Browsing the Bookshelves

One of things I like doing least is walking into a group of people, none of whom I know. It's a circumstance I try to avoid, usually with some success. It is perhaps then somewhat ironic that it is also a most rewarding and refreshing experience. It happened to twice on one day this week.

The Clarence on Whitehall was the location of choice for a bookcrossing mini-meet-up at lunchtime. It's the first meet-up I've been able to make since joining bookcrossing at the back end of August and I was determined to put some real faces to the screen names of some of those I've chatted to via bookcrossing. Even so, it was with a little trepidation that I walked into the Clarence (and, unusually for me, I was late). Of course, I needn't have worried. I was made so welcome and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to talk books and bookcrossing with some generous souls. (Bookcrossers are, I think generous by default.)  The lunch was excellent too - I can heartily recommend the asparagus tart!

As the Clarence is also an official bookcrossing zone, I went armed with a pile of books to release into the wild. The pile was somewhat depleted over lunch as others picked over it. And, despite my protestations that I already have too much on my "too be read" pile, I managed to come away with some new additions too. The rest were left in the zone.

Later than same day, clutching one of the most elegant invitations I have ever seen, I made my way to the offices of John Murray publishers on Albemarle Street to a party to mark the launch of the eighth issue of Slightly Foxed. Slightly Foxed - billed as the real readers' quarterly - is an excellent literary magazine, devoted to delving into the depths of literature and reading and thus assuaging the common obsession with the newly published. I can't pick up a copy of the magazine with thinking of William Hazlitt's protestations against readers' perennial desire for "new books". I may have mentioned it before, but it bares repeating:

"I cannot understand the rage manifested by the greater part of the world for reading New Books.  If the public had read all those that had gone before, I can conceive how they should not wish to read the same work twice over; but when I consider the countless volumes that lie unopened, unregarded, unread and unthought-of, I cannot enter into the pathetic complaints that I hear made that Sir Walter writes no more-that the press is idle-that Lord Bryon is dead. If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

John Murray's offices are impressive. Salted with old-fashioned elegance and spiced with a rich array of bright new literary talent in the form of displays of recent publications laid out in front of more venerable tomes, providing a hint of the publisher's venerable history. John Murray was Lord Bryon's publisher and I was itching to find out what their shelves might disgorge. With a glass of delicious champagne in hand, I headed to a far corner to begin an inspection of the offering but before my fingers made it to a single volume, I found myself chatting away about bookselling and publishing, sharing experience of on-line sales in particular, and, of course, giving the odd plug to ibooknet.

The celebration was in fact a double one. The party was also marking the publication of Tim Mackintosh-Smith's The Ghost Writer and I had the pleasure of meeting both the illustrator, David Eccles and the designer Octavius Murray (son, I understand, of the current John Murray). I couldn't resist a copy of this elegant and intriguing little book.

The blurb for the book reads: "Speaking via its ghost-writer, Tim Mackintosh Smith, the Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi tells its own true, if admittedly incredible, story. Set in medieval Cairo and Aleppo, seventeenth-century Oxford and 1960s London, it is a tale of cannibalism, a curse, and of an authorial voice from beyond the grave. Ghost-Writer not only redefines the meaning of a talking book; it may even make us listen to our libraries." With such a tantalising teaser, I really could resist and so my mount "too be read" received yet another contribution when I finally made it home.