I confess.
When other boys at my boarding school were reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover
by torchlight under the bed clothes, I was devouring The Island of Sheep.
Perhaps The Blanket of the Dark would have been more appropriate. I
still have those dozen Buchan Penguins; little did they realise what eggs they
hatched. Apparently, I was one of the 130,000 who had bought Greenmantle
by June 1964. I wonder how many of those readers have since also succumbed to
the seductions of Bibliomania.
It’s a disease that can lie relatively dormant for years,
then creep up on you and finally take remorseless hold - rather like baldness.
I know. Buchan once shared equal shelf space with Weyman and Meade Falkner,
Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter; even, and I blush to admit it, Georgette
Heyer. But in the space of two years, I moved to the Midlands, I married, and I
started to collect Buchan with vigour. Perhaps this was my mid-life
crisis.
Those early years were in some ways the most exciting - I
was just ahead of the field. I picked up first editions of The Thirty-Nine
Steps and Greenmantle for ten pounds and one pound respectively. I
visited Aladdin’s caves that have long since been walled in, like Voltaire
& Rousseau in Glasgow. I discovered,
literally on my hands and knees in the gloomiest corner of McCutcheon’s
bookshop in Stirling, J.B’s first major work in print - his edited Essays
and Apothegms of Francis, Lord Bacon - for 50p. Montrose I found in
Newbury, Raleigh in Burton-on-Trent, Lord Minto in Bristol and Augustus
in Altrincham. I made acquaintance with some of the ‘characters’ of the book
trade - Michael Moon, just starting out in Beckermet [before opening his
emporium in Whitehaven], who provided me with the first edition of The
Watcher by the Threshold for a mere three pounds; Alex Frizzel of West
Linton, who could always be relied on to produce the rare pamphlet or the
unusual title; and the Taubenheims of Burford, who had a whole shelf of JB and
who kindly acted as intermediaries when I wanted all my Alice Buchan books
signed. I have searched in a converted chapel in Inverness, a redundant school
in Hastings and a country house in Weedon; descended cellars in Edinburgh and
Charing Cross Road and attics in Kendal and Brighton; turned a blind eye to the
glories of Bath, York and Edinburgh as I raced from one bibliopole to another.
I have criss-crossed Britain for Buchan.
There have been troughs and peaks. One erudite
bookseller, on Primrose Hill I recall, when asked if he had any Buchan replied
in a stentorian voice: “We tend not to stock schoolboy fiction”, much to my
wife’s and other browsers’ amusement and my chagrin. Another maintained never
to have heard of him and suggested I might have mistaken the name for Buchanan.
One book selling buffer - I can see him now athwart his stock in Belsize Park -
claimed when asked for any title, that it was “in the cellar”, but he
never had the key on him. My spirits were moderately lifted in Oakham, when
after the inevitable request, the bookseller replied: “Buchan? No, we only deal
with the sewage end of the market in here”. He had evacuated when I next
passed through.
Collecting Buchan has introduced me to Roy Court of
Bannatyne Books, Michael Ross of Avonworld Books, John Smith (of Second
Edition) and Andrew Pringle in Edinburgh; it has taken me to mere sheds in
Kirkwall and Braithwaite and converted cinemas in Hay-on-Wye and Crieff. I have
learned the present names behind 'John Updike' of Edinburgh and 'Maurice Dodd' of Carlisle; I have mixed with the famous at Sotherans and Maggs Bros., Bertram
Rota and Blackwell’s; consumed coffee in Uppingham and taken tea in the wilds
of Buckinghamshire.
Now, the internet courses through my bibliophile veins:
from New Zealand and South Africa, from Australia and Canada, and, above all,
from the USA, have come padded packets, large and small, usually squirreled
away before the rest of the household has awoken. Few postmen earn their
Christmas bonus more deservedly.
Andrew Lang’s cautionary tale - A Bookman’s Purgatory
- in Longman’s Magazine for September 1883, has an awful resonance for me.
Lang’s Thomas Blinton 'was a book-hunter. He had always been a book-hunter,
ever since, at an extremely early age, he had awakened to the errors of his
ways as a collector of stamps and monograms'.
Blinton walked from the City to West Kensington every day, to beat the
covers of the bookstalls, while other men travelled in the expensive cab or the
unwholesome Metropolitan Railway. As some plots have an anti-hero, so Lang’s
tale has an anti-moral. Shocked by a nightmare where his books are all sold
cheaply, Blinton awakes to a repentance that lasted but a week - 'when he was
discovered marking a catalogue, surreptitiously before breakfast'.
Once a collector, always a collector. Like Blinton, like
Lang, I have sinned, and struggled, and fallen. I have thrown catalogues,
unopened, into the waste bin. I have driven past Hay-on-Wye without stopping. I
have ignored Bookfinder, AddAll and the Clique on the Internet for at least two
days. But then the fatal moment of temptation: Hermes arrives hotfoot in the
guise of an innocuous e-mail, Mercury is on the telephone - “We don’t think you
have this Buchan....” apage Satanas?
No - beati possidentes.
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