: Nicholas Royle
: Shadow Lines Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf
: Salt
: 9781784633080
: 1
: CHF 9.70
:
: Sammeln, Sammlerkataloge
: English
: 240
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Shadow Lines very much celebrates the world of books' -Telegraph Nicholas Royle's love of second-hand books and the 'inclusions' he finds inside them, their presence betrayed by 'shadow lines', is about making connections. Someone has scribbled a number in a book? He'll text or call. An old address? He'll return the book to where it used to live. Follow him as he walks between bookshops, reading as he goes, on the hunt for treasure, for ways to make us feel closer - to the books on our shelves, to each other and to our own lives. Share in Royle's enthusiasm for the Rev W Awdry's Railway Series, Penguin Modern Stories and Paul Auster's cult classic, The New York Trilogy, as well as books in art and film. The brilliant follow-up to the instant classic, White Spines. Praise for Shadow Lines ????? 'What links Bin Laden's bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London?What links Bin Laden's bodyguard to an Oxfam bookshop in London?. In Shadow Lines, Nicholas Royle tracks down the owners of objects slipped into second-hand books - with amusing and surprising results.' -Ian Sansom The Telegraph If you love books, bookshops and browsing, this is your perfect all-year gift - head to your happy place with a copy Shadow Lines today! (Note: 'inclusions' not supplied.)

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections - Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny - and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector. Forthcoming is another collection, Paris Fantastique (Confingo Publishing). In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which continues to publish original short stories as limited-edition chapbooks.

In the first episode of the new era ofUniversity Challenge, presented by Amol Rajan and broadcast on 12 July 2023, the new question-master asks the team from Trinity College Cambridge the following bonus question: ‘A murderer at the scene of his crime and two bowler-hatted men armed with a club and a net feature in which painter’s 1927 Surrealist workThe Menaced Assassin?’ It’s the detail of the bowler hats that allows the Trinity team to answer, with confidence, ‘Magritte.’

Three years and one fortnight earlier, on 27 June 2020, just days after non-essential shops were allowed to reopen following the first national Coronavirus lockdown, I came off the M6 at Coventry, parking on Brighton Street in Upper Stoke. Or is it Barras Heath, or perhaps Ball Hill? I don’t know, but the key thing was I was at least a mile from the centre of Coventry and parking was unrestricted. Plus, there was a good stretch of road with back gardens on one side and a high privet hedge on the other: I could park without inconveniencing anyone. Indeed, no one was actually parked here. There didn’t appear to be anyone around at all. I walked down towards Walsgrave Road, a high brick wall having appeared on my right to shield local residents from the noise of the traffic on Jimmy Hill Way. At Gosford Green I turned right and walked along Far Gosford Street, heading towards the Big Comfy Bookshop and hoping it would be open. I had done my research, which suggested it was supposed to be, but in June 2020 we were all more used to seeing shops closed than open.

It was open and it turned out to be a good bookshop to visit immediately post-lockdown, because it had a generous amount of floor space – concrete, painted red, if you want to know. There were even armchairs, also red, but they were taped off. ‘CAUTION,’ shouted the yellow plastic tape. ‘ATTENTION.’ My eye was caught by a more welcoming, handwritten sign affixed to a shelf of old books. ‘OLD BOOKS,’ it said. ‘Is there any better smell than that of old books? Come and browse for a while, you never know what you might find.’ I found a novel, in hardback,The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. I could see that it couldn’t possibly be by my contemporary Henry Sutton, author ofThe Househunter andFlying and numerous other novels, unless he had been a child prodigy and written it when he was four. I decided to buy it and write to Sutton and ask him if he knew about it, maybe off