way, but she’d make some missteps.
And one of the missteps is that she rents a building that one of the local grand ladies of the town had earmarked for an art center. And Florence Green has absolutely no reason whatsoever to back away from this space that she thinks is gonna be the perfect place for her bookshop. And so she goes through with it, but as a result, she makes an enemy of this woman.
And then very sadly, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to run this shop. It’s a good example of characters. I think Penelope’s Fitzgerald is amazing at who are these women who have almost like so much promise and potential, but are a little bit defeated by almost like the forces in society around them.
And I really relate to these characters
Joseph: and self-sabotage as well, I think.
Kate: Yes, exactly. These wonderful, just flawed, very human individuals. And I mean, you are totally on Flora’s side. You absolutely root for her all the way and. The things that are rallied against her. You know, she’s got a very unhelpful ghost in the shop.
There’s a brilliant relationship with a local teenager that she’s got coming in and helping her to keep the stop organized. He’s a very funny character and this wonderful friendship with this elderly, quite aristocratic gentleman, great reader and man of letters, who is very supportive of Florence and what she’s trying to do, but he’s also very old.
Kind of have to read it to see where it goes in the end. When I first read it, I loved it so much and I was very disappointed by the ending. I was very disappointed by the way Fitzgerald chose to end it, and I thought to myself, Ugh, if she made a different decision there, this book would be everyone’s favorite.
Topping all the lists. It would’ve been such a huge success when I came back to it [00:14:00] years later, being much older. I love the ending that she gave it, and it felt much truer to me and more meaningful, even though it’s not what I really wanted to happen, because that’s life. You know? Sometimes things in life just don’t go the way we want ’em to, and Penelope Fitzgerald knows that.
Joseph: Yeah, I love the ending. I thought it was very French. Yeah. Without giving any spoilers. I was just laughing ’cause I was just looking at some of the, ’cause this came out in, was it the eighties or the seventies?
Kate: ’78.
Joseph: ’78, yeah. And I was just looking at some of the original newspaper commentary on the book when it first came out.
The Times called it a ‘harmless, conventional little anecdote. Well tailored but uninvolving.’ And the Guardian
Kate: – absolutely brutal.
Joseph: Yeah, just don’t say anything. The Guardian said ‘A disquieting novel about’, and I really like this because I live in a small seaside town, ‘… about really nasty people living in a really nice little coastal town.’
Kate: [laughs] and she’s so good on the little asides, so she talks about the people who tend to live somewhere like real-life Southwold, and she says they’re all retirees who just go there and take up watercolor painting. And the annoying thing is that most of them are really good at it. That just made me fall about because it’s hilarious. They are all really good at watercolor painting.
Joseph: The whole thing is pitch perfect. I love the fact that the, um. Doesn’t she call the ghost a rapper? Yes, it’s a Poltergeist, but yeah. ’cause it’s rapping and tatting all the time. Have you seen the film?
Kate: No, I haven’t.
Joseph: Yes. There’s a film with Emily Mortimer, who is perfectly cast.
Patricia Clarkson plays one of the antagonists, and Bill Nighy is in it as well. You can’t go wrong with Bill Nighy
Kate: as old gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten, Brigadier or whatever he is.
He’s described as, he’s like a badger. He kind of only emerges from his under great duress. Exactly. Exactly. I would love to watch that.
Actually. Well, just thinking about having done this lovely episode on books to screen. Now all I want to do is just sit down and watch films of books.
Joseph: Yeah, great. Way forward.
Kate: I might give up reading
Joseph: the podcast is gonna take a left field turn. Yeah, I’m sure it would be brilliant. Kate,
Kate: how about you? What else have you got on your stack?
Joseph: I am looking around me for my next book. So do you know about Alberto Manguel?
Kate: I do, but I haven’t read him and the reason I haven’t read him is ’cause I find him a bit dry. So when I’ve tried, okay. I have sort of slightly, but this is not good of me because I think his writing is beautiful and I feel very much like it’s my failure.
No, but he, he writes quite a lot about books, doesn’t he?
Joseph: He’s got a lot of books about the personal one. The personal to him and the cultural significance of reading and libraries and book collecting, and you are right. He can be quite philosophical and a little bit dry. I really like this. This is a companion book actually to another earlier book that he’s written about his personal library, which came out I think 2015 and it’s called The Library at Night,
Kate: It’s not unpacking my library. Is that something different?
Joseph: No, the book I’ve got is Packing my Library. Ah. So this is the book that came later. This is when it was time to pack the library away. The subtitle of the book is An Elegy and Ten Digressions, and the book basically starts with an elegy because after decades of living in a very beautiful 15th century home in the Loire Valley with his partner.
He has to, for a number of reasons, leave France, mainly professional. He’s taking up a job somewhere else, and he’s moving from this big palatial converted presbytery to a tiny, tiny, one bedroom flat on the, I think it’s the upper west side in Manhattan. Ah, so this is radical downsizing.
Kate: I’m looking at pictures of it. If you Google it, it looks like a bookshop.
Joseph: Really well, his flat, his apartment, I should say. I think this
Kate: must be the library that he left. So for example, is coming up here on a Spectator article and it’s entitled Goodbye to All that 2018. And it’s a shot of him in what I assume is the library that he said goodbye to.
Joseph: I have seen pictures of it. It’s magnificent. He basically had to dismantle his library, 35,000 books. His description of what’s in his library, I found hilarious. Not dry at all. He said there was nothing in there that would be on the NYT bestseller list he had.
Kate: So no Mr. Penumbra,
Joseph: no. Thousands of crime novels and thrillers, but not a single spy novel. Obviously. That’s an important distinction to make and I love. His banter about how he organized his books. He would organize some books by original language ’cause he’s a linguist. He can speak [00:19:00] multiple languages, but most things he would just loosely group in families and so he could have nonfiction and fiction from radically different branches of the reading spectrum.
I think one of his philosophies of reading that really interests me is he sees his bookshelves as autobiography. And that does sound maybe a little bit pompous, but I’ve always felt the same when I’ve organized my books at home. So maybe that’s why I’ve got an affinity for him and his view of reading.
I’ve always organized things around vibes. You know, I’ve never done anything alphabetically. So he has to pack up this library and basically what happens, the ten digressions of the book that run through the rest of the narrative are triggered by him as he’s working through each of these boxes. He has a new reflection on reading in exile.
There’s quite a lot in there about the role of literature and libraries in contemporary society. And because he’s so well read, and this is what you were talking about before, at the start of the show, you get 1,001 recommendations for what you should be reading next. Mm-hmm. So it is a really bad book to read.
I think if you’re trying to keep your TBR under control and. It’s really slim. It’s under a hundred pages. Mm. It took me a long time to read this because I was going through it with a pencil underlining books. I wanted to read underlying quotes. He’s very good at bringing in moments from history, reading history.
I would recommend any of his books. He’s got a reading diary as well, which is very interesting, where he takes a year to read a number of books, not necessarily the books that I would ever pick up.
Kate: Well this is what I mean. ’cause I have that upstairs and I actually put it out because that was my impression of it was I was sort of like, oh great, really want to find out his reading diary.
But then when I actually started reading it, it felt a bit like, oh, I’m not super interested in these things. Yeah, but, but you are totally making me feel like I must reengage with the work of Alberto Manguel. He’s clearly my kind of guy.
Joseph: Give him another go. He’s very meditative,
Kate: looking at the picture of his library.
Uh, just Google imaging it, it has popped up on a Reddit thread that’s r slash book porn, which, uh, amuses me that, that such a thread exists.
Joseph: Oh my gosh. Apparently his library, so he could obviously only take a few boxes to the apartment in Manhattan. He created everything up and stored it in Montreal.
And then he took on a job as the director or the chief honcho at the National Library of Argentina, where he’s originally from, I dunno if he writes about it, but I’m sure I read somewhere online. He made the difficult decision not to move his library over with him to Argentina. He ended up giving it to a research facility at university in Portugal.
Kate: Mm. But then it would all stay together and
Joseph: Exactly. Very much like Umberto Eco. He has that incredible library that he, he, the poster, he’s like aircraft hanger poster. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So
Kate: anyone who hasn’t seen it, I will put the link in the show notes. Yeah. There’s a video where he gives you a little tour of his library and the camera follows him down what feels like this endless corridor.
Joseph: He’s panting at the end of it
Kate: Because it’s so huge! And also because it’s Italian, it’s so standard for them. I feel for things to be beautifully designed and this is that as well. So not only that, but it’s all like, it’s not, I dunno if it’s Vitsoe, but it’s like really elegant white shelves and all these fantastic, it’s amazing.
Completely obsessed with Umberto Eco’s Library.
Joseph: It’s shelf porn.
Kate: Well saying as you took us to South America, maybe this is a moment just to flag up this book, which I actually picked up today. This is called Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra, ah, who I believe is Chilean. And this is a lovely white Fitzcarraldo.
Do you like that? It comes with the, what I feel is obligatory thumbprint on the, uh, on the cover. I was thinking, it reassures me that they often have a little mark on them. ’cause I just think a truly perfect white Fitzcarraldo, I would feel like I couldn’t even pick up. But because so often they have like a tiny mark on them, you’re like, ah, it’s fine.
It’s, someone’s already scuffed it up a bit. It’s fine. I can engage with it now. This book looks totally wonderful. It’s like everything I want from one of these kinds of books. It’s a really lovely discursive series of very short essays. Each one is only four or five pages long on all these different aspects of a reading life.
So it’s not just books, it’s libraries and conversations. And also it’s almost a little bit, sometimes it feels he’s throwing in a bit of fiction in there. So there was one story, wonderful story. I didn’t realize it was a story. I thought I was reading an essay, but then very cleverly, I realized that it felt like there was a bit of fiction in there as well.
It was just this magical story about reading a book and taking issue with the previous reader who had scribbled these comments. The margins. It’s this marginalia. So he was writing about his experience of reading this book with this other person’s comments present in the text and how he didn’t agree with the comments.
And so it became like this real dialogue between him and this unknown reader. That was all interesting enough. Mm-hmm. But the really clever thing about the story was the way that actually it kind of circled around, and you started to understand that he was the previous reader and that they were his own criticisms, but that now he was coming back to the book from a place where he felt differently about it, and then you started to understand that it was his own writing and that actually it was almost like him being very self sensorial.
Super critical of his own work. And so I just thought it and magical like in four or five pages all of this was going on. It was really great. And there was a lovely one about photocopying in praise of the photocopy. I’ll just read you this little bit. I loved it so much. Essays by Roland Barthes marked with fluorescent highlighters.
Poems by Carlos Deka or Henri Gaylin stapled together. Ring bound or precariously fastened novels by T Old Gummit or Clarice Lispector. It’s good to remember that we learn to read with these photocopies, which we waited for impatiently smoking on the other side of the copy shop window As citizens of a country where books are ridiculously expensive to buy and libraries are poorly equipped or non-existent, we got used to reading photocopies and we even came to find it charming.
In exchange for just a few pesos, some giant tireless machine could bestow on us the literature we so desired. We read those warm bundles of paper and then stored them on shelves as if they were real books ’cause that’s what they were to us.
Speaker 4: Rare beloved books, important books. And he goes on to write about a classmate who photocopied War and Peace at a rate of 30 pages a week.
And a friend who brought reams of light blue paper because according to her, the printing came out better. And I just, I love this little insight into, yeah, growing up in a country where, as he says, books are fantastically expensive, they’re not easily available or accessible, or perhaps at this time when, when he was a student.
And so as a result, there was this thriving photocopying culture. So I’m just flagging this up because I’m enjoying it so much. I idly thought, oh, that will be great for that Book’s about Books episode. Typically thinking, not realizing. Of course I bought it this afternoon. Obviously I wasn’t gonna have time to read it, but then what I did read of it, I found myself unexpectedly [00:26:00] loving.
Can I take a tiny digression to the importance of book journaling? So this is my reading journal. It’s a lovely mo scheme book journal. I bought it when I was in Vancouver visiting Laura. I was so excited about it at the time. Oh wow. I thought,
Speaker 4: ah, I will fill this book with my thoughts on the things that I’ve read and it will be an amazing record of my reading and I will absolutely love it
Kate: as my notes on the garden gets time by Olivia Laing.
And I am seemingly completely incapable of actually doing that. For some reason, sitting down and writing up notes on a book that I’ve read is almost beyond me, and I’ve done four or five in here. But one of the ones that I’ve done was on a book by Alejandro Samra, which was called The Private Life of Trees.
What amused me about this was ’cause I thought that name’s familiar. I’m sure I’ve read something by him. And I looked in the little bibliography at the front and I saw the private life of trees and I was like, is that the one? I was like, I remember enjoying that. But what was it about? Like no clue, nothing.
I couldn’t have told you a thing about it other than I quite enjoyed the writing. And then I found these lovely notes where I’ve written about The Private Life of Trees. I’ve given it four stars. I pulled out a quote that was one of the things on the cover of it. Every beaten pattern of being alive becomes revelatory and bright when narrated by Alejandro Zambra.
He is a modern wonder. Rivka Galchen said that, and then I’ve just talked a bit about the story. It’s very short. It’s a very tender story about a man reading bedtime stories to his child. And it’s got that lovely, anyone who’s basically ever read a bedtime story to a child will know there’s incredible intimacy to that reading experience.
Mm. It’s just really magical, like worth having children for, I’d say, just to be able to do that or borrowing some if you don’t have children of your own. So it had this incredible atmosphere, and I’ve pulled out these quotes that I really loved this main character. He said, Julian never wanted to be a doctor.
He wanted to be a writer, but being a writer is not exactly being someone. And so all of these little meaningful things. But anyway, the point is, oh my God. The value of a book journal, right? Like from now
Joseph: on you can go back and you can see that you’ve actually read this guy before.
Kate: But it’s like so interesting that I had completely forgotten.
And if I hadn’t written this down, all of those thoughts I had about that original book would’ve been completely lost. So I’m sorry if this seems really obvious to everybody, but this is, I’m feel like a warning. I’m telling you all, write down your thoughts about books. Find a book and write them down because you will be happy that you did when you’re looking back.
Joseph: I am very envious because I have tried to keep a physical book diary. Why is it so hard for, why is it so hard? It’s, I find it, my book journals normally disintegrate into shopping lists and I’m making notes and I’m doodling whilst I’m in work calls and things like that. The only thing that I found that stuck is.
I have large, not post-it notes, but index cards. They’re almost like an a five size index card that I use as a bookmark when I’m reading a book and I will scribble things on those index cards and I can go back and revisit if I want to talk about a book on the podcast or if I just wanna refresh my memory and I’ve got those going back years.
The only problem is they do vary in terms of quality. So some of them are really insightful. You know, I’ve got like Roland Barthes quotes and things like that, very pretentious. And then other things will just say a character’s name like Derek, and then there’ll be hyphen ‘idiot!’ So I’ve clearly had this huge emotional response to something in the plot or a character and decided I need to document this for posterity.
But it, yeah. It just gives me a laugh when I look back on them.
Kate: I love that though. And what a great idea. And where do you keep them all once you’ve filed them? Have you got some lovely card index file and are, are they alphabetized? How do you store them?
Joseph: I feel so ashamed now, Kate? No, they’re all crammed into, I think it’s a Waitrose carrier bag in the bottom drawer of my, of my tallboy, where I keep my underwear and my socks.
Kate: That is very unromantic.
Joseph: That is, yeah. And I get paid to be an Archivist as part of my day job, so that’s quite shameful. But yeah, I should get onto some kind of system.
Kate: Yeah. Um, I’m gonna send you a picture of something I have downstairs. It is the most beautiful card index box maybe by this lovely company called Mabel & Co, that are based in Suffolk and they are printers.
Wonderful, beautiful, beautiful work they do. But anyway, they do these amazing boxes designed to help people store things like that. And one of them is for books. I’ll send you a picture. I have it. I’m completely in love with it. Haven’t ever put a thing in it. It’s too perfect. I couldn’t tell me it. It’s Stein.
Joseph: It is, it’s like a white Fitzcarraldo. You’re hoping it’s gonna arrive scuffed, so you can actually open it and read it. Yeah. Yeah. I just, it’s the same problem.
Kate: I just think the point is it’s such a richly rewarding thing to do, and I just, I, I can never get my head around why it’s so hard. Anyway, listen, I digress.
Tell me about another one of your books.
Joseph: I’m gonna tell you about the book Forger, the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world. And this is by Joseph Hone, who I think has written a few books or at least one other book about a literary thriller story about a pamphlet being printed in medieval England and causing an uproar or something like that.
But this is a book all about a character called Thomas James Wise, who, where we meet him is this very well respected book collector in 1930s London. He’s made a name for himself as being able to sniff out perfect, pristine copies of modern classics and sell them on for quite a lot of money. And what Home says is before Wise came along the idea of a modern classic, which is kind of normal to us.
There’s shops like, is it Goldsborough? I always forget the name of it, that sells all of those first edition modern classics.
Kate: Oh, like one of those places in Bloomsbury where they’ve got, yeah. Yeah. I sort know where people go
Joseph: and buy like a first edition Graham Green as a gift because it’s someone’s favorite book or something.
Kate: I never venture into those shops ’cause I know that the prices are outta my league, but I sort of know absolutely.
Joseph: Yeah, I stare through the windows longly. But what I didn’t realize was that before Thomas Wise came along, that appetite for First edition modern classics didn’t exist in the book collecting world.
What people had gone after prior to Wise was copies of Shakespeare, copies of gda, real kind of when you think of old, valuable books. Yeah, Gutenberg, Bibles, things like that. And one of the reasons he popularized modern classics was that he just didn’t have the money to buy these at auction houses. So he saw all this as an easy way of buying up fairly old books and selling them onto an American market.
In the 1920s, thirties, there are a lot of people making a lot of money in the new world. He wanted to buy a piece of the cultural history of the old world. So there were a lot of rich Americans who wanted to buy first editions of Oscar Wilde. Or the poetry of Shelly or other Victorian writers. So he saw that as an opportunity to make a quick buck.
And that what Ho says, that was fine for many years and he did make a lot of money. Had a very beautiful house in Hamstead with a, I think Hone says he had the finest private library in all of the kingdom, but obviously was it nicer than
Kate: Alberto Mangel’s?
Joseph: Well, I don’t know. I’d have to compare the photographs, but supply couldn’t keep up with demand.
He decided then that the only way really around this was to start forging books. I dunno if that’s the pathway I would take, but that’s certainly the, the opportunity that he saw. And it’s interesting actually because I kind of felt like Thomas Wise made a few mistakes when he started to forge books.
But one of the things he did was he didn’t just sell these forgeries as first editions. He actually started to predate them before the known publication date of existing first editions. So they became these incredibly rare and coveted items. So you’d have a collection of Shelly’s poetry, and most people in the book collecting world would know, oh, it came out in 1872 or something.
He would say, oh no, this one’s from 1869. And he got a bit greedy as well. He didn’t just forge one copy, he forged multiple copies, which I think was part of the story of his downfall. So basically, he’s selling these books on these forged copies of these very coveted books. Everything’s fine for a couple of years until a young duo of booksellers, the most fantastic Gio Carter and Pollard, I forget which way round they are.
I think Pollard was the Bloomsbury Dandy who had written a book called The Martini and was friends with Ian Fleming
music: Uhhuh
Joseph: and Carter was a communist, so they’re unlikely bedfellows. But basically they were starting out in their book selling career and they looked to wise in what he was doing and I think.
They probably thought, well, how is this guy finding all of these books that on the law of averages, these shouldn’t be available. These should be in personal collections, but these new copies, pristine copies are always available in auction houses. So there’s something a bit unusual here, and they started a detailed investigation and they bought some of these books.
Then they started a detailed investigation into the paper type that these books were using. They got quite forensic. I know you’d appreciate this as a designer, they looked at the Kerns of the fonts. Mm-hmm. One of the things that finally got him was that the real older copies of these books used a lowercase F, which had a heavy Kern.
Mm-hmm. So the F would fold over onto the next letter in the word. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kate: Yeah. Because it’s the space between letters, isn’t it? The Kerney.
Joseph: Thank you. That’s it. And what Wise was doing, because Wise was using a modern printing press, the Fs, the lowercase Fs didn’t have this lovely little flourish.
They just went straight up. ’cause they were easier to print for the mass market. And so they spotted this and it’s quite interesting because. Obviously there was like a gentleman’s code back then, so they didn’t, it’s a weird conclusion for the book ’cause they didn’t actually end up accusing wise directly of forgery.
But what they did do is they published their expose with all their chemical analysis and all of their detailed inquiry into spacing and everything like that. And the report was so thorough and the facts that they presented were so incontrovertible, they presented them to their peers. That wise essentially ended up being incriminated and being kicked out of all of the bookseller associations he belonged to.
He lost his place at the top of the food chain. And he died a few years later with his reputation in tatters book,
Kate: but was never actually brought to account for a crime or he was never tried or anything like that. It was more like reputationally, he was just finished.
Joseph: Yeah, well he was kind of tried by his peers ’cause it’s anyone who works in an industry where it’s not that many people, if you put a foot wrong as badly as Wise did, people are just not gonna trust you.
Kate: It’s interesting that this is clearly a huge story within the antiquarian book selling world, and nobody else outside of this world would really ever know about it.
It’s shocking, isn’t it?
Joseph: It’s absolutely shocking.
Kate: Is the book good? Is it a good read?
Joseph: It is a really good read, and once Hones’s done all of the scene setting at the beginning, I mean, it’s a really fascinating pen portrait he gives of the book selling world in London. At the turn of the century. But once he’s done that, there’s this fantastic sequence of chapters where you get wise going about his forging, thinking everything’s still okay.
And then you get a chapter with Carter and Pollard investigating and they’re getting one step closer each chapter. Mm-hmm. To blowing his cover. So it’s this really lovely pattern and mouse dynamic, which makes it, it’s a really cliche phrase to use now, ’cause everyone’s saying it, but. When nonfiction reads like fiction, when it reads like a thriller.
Yeah. You know you’re onto something good.
Kate: Yeah. Love that. They’re my favorite narrative nonfiction.
Over on the main pod you’d be hearing an ad for the Patreon right now, but you guys don’t need that. You are already here. What I didn’t want to miss was this opportunity. I have to say thank you to all of you for your membership and support and to welcome new members, Deborah, Abigail, Natalie Cook, Emily, Barbara, Cassandra, Wong, do Palmer, Jennifer Hall, and Catherine Gascoyne who’ve all joined recently.
I’m so happy to have you, and apologies if any of those members have had multiple shoutouts at this point. It’s a little bit hard for me to keep track when new people join, but I do like to acknowledge you. Another new member you might see popping up in the chat for is regular podcast, Phil Chaffee, who recently accepted my invitation to join us.
I know many of you love and appreciate him as much as I do. He’s one of my very favorite people to talk books with. I’ve come to think of this subscriber community as a garden I love to spend time in, and I so enjoy watching it grow. We’ve decided to leave our read along of the count of Monte Cristo for the new year, as Autumn is quite full on with prizes like the Booker, and then the run up to Christmas is always a busy time.
I am, however, currently dipping my toes into the waters of Julia Cameron’s Creativity program, the Artist’s Way, a bestseller and global phenomenon. This 12 week self-led course involves things like warning pages and taking your inner artist on a date. It has helped many people overcome self-criticism and doubt to lead more creatively fulfilled lives.
Whether you think of yourself as a creative but would like to own it a little more fully like me, or whether you are someone who doesn’t think of yourself as a creative type, this book is designed to help you see yourself differently. My experience of it so far has been rewarding, and I’d love it if any of you wanted to read along with me.
There’s no fixed start date as I don’t want anyone to feel pressured by a schedule. I’ll simply make a new chat thread and we’ll post weekly updates where you can comment and share your own progress if you’d like to. Now it’s back to my chat with Joseph and the vintage book Forger reminded me of another favorite of mine set in the world of antiquarian book selling.
Kate: Quick fire now. ’cause I feel like it’s just so lovely chatting to you and we’re not getting through many books are we? But still in the Antiquarian book selling World. Once Upon a Tome, pod regulars will know. This is one of my all time favorites. This is by Oliver Darkshire, and he worked at the Bookseller Sotheran’s, Henry Sotheran & Co, which is I think the oldest established antiquarian book sellers.
Here in the UK they’ve been around since like 18- something or other. He is someone who hasn’t really quite managed to find his place in any other professions, and it doesn’t seem very optimistic that he’s gonna find his place here because he has undiagnosed narcolepsy. So one of the issues for him is that he just keeps falling asleep on the job.
And basically that and just not really being very together. I think sort of various other things that are going on with him just mean that he hasn’t really been able to hold down a profession anywhere else. And one of the really endearing things about this book is that he is warmly embraced within the extremely eccentric world of Sotheran’s.
He is very much accepted. It takes about a year before anyone even really notices that he keeps falling asleep at his desk. And um, and then I think the proprietor gently suggests, you know, perhaps he should see something about it and what’s going on. And then he does end up getting this diagnosis.
But it’s hilarious. It’s one of the reasons that I love this book. It is Laugh Out Loud, funny. He’s got such a brilliant dry. Way of describing this shop and all of the wildly eccentric things that went on. The other thing I really love about it is that you sort of feel like he’s someone who spends a lot of time playing like D&D in his spare time.
It’s got this real like dungeon-master vibe, which brought to this very stuffy, very traditional, very formal business of the selling of Antiquarian books. I just adored that mix. Those two worlds meeting to me was just such a delight. There’s something a bit otherworldly about this. Sadly, they’ve moved the shop that they were in, which apparently is sort of a bit like the shop that time forgot was on Sackville Street in Piccadilly, fairly near where I used to work when I [00:42:00] worked at the Wolseley, and they’ve now moved to Charing Cross Road.
And there’s this sort of lovely thing I think that’s starting to happen where my sense is that bookshops are coming back to Charing Cross road because there’s southerns now there’s obviously foils still there. There’s one further down. Any amount of books that’s there books. But I feel like little by little, I dunno why, but my sense is that bookshops are coming back.
And Sotheran’s are now there too. Love that book so much. And then very, very different. This is called Shelf Life Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, which I found in the wonderful Skoob secondhand bookshop in Bloomsbury the other day. Nadia Wassef now lives in London, but this is the story of her founding with her sister and another female business partner what went on to become a chain of bookshops called Divan in Cairo. This was 20 years ago. At a time when societally running businesses was not something that women did, and being in positions of power was not something that women did. And so] they have to overcome these huge challenges.
On the one hand, there’s this issue about they’re not really taken seriously and they have to deal with all this endemic misogyny that’s within Egyptian society at this time, and also the fact that there is no culture. Of the sorts of bookshops that we are used to here in the west where you just wander in and there’s gonna be an incredible array of things and you browse and find all these new titles and all these different subjects and that didn’t exist.
There was no culture of bookshops like that at this time. And she is so fascinating on so many levels. The way she structures it works really well where each section of the book is a section of the bookshop. So she goes from the cafe to her Egypt essentials. She tries to build cookery, business and management, pregnancy and parenting.
And each section then is a jumping off point for these lovely reminiscences about her experiences and her life. And so you learn quite a lot about her position in Egyptian society, which is an interesting one because. She’s talking about how growing up, I think as part of quite a wealthy family, she was educated in English and American schools and had a very different experience of language and culture to a lot of people who went to state schools, who had a completely different experience of being educated and what they learned.
And so when she comes to set up these bookshops, she’s trying to. Create something that will address both these audiences. And so she’s got the English language section and then her sister is doing the Arabic section. And it’s just so fascinating the way that you’ve got this personal story of all these challenges and difficulties in setting up this business.
So it’s very interesting just on a business level ’cause she’s very frank and upfront about all of that and how hard it was. But then also culturally, it’s so fascinating because Egypt is changing so rapidly and radically all around her. You know, seismic things are going on the Arab Spring and, and also in her relationships, right?
She’s twice divorced. So you meet husband number one and husband number two in the course of this book, and she has children as well. So there’s just a lot going on in her life. And in the end, she comes to live in London and steps away from the business that she founded. But it continues, as I understand it, it continues to flourish to this day.
So I really recommend that. One of the things I’ve loved so much about it is how pacey it is. It’s a really no nonsense. I, I describe the writing style as brisk, which seems like what she’s like as a person as well. You know, she doesn’t mess around. She doesn’t mince her words. She tells it like it is and she’ll take you through and I’m finding absolutely riveting.
I’m really, really enjoying it. So I recommend that.
Joseph: It sounds great. One of the sub genres within books about books that I don’t really enough of which I want to start reading more of are books about booksellers, people starting bookshops. Did you see? I haven’t read it. It’s a new book. I think it came out last year.
It’s by. Jane Cholmeley, I want to say. And she was one of the co-founders of Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop. Yeah. Which is on Charing Cross Road. Which I think opened in the eighties. And Libby Purves did a fantastic article about it in the Times Literary supplement, and that was a bookshop, very much like the bookshop you are talking about.
It opened against a societal backdrop where everything was against running a feminist women’s bookshop. At that time it was Thatcher’s Britain, section 28. There was societal opposition. But they created a cult following. They found an audience basically and catered for them. So I really want to read that.
Kate: Yeah, me too.
I’m just laughing ’cause I picked it up so many times in the bookshop.
Joseph: Oh did you?
Kate: And I always put it down, but yeah, it’s absolutely on my agenda. It’s funny as well ’cause I don’t know that bookshop like, I dunno when it closed, but it’s not something that I ever knew about or, um, it only
Joseph: closed, I think, at the time of the millennium.
Maybe 2000, 2001. Yeah. So it was a good 15 years it was running for,
Kate: yeah. I sort of feel like I should have known about it, but. Yeah. Anyway, so I’m interested to find out, have you got one to finish on or is that it?
Joseph: I’ve got In Search of Lost Books. The subtitle is The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes.
The blurb on the back of the book says, this is the story of one man’s quest for eight mysterious loss books. This is by a chap called Giorgio Van Straten, I should say it’s been translated from the Italian into the English. It’s his quest, chapter by chapter to talk about, to investigate these eight books, which have piqued his interest.
So these are books that have been lost through fire or war or theft, or they’ve been self-censored, or they’ve been suppressed by someone’s estate. They continue to be part of the literary imagination or the literary world. People keep talking about them even if they can’t read them. It’s quite an interesting mix of titles.
There’s a chapter on Ernest Hemingway, who you probably know the famous story. He had a suitcase of short stories and a novel, which was pinched from a train carriage,
Speaker 4: which he does talk
Joseph: about.
Speaker 4: He blamed his wife. He blames his first, yeah,
Joseph: he blamed his first wife because he does talk about this in his memoir, A Moveable Feast.
I thought this was quite interesting ’cause Van Straten adds some extra color. He says his first wife, whose name shamefully, I can’t remember. It was a very hot day and she stepped off the train to get a bottle of Evian and that’s when the suitcase got pinched. So yeah, I wouldn’t want to have been having to have that conversation with Ernest Hemingway, but, um,
Kate: Hadley Richardson.
Joseph: Hadley Richardson. Yes. There’s a chapter on, we probably all know about Franz Kaka telling his friend, Max Brod, please destroy all of my masterpieces after I’m dead. I don’t want ’em published because he was a perfectionist. And thankfully Max Brod didn’t destroy books like The Castle and the Trial. So we’ve got these classics of 20th century literature, but there is an interesting chapter about all of the books and manuscripts that Kaka did get to that Max Brod couldn’t save, and what we potentially lost there.
I think the saddest chapters for me, I say sad because all of these books, the books that Van Straten talks about, I really desperately want to read. Now. I feel like this book has put me in an impossible position of yearning after books that I can never get my hands on. But there’s chapters on Bruno Schultz who was a Jewish writer who was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto.
He famously wrote a lot of incredible collections of short stories, very surreal. Kind of similar to Kafka, and it’s always been suggested that there was a novel that he’d written that was floating around. And Van Straten says there was a novel called The Messiah, which was finished, but it disappeared.
And with Sylvia Plath as well. Obviously she died very young. I think she was about 28, which she took her life. And by that point, she’d only published a collection of poetry and the Belgium one novel. As Van Straten says, there was another novel in her papers. There was the collection of poetry Ariel, which her estate, which was managed by Ted Hughes.
He published that after her death. But there was another novel called Double Exposure. It was in draft, but it was pretty much there. It could have been worked up by an editor. Lots of people saw this book and it’s never been released. Oh, so they might still have
Kate: it. It’s not that Hughes destroyed it.
Joseph: Well, this is the thing. Uh, for a long time I think people thought that Hughes had destroyed the book because Plath in that novel started to talk about what he was like in their relationship, in their marriage, and it would’ve been uncomfortable for him in terms of his reputation as a known writer, the poet laureate. But reading around this, doing a bit of internet research, apparently Ted Hughes left all of his and Sylvia’s residue literary estate to Emory University.
With a timestamp on the folder to say, this can’t be opened until 2023. Oh. Which I think is 60 years after her death. So the thing is, it’s clearly not there because if there was another Sylvia Plath novel floating around,
Kate: it would be a publishing sensation.
Joseph: We would already be talking about it.
Kate: No one’s gonna sit on that
Joseph: no one is gonna sit on that. It would be worth too much money, especially now that you know, generations have discovered the Bell Jar, which was a favorite novel of mine when I was growing up. So, yeah, I thought that was quite sad, but sad, hopeful. It’s a beautifully written book. It’s in translation. It just makes you think about all of these reading opportunities that could have been
Kate: Mm mm Story of my life.
Reading opportunities that could have been, yeah. Alright. This has been so lovely. I could sit and talk books to you forever and it was such a treat as well. ’cause you know, I so enjoy listening to your shows and when you’re listening you sort of wish you were part of that conversation. So very nice to have an actual conversation with you.
Yes, same. Hopefully we’ll get you back. We could probably easily talk about more books about books, couldn’t we? There’s plenty more tip of the iceberg. I feel I didn’t talk about Alba Donati’s Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop.
Joseph: No, I was waiting for that one. I was just, I read up on it. Yeah, it looked really interesting.
Kate: Oh, I mean, that’s just the most wonderful book ever. Did you enjoy it? Oh my god, I love it.
Joseph: Oh, okay. Right. Love it so much. That’s what I wanted. I just wanted a recommendation.
Kate: This is, um, yeah. Sets up a bookshop in a tiny town. There’s only about a hundred people that live in this tiny Tuscan village on a hilltop somewhere, but she feels that she wants there to be a bookshop there, and she feels like it’ll be really good for the town.
And the way she makes it work is by bringing the community on board and getting them to feel invested. And she gets people to volunteer and help run the shop, but her own writing is so beautiful as well. She worked in the book industry, so it’s also full of these brilliant literary references and it’s one of those books that almost like leads you to other books.
And also it’s got a bit of Francis Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun. You know, you feel like you’re there. You’re like, I want to wait for a bookshop in a Tuscan hill town. I mean, perfect summer read. I adore that book. There you are. Now we have talked about it. That’s a really great
Joseph:Thank you for that.
Kate: Yeah, it’s a stone that’s been turned. This has been a delight, bye.
Kate: That’s nearly it for this episode, and you’ll find all the books mentioned in the show notes. Head to the episode page at the book club review.co uk for full listings, including some follow on reading recommendations and a transcript. Plus, you’ll find our archive of over 170 other episodes of the pod you might like to listen to.
Next, you’ll find the link in the show notes. If you love the pod, then don’t forget you can come and be a part of the book club. Review community over on Patreon. Subscribers, get regular extra episodes of the Book Club review and you’ll be part of a growing community of readers from all over the world.
Swapping book recommendations in our chat groups while at the higher tier, you can join the monthly book club. Check the link in the show notes for all the details and benefits. I hesitate to send you to a podcast you might like more than my own, but what can I say? I’m always looking for the good stuff and when I find it, I like to pass it on.
So go check out Curious Readers wherever you get your pods. I think you’ll love it. Since we recorded, I watched the bookshop film, Joseph recommended starring Emily Mortimer, and I found it an absolute delight. Quite different from the book in some ways, but absolutely true to its essence. If you love books and reading and all Bill Nhe, I recommend seeking it out.
I also recently came across another book about books I absolutely loved, and that was Things I learned on the 6:28, a reading diary from TLS Editor Stig Abell. I’m clearly going to have to do that follow-up episode sooner than I thought. There’s so much more to be said, but for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip through the looking glass.
Drop me a line and let me know your favorite books about books we might have missed. You’ll find me on Instagram at book Club review podcast or email thebookclubreview@gmail.com. But for now, thanks for listening and whether it’s books about books or just books, I wish you happy reading.
