Browsers' corners
Christopher Hawtree
Author! Author! Edited by Richard Findlater (Faber & Faber £6.95; £2.951 Modern First Editions Joseph Connolly (Orbis £15)
Not having published anything, it is as something of a voyeur that I look at most quarters' issues of the Author. This 93-year-old journal of the Society of Au- thors, which has recently celebrated its centenary, devotes much of its contents to such topics as the dubious merits of word-processors, VAT in Ireland, the con- tinuing saga of PLR, and so on; if a writer were to fill his own pages in this way, his readers would soon transfer their loyalties to a more beguiling narrator. One approaches an anthology culled from its Pages with a certain dread, but soon turns from each item to the next with some fascination and enjoyment; shorn of tech- nical minutia, it contains a series of articles Which amply show the hardship, enjoy- ment and contradictory opinions that attend the writing of books. Perhaps the sentence that most deserves to become a classic is one by Anthony Burgess which, referring to his own works, combines Modesty and vanity in a perfect balance:
• • . in general, I would say that most of the translations I have been able to super- vise are better than the originals'.
Hardly a controversy goes by without a telling contribution from Bernard Shaw. One such exchange was started by the best-selling novelist W. B. Maxwell. (John Betjeman was fond of praising 'old W. B.', delighting in pointing out that he meant Maxwell, not Yeats.) 'The desire for the greatest possible number of readers seems to me not only justifiable, but a proper ambition for every writer to entertain,' wrote Maxwell in 1925; a consolation of wnting is that such rules, however plausi- ble they sound in certain cases, do not apply all round. By a cruel irony, the Acknowledgments page of this anthology records that 'we have been unable to trace the owners of the copyright in the work of ' • • W. B. Maxwell'.
Needless to say, he does not figure in Joseph Connolly's elegantly produced guide to the prices that readers might now expect to pay for certain writers' books as theY first appeared. No doubt if he deigned to have such a thing, Mr Connolly would Put Maxwell's novels in the cheap box outside the shop which he keeps in Flask Walk. And yet, as the guide shows, there is
lways the hope that one day he will come In from the cold and be eagerly sought
after. In the seven years since Mr Connolly produced his first such guide, Barbara Pym has shot in with all the speed of a new record by her favourite Beatles, so that a first edition of Some Tame Gazelle in a dust-wrapper is listed — an underestimate — at £80 (H, in Mr Connolly's alphabetical scale of prices). Some, remembering Hux- ley's short story, might regard booksellers as the ultimate cynics, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Mr Connolly's introduction and descriptive paragraphs, if sometimes written in pencil- behind-the-ear jocular ('space, as it were, does not allow me to list these' non-fiction works of Arthur C. Clarke), reveal that his real, healthy affections lie in such writers as P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh ('every time you read Waugh, he seems to get better and better — there is always more to be got from the book than the last time you read it'); a scarcely concealed sense of duty accompanies his listing of Saul Bellow and Tolkein. The Durrell entry contains a vigorous polemic about the plummeting design standards — 'the ubiquitous "ft' — at Faber and Faber.
Instinct, as much as anything can do, guides him. Among the few young writers to be included is Graham Swift, from whose Waterland 'I get the right "feel" '. Inevitably some of the listings are erratic, and the reader is referred to out-of-date bibliographies. Much the most startling item is something by Henry Green called Party Goff, which can only be an oblique joke about the Telegraph's fiction review- er. The entry for A. N. Wilson, who 'seems set to stay', omits Wise Virgin. Both Anita Loos and Ngaio Marsh are confidently said to be alive. A volume of Forster's letters out next March is in, but Stars and Bars is not. 'One fellow, who had just bought and enjoyed An Ice-Cream War has come into my shop every week since, asking if I have "any early Boyds" '. Gore Vidal's most sought-after books appear, as yet, to be the three excellent detective stories which he wrote under the name of Edgar Box; these come into the G category, while most of his subsequent work hardly musters a B, such were the print-runs. Poor old Reggie Tur- ner once remarked to Max Beerbohm that it was second editions of his works that were rare. Mr Connolly makes out an interesting case for Anthony Buckeridge ('you clodpoll, Jennings!), and it would have been interesting to see how Paul Theroux now fares.
Once picked up, it is difficult to put down this book: one's eyes go from entry to entry, and it must be said, then stray along the shelves. Where is my copy of Auden's 1928 Poems (X-Z)? One might pause to wonder whether many customers will be eager to pay C for a copy, but as Mr Connolly chances to point out, his earlier guide (pictured on the cover between Berryman and Osborne) now comes into the E bracket.
Such laws of supply and demand cannot be predicted for long, and there can never have been such a forthright guide to the shops where the potential bargains or otherwise are to be found than in Drif fs Guide, a small, typewriter-set book which lists all the secondhand shops in Britain. It can be bought in some enterprising shops or direct from Mr Driffield (£4.50) at 14 Charing Cross Road, W.C.2. Mr Connolly might not be best pleased at entry 90, which describes his shop as having `med size gen stk slow t/o' and then some acerbic verse, but he can be thankful that he is not the proprietor of the one in Islington which 'looks like an undertakers & they are certainly buriers of books, if you knock on the door they will ask you what you want and say that they have not got it'. Under- standably, it has caused outrage in the trade, but for the customer it is a boon, an entertainment and should be a constant companion.
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