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Sixpence House by Paul Collins

StuckinaBook All , , 7 Comments

Image result for sixpence house paul collinsOne of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.

I first went around 2003, I think, which is also when Paul Collins published his memoir Sixpence House. I’ve been ten or so times in the intervening years and I still love it, but each time there are fewer bookshops and more non-bookshops. Reading Sixpence House reminds me of its heyday, when there were 40+ bookshops and you couldn’t visit them all in a day.

I’ve seen plenty come and go over the years, with many seeming to last less than a year. I suppose the internet is the culprit, though it gives with one hand and takes with the other, as far as book-lovers are concerned. But it is still a glorious place – and that’s what brought Collins and his wife there in the early 2000s.

They’d been before, but now wanted to move there for good – or at least for a period. Neither of them are particularly drawn towards concrete, long-term plans. In a manner that wouldn’t feel possible were it not true, Collins manages to get a job at Richard Booth’s bookshop ‘sorting American books’, simply by loitering around and being American.

It’s a joy to read Collins’s love of books. He often goes on delightfully bookish tangents related to novels and memoirs he picks up in this job, or stray thoughts leading to other books. I didn’t expect to find two mentions of relatively obscure novels I wrote about in my DPhil – Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew and David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo – but they are among the miscellany of titles Collins is reminded of. You get the sense that living in Hay allows you to live in this tapestry of literature past and present – even if most of the booksellers are interlopers, and most of the locals have more down-to-earth jobs. As Collins puts it, the locals are book movers and the foreigners are booksellers.

They start house hunting. The title of the book rather gives away which house they’ll ultimately decide is their ideal home, flooded basement and all, so the reader isn’t super surprised when various other viewings end up in disappointment. But surprise isn’t the point of Sixpence House; it’s about watching a book lover discover his ideal homeland – and then discover that not all that glisters is gold. Not that there’s a dark underbelly to Hay – simply that life doesn’t always work out quite the way one hopes, particularly if you are trying to bring together many disparate threads.

One of those threads is leaving America. Collins has a British passport, but he is American through and through – and this book is clearly aimed at Americans. Occasionally that made it a bit off-putting to read for this Englishman. I don’t need to be introduced to things from my culture like Countdown with the breathless incredulity Collins relays them. I don’t need to be told that our roads are too narrow, our bedrooms too small, and our teeth too bad. (Though I do always welcome an American marvelling at the wonders of the NHS!) On the flip side, he doesn’t explain American cultural references – what on earth is C-SPAN, for example? (I have Googled it now). On yet another flip side, he mentions Lord Archer in a way that assumes the reader knows everything about him – did that news really get across the Atlantic?

As a memoir, it naturally doesn’t have the central narrative-non-fiction of Collins’ excellent book about William Shakespeare that I read earlier in the year, and I suppose Sixpence House is almost entirely a memoir that also looks a little at the life and recent history of a place. It’s nice to learn more about Richard Booth, particularly after his recent death, and there is an engaging ongoing thread of Collins editing his first book about notable losers, but there is a slight caginess – cageyness? – to the storytelling that makes you wonder if Collins felt entirely comfortable about writing a memoir. And it’s also unclear exactly why they decide to leave, in the end, while in the midst of looking to buy houses. He can draw the parameters wherever he wants, naturally, but I was left with quite a few questions.

Despite that, this is a really enjoyable book. As I say, I think it’s primarily targeted at Americans – but it is also special to those of us who know and love Hay. So if you’re an American who loves Hay but has also not picked up too many details about life in the UK, then you might just be the ideal reader for Sixpence House!

The Book of William by Paul Collins

StuckinaBook All , , , , 2 Comments

It’s only February, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read one of my books of the year – The Book of William by Paul Collins, published in 2009. The subtitle is a little misleading, but it gives you the gist: ‘How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World’.

I bought it in 2013, when I was working for the Rare Books department at the Bodleian and had been commissioned to write a very short biography of Shakespeare (and accounts of various portraits, false portraits, etc.) to accompany a DVD of adaptations of his plays. I never found out if that text was used (though I do remember that my first draft of the biography was rejected for “having too many facts” and “not being swooning enough”). But it did reignite my interest in Shakespeare – I picked up this book and James Shapiro’s excellent Contested Will around this time.

Collins’ book looks at various stages in the First Folio’s history – starting, understandably, with its creation. Shakespeare died a few years before it was printed, and there wasn’t much precedent for printing plays on such a grand scale – but he had champions of his work who saw that it happened. I’d learned quite a lot of this section before, at university and in other books, but Collins puts it together excellently. My attention was already caught.

My favourite sections of The Book of William were the next few chapters – more or less the bulk of the book, I suppose – looking at the waxing and waning of Shakespeare’s popularity. And these ups and downs sometimes, but not always, coincided with the popularity of the First Folio in the secondhand market. Collins’ accounts of rival editors in the 18th century is brilliant. One of them was Alexander Pope, no less, and his hacking away of Shakespeare’s plays led to a bitter back and forth with an editor, Theobald, who had a much more rigorous respect for the original – and wasn’t above publishing a book which highlighted hundreds of Pope’s errors.

We dart all over the place, as the account moves on. There is the gentlemen in the middle of nowhere, who stopped being a successful businessman to launch an exhaustive project to discover all the differences between the remaining First Folios, and their ownership, in an enormous five-volume series. There is the Folger Library’s collection of folios, as well as the mirror machines they use to trace distinctions between them. It’s all worlds away from a man from Stratford writing out blank verse, and fascinating to see how many chance or unlikely steps in between that moment and the present have led to his reputation – and that of this first printed collection of his plays (albeit incomplete).

I can join the ranks of those who have held a First Folio. Again, the Bodleian – I was able to look through a copy, and was amused that a previous ownership had amended the list of plays, adding or removing them according to their own beliefs about canonicity. Most of the editions Collins looks at have been similarly desecrated by earlier owners, unaware of how sacred these books would become. And some of the most tantalising moments are those that come from a similar unawareness – plays lost to history, or First Folios that disappear. As Collins points out, it’s not a particularly rare book (as these things go), with over 200 known to still exist. I own books with shorter print runs than that. A combination of things – Shakespeare’s genius, lore about the book, and of course demand – make it so valuable.

I have to admit that the end of the book sort of petered out for me. We are taken to Japan, and left there. I suppose it would be difficult to resolve something that can never truly end – for the history of the First Folio will continue and continue. And any scholars will be frustrated using this book, because there are no footnotes or sourcing – all the statements are doubtless well researched, but have to be taken at Collins’ word.

The accounts would be interesting in any writer’s hand, but Collins brings something special to this book. I love anything which foregrounds the author’s own experience of researching the book – so he is always present as we journey with him around the world. His tone perfectly captures reverence, fascination, and amusement at the absurdity of many moments in the history he relays. It’s made me all the keener to read his book about Hay-on-Wye – and also to find more and more to read about Shakespeare’s legacy. A real treat.