National Bookshop Day

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Bookshops, Daunt's Bookshop, Libraries, London

Let’s all raise a glass in praise of our wonderful bookshops. Along with libraries, they are the best friends of all readers and writers.

My other half and I spent time (and a modest amount of money) in Daunt’s Bookshop in London yesterday. A magical place in Marylebone..

It is tempting to save a pound or two by buying books from Amazon – though by the time you’ve added postage, the difference may not be great – but let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot by making book selling on the high street uneconomic. We don’t want to deny ourselves the thrill of one day seeing our own efforts on public display, do we?

 

Tsundoku – we’ve all got it (haven’t we?) …

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Bookshops, Church fairs, George Eliot, Japanese, Robert Browning, Royalties, To Be Read piles, Tsundoku

Tsundoku is the Japanese word for books you’ve bought but have not yet read. How brilliant to have such a word – why isn’t there an English one, we must have been piling them up just as much over here for just as long! Here’s some of my own tsundoku. Some was bought on impulse in a bookshop, some ordered after careful thought, some bought at a church fair because I was a friend of the person manning the bookstall and felt I had to buy something.

Authors, how do you feel about your work being tsundoku? Is it enough that your book caught a purchaser’s eye so much that he or she bought it? Or that you’ve had the royalty on that sale? Or are you somewhat put out that you’re still in the To Be Read One Day list?

If the latter, my apologies to the authors in my photo. I suspect that Robert Browning, George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle wouldn’t have minded that much.

 

No longer on the bookshop shelves

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Bookshops, Dagger Awards, John Creasey, Tethered Camel Publishing, Village fetes, William Vivian Butler

What would a writer prefer? Great success in his or her lifetime, but then dropping out of sight? Or obscurity while she or he lives, but immortal fame afterwards? Chance would be a fine thing, many of us would answer, and we’d be delighted with ‘Local Writer Writes Interesting Story’ on page 4 of the entertainment section of our local newspaper, but we can always dream …

I muse on this because of the mention of John Creasey in my last post (on very valuable commas). How fame can pass. When I was at school he was one of Britain’s most prolific and successful crime writers, under his own name and his several pseudonyms such as JJ Marric and Antony Morton. He sold over 80 million books. His dates? 1908-1973.

On my shelf I have tales of his heroes Inspector West, Commander Gideon and the Toff. These are pictured. I used to have many more, but when I was a teenager my collection fell victim to a domestic misunderstanding and in my absence was given away for sale at the local village fete. (The Gideon book pictured is actually not one he wrote himself, but was written after his death ‘in his footsteps’ by William Vivian Butler. There’s a better picture of covers of John Creasey’s novels at http://www.johncreasey.co.uk/.)

I loved his work. His name is retained in the John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award, but apart from that he is largely overlooked. Perhaps his books are too rooted in their time: Inspector West and Commander Gideon are incorruptible, and don’t have damaged back stories. It wouldn’t be overly unlikely in his 1950s novels for a criminal to mutter “It’s a fair cop, guv”. Tethered Camel Publishing recently reprinted some of John Creasey’s titles, but if you look on the shelves in Waterstones you won’t find him.

So fame can be fleeting. Maybe, if I were selling 80 million copies, I’d say “Let it fleet.”

What would be your choice? Lifetime success or posthumous fame?