R. B. Russell - Fifty Forgotten Books

Putting the Pieces in Place , 2009
Literary Remains , 2010
Leave Your Sleep , 2012
Death Makes Strangers of Us All , 2018

Bloody Baudelaire , 2009
The Dark Return of Time , 2014
The Stones are Singing , 2016

She Sleeps , 2017
Waiting for the End of the World , 2020
Heavens Hill , 2022

Ghosts , 2012

Occult Territory: An Arthur Machen Gazetteer , 2019
Past Lives of Old Books and Other Essays , 2020
Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Bibliography , 2020
(with J. Lawrence Mitchell)
Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography , 2022

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, 1999
(with Miracles , translated by Adrian Eckersley)

First published in 2022 by And Other Stories
Sheffield London New York
www.andotherstories.org

Copyright R. B. Russell, 2022

All rights reserved. The right of R. B. Russell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505509
eBook ISBN: 9781913505516

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Linden Lawson; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting, text design and eBook by Tetragon, London ; Cover Design: Holly Ovenden.

All photographs are the author's, save where noted.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported
using public funding by Arts Council England.

Fifty Forgotten Books is intended to be a personal recommendation of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction. The idea is not just to discuss the books, but to explain what they have meant to me over time, thus forming an oblique, partial memoir of my life. I have been a writer and publisher for over thirty years, and a bibliophile for many more. I hope this volume provides an example of how literature, books and book-collecting have been an intrinsic part of my personal, professional and imaginative life, resulting in friendships and experiences I would otherwise never have had.

The first problem I encountered in my selection was that some of the books I wanted to discuss have never been well enough known for them to be subsequently forgotten while just as many have always been appreciated, if sometimes by connoisseurs of the less-frequented byways of literature. My title, then, is more a challenge or invitation to readers to determine how many of these works they remember. Familiarity with the fifty books I have selected depends not just on how widely read you are, but on simple serendipity, because no book lover can ever hope to work their way through anything other than a fraction of the books they would like to read. A few of my forgotten books are now back in print with small publishers who revive obscure fiction, but at least two have been Penguin Modern Classics for decades ( Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier and A. J. A. Symonss The Quest for Corvo ). In my defence, it is often too easy to ignore the classics and assume they are already too well appreciated to be worthy of consideration. For all the prestige of a publishers classic books, they are invariably heavily subsidised by fashionable contemporary publications.

I was tempted to exchange those better-known books for some that I know are really obscure, such as The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Alison Gibbons (1982), and A Moving Experience by Edna Judd (1995). Both would have been examples of intriguing books that few people have heard of, but I thought better of it in my opinion, they are not actually very good.

Every book discussed here is recommended without equivocation. I have reread many of them several times, and each subsequent reading has usually revealed something new about the book, and also about me as a reader.

It will be noted that I do not only discuss the texts and their authors, although these are obviously the primary consideration. The physical book has always been important to me, and I have mentioned the circumstances of discovering my copies and, where I can remember, who recommended them. A memorable edition of a book, suggested by a friend, discovered in an idiosyncratic bookshop, inevitably adds to the experience of taking it off the shelf again, perhaps decades later. In many ways my book collection today acts as an aide-memoire or diary of places I have lived in and visited, and of friends even the booksellers who supplied them. Inevitably, in recent years, some of my books have their origins in recommendations online and have been bought from dealers I do not know, simply by pressing a virtual button on a commercial website. I invariably feel that something is lost by the lack of association, no matter how good the book.

I should explain that my book-collecting turned into a publishing hobby in my twenties, resulting in the formation of Tartarus Press in 1990. I continue to run this small publishing house, issuing approximately ten books a year, with my partner (in life and in business), Rosalie Parker. At every stage, our publishing has been inspired by our joint love of books and writing. It would therefore be odd if I did not include some Tartarus Press books here, although selecting just a few has been an invidious task we are both passionate about everything we have published.

In my relationship with Rosalie, I am the collector. We weed or prune our bookshelves regularly, and although Rosalie can send books she has finished to a charity shop without a second thought, I always find this difficult. I might want to refer to them, or even reread them. I find that I have to keep the volumes I love, and even upgrade copies for more interesting, often earlier editions. I occasionally find that I can justify owning multiple copies of the same book.

I would like to thank Jeremy M. Davies for commissioning this exercise in obscure books and nostalgia. He asked for a memoir of my adventures uncovering rare, strange, obscure books in shops and church sales, etc. of the world. I hope that I have gone some way to fulfilling the brief.

Perhaps I should say something here about second-hand bookshops today, lest this volume appear entirely backward-looking. Like many collectors, I do of course look back with a certain amount of nostalgia to those dusty emporia I visited over the years but which have now closed, remembering the many treasures unearthed in them, as well as the characters encountered. Collectors often assume that there are no longer as many bookshops as there once were, but the literary researcher Mark Valentine recently compared the number of shops in Driffs Guides to All the Secondhand & Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain from the 1980s to those still trading today. Surprisingly, he found that, if anything, there are more second-hand bookshops now than there have ever been (if one includes charity shops that deal specifically in books). I can only assume that when I remember the bookshops of, say, the Brighton of my youth (and there were many), they were not all operating concurrently. There are still wonderful bookshops in business today. In the last few months I visited Lucius Books in York and came away with a first edition of Pierrot! by Henry de Vere Stacpoole, and at Westwood Books in Sedbergh I bought assorted hardbacks and paperbacks including two real gems (Merlin Sheldrakes Entangled Life and Alastair Bonnetts Off The Map ). At Scarthin Books in Derbyshire I found a paperback of Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (I had been looking for a copy for ages), and in Camilla's Bookshop in Eastbourne (which still stands after many decades) a splendid Panther paperback of Cults of Unreason by Dr Christopher Evans.