A couple of years ago I put together a few notes on the history of Wimbledon's Eagle House - one of the few and among the finest of Jacobean manor houses which have survived into 21st century London. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="747"] Eagle House, Wimbledon Village, A 1899 sketch by T R Way. This is the Internet Archive’s version of a sketch in Boston Public Library’s collection.[/caption] At the time, I noted that in 1877 Eagle House had been purchased by one Thomas Graham Jackson (shortly before the sketch above was made) and that he put much effort into restoring Eagle House to its former glory as a home after many years in which it had been used as a school.  So I was delighted today to stumble across further information about Thomas Jackson which connects him both more deeply to Wimbledon's history but also the main theme of this blog - books! [caption id="attachment_962" align="alignright" width="228"] Sir Thomas Jackson, aged about 60[/caption] Thomas Graham Jackson is perhaps better known as Sir Thomas Jackson (after he was awarded the baronetcy of Eagle House, Wimbledon, in the County of Surrey in February 1913). After studying at Oxford, at the age of 23 he was apprenticed to leading Victorian Gothic revival architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, before founding his own practice in 1862 and going to become one of the foremost architects of his generation in his own right.  Architect Jackson is best remembered for his work in Oxford at Oxford Military College and Oxford University (including the famous Bridge of Sighs over New College Lane and much of Brasenose college).  His work and style of architecture so came to dominate Oxford that Jackson acquired the nickname Oxford Jackson and even Nickolaus Pevenser, who for the most part unsurprisingly found Jackson's work not to his taste, conceded that once he"had set his elephantine feet" on the city it "would never be the same again" (J Sherwood and N Pevenser, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire, London, 1974, p. 59).  Jackson didn't just bestride Oxford's architecture though - he also worked extensively in Cambridge and on other clerical and educational buildings and the 'Anglo-Jackson' style became typical of many public buildings of the era. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Bridge of Sighs over New College Lane, Oxford University (photo credit: M Stone)[/caption] Jackson published prolifically, producing detailed and well-researched works on architecture which often included his own sketches made during his extensive travels and a number of travelogues and memoirs.  His books include one co-authored which his fellow architect, Norman Shaw, entitled Architecture - a Profession or Art (John Murray, 1892), which comprised 13 short essays on training and qualifications for architects and triggered a short retort publication by another fellow architecture, William H White, The Architect and his Artists, an Essay to Assist the Public in Considering the Question is Architecture a Profession or an Art (Spottiswoode & Company, 1892).  These two publications laid the foundations for a public policy debate which was to culminate some forty years later with the passage of the Architects Registration Acts between 1931 and 1938. The Acts, which remained in force until 1997, established a statutory register of architects and  restricted vernacular use of the word 'architect'. What sings to the hearts of both book collectors and local historians however is that later in life Jackson also penned a handful of ghost stories primarily, it is thought, to entertain his friends and family.  Six (I do not know whether or not there were more) were gathered together and published in 1919 by John Murray, the same publisher who had issued some of his architectural works.  The stories range in setting from 18th century London to contemporary Italy and feature both benevolent and malevolent ghosts.  In 'The Lady of Rosemount' Jackson tells of a ghost from the past intruding into the present.  'The Eve of St. John' has a similar theme.  'The Ring'  features an overly-curious traveller in Italy who is afflicted by an ancient curse and 'Pepina'  has a restless spirit returning to haunt those responsible for its death.  In 'Romance of the Piccadilly Tube' Jackson created one of the earliest stories of hauntings on the London Underground. It is, though, the last story in the collection that appeals most: the eponymous 'Red House', like Pepina featuring a returning restless spirit, is thought to be based on Eagle House, which by that time had long been Jackson's home, and the action takes place within its confines.  Jackson clearly had a deep interest in the area in which he made his home: not only did he set one of his stories in the heart of Wimbledon but he was also one of the founding members of the Wimbledon Society (then known as the John Evelyn Club).  Six Ghost Stories was the only work of fiction which Jackson published but in his Recollections: The Life and Travels of a Victorian Architect he tells of a small room, an attic, in Eagle House, having  “sort of hidden chamber in the hollow of the roof which in the days of the school was known as the ‘murder chamber'."  According to an anonymous article in a newsletter produced by the Wimbledon Society in 2008, 'The Red House' "makes great use of an identical hiding place - “a small chamber artfully hidden in the hollow of the roof'." At least four of these supernatural tales follow the conventions set out by the master of the genre, M R James.  Indeed, Jackson acknowledges James'  mastery and influence in his preface, endorsing James' two 'golden rules' of the good ghost story - that the setting must be in ordinary life, and that the ghost should be malevolent.  Jackson isn't another James but Neil Wilson, in his guide to supernatural fiction 1820-1950, Shadows in the Attic says "While Jackson's work does not have the originality of James' own, it does manage to combine an authentic sense of place together with a well-handled development of ghostly atmosphere and fully repays the attention of the supernatural enthusiast" (British Library, 2000, p. 278). [caption id="attachment_958" align="alignright" width="198"] Dust Jacket Illustration on Ashtree Press's 1999 edition of Six Ghost Stories, by Jason Eckhardt[/caption] My inner reader yearns to devour these stories, especially The Red House, set as it is just a few yards from where I live.  And the book collector in me yearns to read from an original 1919 Murray edition of Jackson's Six Ghost Stories.  They are not hard to find but are seriously and, for me prohibitively, pricey. It's fortunate then that, although Six Ghost Stories was for decades out of print, later editions have been produced by Ashtree Press in 1999 and Leonaur in 2009 (the first with a detailed introduction by Richard Dalby and a seriously creepy dust jacket illustration by Jason Eckhardt, although even second hand either version is likely to set you back the best part of £20 (unless of course you order via your local bookshop). At the time of writing copies of a later paperback edition, with a new foreword by the well-known fantasy and science fiction writer John Grant, are available from the Museum of Wimbledon for £7.99 plus £1.25 p&p.  Incidentally, the Museum's website claims that this is the only paperback edition ever produced. I don't believe that is entirely correct - it would seem that the 2009 Leonaur edition is available both in paperback and as a 'collectors' edition' hardback.  Myself? I'm going to pop along the road on Saturday afternoon and get a paperback copy from the museum while I save up for a Murray copy! Does anyone else see some similarity between the top-hatted gentleman featured on the Ashtree dust jacket and Jackson himself? Co-incidence or design?

This beautifully bound book, Proverbes, Ecclesiastes or Preacher, was bound by Richard Jugge in London in about 1550.  Its leather boards have been decorated with gold tooling, a technique invented two hundred years earlier in the Arab world which arrived in Europe via Italy's trading ports, in the middle of the 15th century.   Richard Jugge (1531-77)  was an English printer and bookseller who kept a shop 'at the sign of the Bible' close to the north door of old St Paul's Cathedral in London. Educated at Eton, he went up to King's College, Cambridge but left without taking a degree.  It is thought he began to print books around 1548.  Two years later he was granted a licence to print the New Testament in English and subsequently a seven-year patent to print all common law books. He was one of the first printers to join the Stationer's Company (founded in 1403, the Guild of Stationers was originally a fraternity of booksellers who copied and sold manuscript books), serving annual terms as a company warden on several occasions in the early to mid 1560s and as its master into the 1570s.  He was appointed Queen's Printer (along with John Carwood, who had been printed to Queen Mary) shortly after Elizabeth I ascended the throne. Jugge (sometimes recorded as Judge, or Gugge) is thought to have printed around 70 books over his career.  As typified the times, most of these were devotional and religious texts and his editions of the Bible and the New Testament displayed fine typography: Jugge was 'unrivalled for the richness of his initial letters, and for the handsome disposition of the text' (Dictionary of National Biography).  It seems however that Jugge struggled to keep up with the volume of work that came his way and at one point he was ordered to produce only small Bibles, leaving larger and more time-consuming Bible printing to others.  Jugge died in 1577 and for a few years his business was continued by John Jugge, probably his son. John himself died around 1579 when Richard's widow, Joan, took on the business  and continued to print books until 1587 although at a much diminished rate. The National Library of New Zealand, which holds the volume, describes the binding as "16th century calfskin with gilt arabesque panel stamped on front and back boards, spine bands raised, spine stamped with gilt fleurons, cloth ties". Panel stamping involves using a rectangular tool with a pictorial or abstract designs to press gold-leaf onto the cover of a book.  A time-saving measure, and cheaper to do that the labour-intensive alternative of building up a pattern by repeated stamping with smaller, individual tools, the technique was frequently used on smaller books. The book contains an inscription in Latin: ""Margarett Willoughby me possidett. Donum Elizabethe Beaumonte q[ui] obiit apud Coombe ... de Gittesham die veneris 4to die Martii ... 1613 ..." which translates to something like 'Margarett Willoughby owns this, the gift of Elizabeth Beaumonte who died at Coombe, Gittesham, 4 March... 1613".   Combe, the local manor house near the village of Gittisham in Devon was around that time occupied by Thomas Beaumont MP and his wife, Elizabeth.  It found its way into the collection of Sir Robert Harmsworth (1st Baron Harmsworth, a renowned book and manuscript collector, as well as an MP and businessman).  Harmsworth died in 1937 and this volume and was included as lot 2466 in the catalogue when his collection was sold in 1946.  It was donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library by Sir Arthur Howard (another English book and bible collector and MP, the son-in-law of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) in 1973; the Alexander Turnbull Library has been held by the National Library of Zealand since 1918 when Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull gifted his collection to the nation.

[caption id="attachment_877" align="alignright" width="300"] Val McDermid[/caption] Val McDermid is not a women to be bothered by the gothic macabre of tombstones, as an encounter in an Edinburgh graveyard reveals. The location was chosen by The Guardian’s culture reporter Hannah Ellis Petersen, and “came from the misguided belief that an author who has spent her life writing about murder might feel at home surrounded by graves. It turns out that the atmosphere of the place is completely lost on her”. McDermid is bothered, it turns out, by things which shape the lives and well-being of her legion readers: not truth and justice in their ethereal forms but the day to day effects of social injustice and gender inequalities on individuals. “If I was a 16-year-old now, I wouldn’t be going to Oxford, that’s for sure, and therefore wouldn’t have had any of the opportunities that opened so many doors for me back then”, McDermid says. “I really worry we are heading more towards the Victorian ethic where those who have the capacity to claw their way to the top will do, and the rest will be sweeping the shit out of the doorway. We’re going back to Bleak House”. McDermid is well-known as an activist, speaking out on such issue as Scottish independence, equality and social cohesion but, as Ellis Petersen notes, she doesn’t use her crime novels to expose her politics directly. There’s a fabulous mid-interview retort from McDermid: “Once you start murdering MPs, where do you stop?” As Sian Busby’s McNaughton – a novelisation of the story of Daniel M’Naghten who in 1843 shot the civil servant Edward Drummond in the back, mistaking him for the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel – demonstrates, even attempting to murder an MP can have far reaching, and not necessarily progressive, consequences. A Scottish woodturner, M’Naghten had paranoid delusions – at trial his prosecutors and defence agreed on this– and was held not guilty on grounds of insanity. The verdict spawned a raucous outcry from the press, Parliament and the Queen (Victoria had herself been subject to assassination attempts) against the court’s leniency, and led to the retrograde ‘McNaughton Rules’ as the standard test for criminal liability in relation to mental health. Had ‘ the rules’ been applied to M’Naghten himself, he would probably have been found guilty and hanged rather than spending the rest of his life confined first in Bethlem and then Broadmoor. It would be another 100 years before anyone could again successfully argue in a UK court that an offender was not criminally responsible if the crime had been committed as a result of a mental defect. This isn’t to say that McDermid denies a place for politics in her fiction. As she wrote in an article (also published in The Guardian) earlier this year “these positions don’t usually hit the reader over the head like a party political broadcast. If it is not subtle, all you succeed in doing is turning off readers in their droves. Our views generally slip into our work precisely because they are our views, because they inform our perspective and because they’re how we interpret the world, not because we have any desire to convert our readership to our perspective. Except, of course, that sometimes we do”. Nor is it a responsibility she wears lightly. Speaking of the perceived disconnect between politicians and the public, she reflected: “When people lose trust in politicians, they need to find it elsewhere. Maybe, because they trust writers to tell some kind of truth buried in the fictions, we’re being listened to in a way we rarely have before. And that’s a scary thought”. Splinter the Silence (published today in the UK under the Little, Brown imprint – the hardback edition contains a bonus short story), sees the popular psychological profiler Tony Hill team up again with former DCI Carol Jordan to investigate a series of apparent suicides linked to the most modern, cruel and criminal phenomena of cyberbullying and abuse over social media, the dark and disturbing side of humanity exposed under the anonymity of internet trolls. [caption id="attachment_879" align="alignnone" width="300"] McDermid with J K Rowling[/caption] McDermid tells Ellis Petersen that she found the online violent and sexist abuse levelled at her friend J K Rowling when Rowling aligned with the ‘no’ campaign in ahead of the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum “profoundly depressing”. She points to an “instinctive misogyny….when a woman says something that in any way erodes on white male privilege…The vileness of the abuse is astonishing…[W]e have felt over the past 20 years that feminism has made steps forward…So I was thinking things had changed, that the next generation of men weren’t as institutionally misogynist as the previous were. And then suddenly the internet came along, and gave them a platform to voice their feelings anonymously. And boy, did the bile come out”. Most of the pre-publication reviewers of Splinter the Silence have revelled in the return of one of McDermid’s most popular characters. Little, Brown herald it as “her most gripping, chilling, suspenseful novel yet”. There is a splattering of reviews (all positive) on Goodreads already, among them one from Liz Wilkins who comments that the “series has not even shown a hint of growing old, the quality, readability and just sheer addictiveness of it grows with every single novel and Splinter the Silence is no exception”. Few (Barry Forshaw, writing for The Independent, aside) have commented on the inherent feminism underpinning of the storyline. Yet is exactly this which lifts McDermid beyond readable into the re-readable echelon. Sir Walter Scott drew a distinction between ‘ephemeral’ novels which supply ‘the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries’ and those which deserve ‘an attention from the public far superior’. Writers who more usually attract the accolade of great as measured, say, by the Nobel Prize or Man Booker judges or academic acceptance by within the perambulatory literary canon are often constrained in their ability to do immediate good – to entertain or to influence - by a tiny readership. McDermid’s writing inhabits that difficult space between Scott’s extremes of easy popularity and serious profundity, making her one of today’s most important writers. She is, of course, also a phenomenal story-teller. Val McDermid's Splinter the Silence is published in the UK today, 27 August 2015, by Little, Brown.

POSTSCRIPT

I spotted this tweet from Chris Brookmyre shortly after I posted this article.  Seemed appropriate...

Britain's most dangerous woman pictured alongside Nicola Sturgeon. pic.twitter.com/V5Y8Gu8Cx5 @valmcdermid @NicolaSturgeon

— Chris Brookmyre (@cbrookmyre) August 27, 2015

     

It's Sunday evening, yes? So time to kick off the shoes, put away the day's cares and get out a good book to read.  But before you do, to get you in the mood, here's a really fun tribute to reading books, in the form of a parody of the (brilliant) song All About That Bass.  If you love the physicality of a paper book, this is most certainly to for you. Put together by the good people at The Book Man, my thanks are due to fellow ibooknet members Catherine at Juxtabook and Mike at a Book for All Reasons, and in turn to Shephards Confident, for sharing this. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz4tjFG2W98&w=560&h=315] Now, for me, kindles and other e-readers have their place, but these are girls are definitely after my heart!

Kirsty Lang called the Seine 'the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves'.  It is the Bouquinistes, booksellers who offer used, second hand and antiquarian books, who make it so.  Today these seductive 'merchants of the mind' are a familiar sight along the banks of the Seine in Paris, an exhilarating one for those who delight in the hunt of book collecting, and a honeypot for tourists and visitors seeking immersion in Parisian street culture or just a souvenir to take home. The Bouquinestes pursue their trade along the right bank of the Seine from the Quai du Louvre to the Pont Marie and on the left bank from Quai Voltaire to Quai de al Tournelle, their stalls mingled among those of stamp, coin, ephemera and comic dealers, and others selling old prints, engravings and journals, offering a dazzling array of secondhand and collectible books and hours of fascination for the treasure hunter. Paris peddlers called 'libraries forains' are thought to have begun to offer used books along the banks of the Seine sometime around the 16th century.  Purveyors of new books treated them with hostility, fearful that they would undermine their own trade. Similarly, the civic authorities were suspicious of the fledgling bouquinestes. Their activities could not easily be subject to official censorship and they were therefore considered a potential source of radical influence and dangerous.  In 1557, during the Wars of Religion, the libraries forains were accused of being thieves and of selling forbidden Protestant pamphlets, embarrassing and troubling to both the government and the church. Their numbers were increasing at the beginning of the 17th century, and some of them saw the opening of Pont-Neuf in 1606 as an opportunity for public readings, musical entertainments and open-air shows.  Edward Fournier wrote, in his 1862 history of Pont-Neuf that the "This famous bridge was not content to be the most varied and the most gigantic of open-air shows, it was also a huge reading room ... the books were there in multitude and along parapets spread like the double radius of the largest libraries".  The libraries forains often used wheelbarrows to haul their bookish wares from spot to spot and sold them from trays fastened to the parapets of bridges over the river with leather straps. After a series of attempts on the part of the authorities to control their activities, a 1649 settlement finally prohibited stalls, and any other display of books, on the Pont Neuf and travelling booksellers were driven out of the city, and could only gain re-entry under licence.  The prohibition held for a while but slowly the booksellers returned to Pont-Neuf and the banks of the Seine, quietly tolerated by some regimes, deterred, persecuted or removed by others.  In 1721 Louis V forbade the display of books on pain of fines and imprisonment and in 1756 all trade on Pont-Neuf was banned.  Under the more moderate regime of Louis XVI, booksellers again returned to the Seine.  During the French Revolution, despite the dangers of street trading, the Seine book peddlars prospered, the valuable content of the libraries of the nobility and clergy, systematically looted by the sans-culottes, making its way to their stalls. Napoleon was tolerant to the bouquinestes, who in the early 19th century began to settle in particular spots. In October 1822 the profession was legally recognised for the first time and 1859 a concession was introduced which permitted bouquinestes to trade at specific places albeit under strict conditions.  A little later, in 1891, they were permitted to attach their boxes to railings permanently.  During the Paris World Exposition in 1900, there were thought to be some 200 bouquinestes along the banks of the Seine.  New measures in the 1930s formalised the bouquinestes' trade, requiring them to sell books exclusively and preventing them from operating a second shop elsewhere. Today each of 240 bouquinestes occupies 10 meters of railings long the Seine for an annual fee, making use of 900 distinctive bottle green boxes (the size of the boxes was fixed in 1930) to house hundreds of thousands of books, stretched along 3 kilometers of the banks of the Seine.  Together they make up what is claimed to be the largest concentration of open air bookselling in the world. The banks of the Seine in Paris were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

I've spent a glorious morning, fuelled by coffee of course, putting together a few notes on the life and work of one of my favourite illustrators, John Archibald Austen. Austen, born at the end of the 19th century, followed his father and trained as a carpenter.  But enamored by the works of Aubrey Beardsley, he moved to London and retrained as an artist and illustrator (and for a few years, revelled in somewhat Bohemian circles).  I'm lucky enough to have a copy of the 1929 John Lane at the Bodley Head edition of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, illustrated by Austen , in my collection.  Collectors' notes here.

There’s a treat in store for Middle Earth fans and collectors later this month when one of J R R Tolkien’s earliest prose works, The Story of Kullervo, is released. Kullervo is a tragic character, perhaps the darkest of Tolkien’s creations. ‘Hapless Kullervo’, as Tolkien called him, was orphaned and in the charge of the cruel magician, Untamo. Untamo had killed Kullervo’s father, Kalvero, kidnapped his mother and tried, three times, to do away with the young boy. Kullervo survives through the bond with his twin sister, Wanona and with the protection of the magical black dog, Musti. Sold into slavery, he swears revenge against Untamo; and so the story unfolds. The publishers acknowledge The Story of Kullervo as ‘the foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien’s invented world’. Kullervo becomes a forefather of Turin Turambar, the incestuous hero of The Silmarillion. Loosely reworked from the epic Finnish poem, Kalevala, (which was also the inspiration for a suite of symphonic movements by Sibelius) Tolkien described his story of Kullervo as ‘the germ of my attempt to write a legend of my own to fit my private languages’ and ‘a major matter in the legends of the First Age’. Tolkien worked on The Story of Kullervo in 1913 and 1914 while he was at Exeter College, Oxford, studying English. In a contemporary letter to his future wife, Edith Bratt, he explained that he was "trying to turn one of the stories [of the Kalevala]—which is really a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris' romances with chunks of poetry in between". Tolkien didn’t finish the story and it remained unpublished until 2010 when it appeared in an academic journal alongside two drafts of an essay, On the Kalevala. Release by HarperCollins later this month marks the first mass market publication. The Story of Kullervo is published by HarperCollins on 27 August 2015 and will be available in hardback and as an e-book. The story is accompanied by the author’s notes and drafts illuminating his source material for Kullervo. The volume is edited by Verlyn Flieger who was behind its academic publication in Tolkien Studies (Volume 7, 2010, pp 211-278).

Make no mistake, Tore Renberg’s See You Tomorrow (Arcadia, 2014) is the hardest boiled of thrillers. Brash, gruesome, riveting, bitter and full on, it requires a courageous reader.  It is, as you would expect of a thriller from the Arcadia stable, an action-packed page-turner.  But it’s cleverer and more rewarding than that. It’s a terrifying insight into how people can become bound into a repellent, immoral and perverted code of behaviour which, for them, becomes justifiable, even something to be proud of, as the only means to survive in the a world which has done them no favours.  What emerges is a questioning of the human condition, delivered without judgment, which is intelligent, engaging and ultimately troubling.  Late night reading is not recommended. The sun is shining on Stavanger and it’s hot. Unseasonably hot for late September. Sunlight burns a rare spotlight on the lives of eleven usually unnoticed misfits, left behind by Stavanger’s rapid, oil-funded gentrification.  Among them are petty criminals with a philosophically flawed but pragmatic code of ethics, their lives ringed with heavy-metal and horror films, dishing out brutality in paltry revenge for that which they have received; teenager Sandra, blinded by faith in a God who doesn’t bless her and fatefully repressed by parental, middle-class expectations is infatuated with a bright-eyed and devastatingly handsome local delinquent who refuses to discuss his past; Pal, left behind more than once, is bewildered his own inability to live an ordinary and struggling to keep up appearances and single-handedly bring up his two girls. He’s also a secret and unsuccessful gambler who deals with his mounting debt by tipping bills into the litter bin at a nearby bus stop; Cecilie is awkward, abused and wonderfully powerful but she doesn’t know whose baby she is carrying. Rudi, always super-horny, whose Asperger’s-like tendencies compel him to over-value routine and under-value the ability to stop talking, proves much of the darkly comic humour: one might think of him as a lovable rogue, if he didn’t enjoy dishing out ritualistic violence quite so much. Jani, hilariously, haphazardly tries to use his own mangled version oil-rich corporate conglomerates’ management techniques to his dangerously pathetic local gang of four. Over the course of three days their stories continually collide, causing explosions which propel them off course, all of them, scratching and scrambling to regain a small portion of control. There’s so much about the bonds that bind people and the casual cruelty that breaks them apart. Out of it comes a relentless narrative which will revolt the faint-hearted and reward thoughtful thrill-seekers. Renberg has acknowledged William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) as an influence on See You Tomorrow. The parallels in style are obvious – interlaced narratives told from different perspectives; short, sharp chapters, constantly challenging the reader to keep up and work it out. But there is something deeply intimate about Renberg’s style – his benevolent interest in characters, his sympathy for their circumstances, all wrapped round with the sometimes comforting and sometimes confrontational sounds of music and poetry – that makes See You Tomorrow distinct. I never know where I am with Faulkner.  Renberg gives signposts! At one point, as I closed the book (I had to occasionally, just to catch my breath) it struck me that fellow thriller-seeker Liz Barnsley would love this book. I quick stop over at her blog, Liz Loves to Read, proved me right. She gave it “Five shiny 'do not miss this book' stars and an elephant”.   I’m not sure about the elephant, but See You Tomorrow is certainly 550 pages of zestful verve for which the phrase page-turner might have been invented. About Tore Renberg Tore Renberg burst onto the literary scene in 1995 with a blow-away collection of short stories, Sleeping Tangle, winning the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas Debutant Prize. Two of his novels have been turned into films.  He is a respected literary critic and broadcaster in his native Norway.  See You Tomorrow is the first of his works to be translated into English. See You Tomorrow by Tore Renberg, translated into English by Sean Kinsella, was published in the UK by Arcadia Books in October 2014.

I love books. I love reading them, owning them, collecting them. I take great pride in my book accumulation (I daren't call it a collection - that implies something too grand, too designed and deliberate, and frankly too costly to describe accurately the several thousand books that line the shelves (and stand in piles on the floor at the moment as well) in every room. Recently I read Sian Busby's A Commonplace Killing. I was impressed. Impressed with the quality of the writing, the completeness with which Busby recreated post-war London, the credibility of her characters and the relentless drive of the narrative, in some ways a typical police procedural crime story but riven out of the norm by the complexities of a society struggling to come to terms with Victory, towards a climax not revealatory but incredibly sad, satisfying and life-affirming all at the same time. And this dispute the fact that the novel was completed by her husband, the BBC's Economic Editor, Robert Peston, after cancer had stolen Sian away, with the novel almost, but not quite, complete. (There is a moving and very human introduction by Peston in the edition I read which I would thoroughly recommend reading before turning a page of A Commonplace Killing.) As I closed the final pages of A Commonplace Killing, I began to wonder what else Busby may have written and, thanks to the wonders of google, soon discovered that she had another novel to her name. McNaughton: A Novel, first published in 2009. So there I am again, adding to my already ridiculously long 'must read' list - I'm now looking at needing about five lifetimes to make a small dent in it - but McNaughton makes its entry pretty close to the top. It's out of print, of course, but a quick visit to Abebooks and I find a nice-sounding, first edition copy, right here in the UK which can be on my doorstep in days. I revel in my wonderful, little local bookshop, but I also get a lot of books on line, especially secondhand, out of print or collectable ones. The world is a changed place for the compulsive book-buyer since the advent of the internet, and Abebooks in particular. I lost track of the number of books I've bought on line over a decade ago - I buy to read, to research, to collect, to impress (yes, I admit it!), I buy books for their beauty, or their weirdness, for their promise of enlightenment, or adventure, or pleasure. You could say I'm pretty much an on-line book connoisseur; and of course I used to make my living selling books on line (and still dabble occasionally), and no many UK on line booksellers either personally or as a regular customer. I like to think I know what I'm doing. I avoid the flash in the pan sellers; I don't buy from those sellers to try to trick the newcomer in thinking they have found a rare bargain when in fact all they have found is someone more skilled in marketing and data-manipulation than the next man and who is prepared to fleece the niiave; I don't buy from sellers who can't describe a book properly or don't describe it at all, or who think that identifying a first edition is simply a matter of looking at the copyright date. And for the most part when an ordered book arrives, I am pleasantly surprised that it is better condition than the description in the list. When McNaughton arrived (on time, soundly protected and nicely packaged) I received not so much a book but a lesson in risks of hubris. Yes, I can read the book. But surely that's not all that matters? Here's the description the bookseller gave:

1st edition, hardback, clean and tight, no inscriptions, Very Good / Very Good dustwrapper (not price-clipped).

And here's my email to the bookseller, sent after a few days of applying my old bookseller skills and trying, but failing, to clean and flatten creases.

I wanted to thank you for sending the book I ordered from you via Abebooks.co.uk on 2nd July so promptly. The book was McNaughton: A Novel by Sian Busby. It arrived in very good time and I congratulate you on your safe and effective packaging - there was no chance of the book being damaged in transit. I am however disappointed by the condition of the book which to my mind does not correspond with the condition notes provided in your listing. You described both the book and the jacket as being in very good condition. You did not however disclose that the book suffers from mild but significant page tanning, or that there are marks on the lower text block edge, or that there is a disfiguring dent in the binding at the head of the spine, or the fact that there are small starting rust markings on the rear endpapers. The jacket is grubby and soiled all round, with dirt so ingrained at the edges and on the spine that it cannot be removed, even with gentle but determined cleaning, without damaging the paper; the edges are bumped all along the lower edge, and at the head of the spine is dented, corresponding with the dent in the casing. I dispute your grading of this book as very good/very good but accept that this can be a subject judgement and hard to measure. I am more concerned that you could have described this book as 'clean' when so obviously it isn't - something that anyone who looked closely enough at the book to determine that the jacket wasn't price clipped must have noticed. I am not seeking to return the book; nor do I wish for a refund - you charged a fair price for the book, one which I would probably have paid even if you had described the book accurately. I am pleased to have it to read as it isn't particularly easy to get hold of. But I shall have to continue to search for a copy in keepable condition. And I thought you deserved an explanation for my decision never to buy from you again. With kind regards

A new book should be a bright point in the day, a relief and counterpoint against some of the really sad and troubling events which touch all our lives. But this was, in the end, a bad day for a booklover.  Sadly, McNaughton is not fit to feature against the Twitter hashtag #beautifulbooks.

Now held by the British Library, this wee volume of psalms, containing a portrait of Henry VIII, is known as Anne Boleyn's Gold Book. She purportedly handed this book to one of her maids of honour when she was on the scaffold, moments before her execution, in 1536. During the later Middle Ages, small volumes were fashionable among the literate elite. Prayer books, and in particular Books of Hours, were among the favoured content and often appealed to women in particular. Their smaller dimensions made them lighter and easier for the owner to carry with them throughout the day; and, worn hanging by a fine chain from a girdle - using the hoops which can be clearly seen in this example - they also made fabulous jewels and adornments. This small girdle book, containing several psalms, measures just 4cm by 3cm. The suggestion that this particular small girdle book was once owned by Henry VIII's second Queen, Anne Boleyn and was presented by her, when she stood on the scaffold, to one of her maids of honour is delightful and intriguing but hard to substantiate. In 1873, Robert Marsham described a manuscript then in the possession of his brother, Charles Marsham, 3rd Earl of Romney, in an article (published in Archaeologia 44, 1873) entitled "On a Manuscript Book of Prayers in a Binding of Gold Enamelled, said to have been given by Queen Anne Boleyn to a lady of the Wyatt family: together with a Transcript of its Contents". The lady in question is traditionally held to have been Lady Margaret Lee, sister of Thomas Wyatt and thought to have been one of Queen Anne Boleyn's ladies in waiting. Marsham himself, in his Archaeologia article, acknowledges that there is no proof to substantiate the family tradition, noting that it is not mentioned by George and Richard Wyatt when they compiled the 'family memorials' in 1727. But Marsham does suggest that the tradition dates back to at least the mid-18th century. George Vertue, in his 1745 'Notes on the Fine Arts' says that he had seen in the possession of Mr Wyatt a "most curious little prayer-book MS on vellum, set in gold, ornaments graved gold enamelled black - such were given to Queen Anne Boleyn's maids of honour - and was thus given to one of the Wyat family, and has been preserved for seven generations to this time". There is also reference in the Minutes of the Society of Antiquaries, alongside a drawing of the prayer book, from 1725 as follows: "24 Mar 1724/5. Mr Corry brought a manuscript on vellum in a gold case enameled curiously, being forms of devotion from the Psalms etc or Consolations in distress. This belonged to Queen Anna Bollen and now in the hands of Mrs Wyat of Charter House, in which family it has been ever since her death. She also has a original picture of her". The volume seems to have passed from the possession of the Wyatt family to that of Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (1776-1839), the first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, of Stowe House, at some point before 1818-1819: it appears in a catalogue of the Duke's books drawn up at that time. It was then inherited by the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (1779-1861). The second Duke sold it to Bertram Ashburnham (1797-1878), 4th Earl of Ashburnham, in 1849. It was purchased by the British Museum in 1883 from the 5th Earl of Ashburnham, together with over a thousand other Stowe manuscripts. Marsham himself seems to doubt the veracity of the family tradition although he was able to confirm that the portrait mentioned in the 1725 minutes was also then in possession of his brother in the 1870s. Whatever the truth behind the legend of association with Anne Boleyn, there is no doubt that this is a beautiful, historic and rare example of a Tudor miniature book. It is now held by the British Library (Stowe MS 956).