Nicholas Royle's Blog

Hills of dreams

Everyone knows Sheffield is built on hills. Seven of them. Knowing it is one thing, feeling it another. 
 
Invited to be ‘in conversation’ with Tony White at Site Gallery, for an event that is part of Strong Language, curated by Tim Etchells, which in turn is part of the Off the Shelf festival, I decide to travel in the direction of Sheffield by train and alight at Dore & Totley, on the outskirts of the city, and walk in, visiting two second hand bookshops on the way. It’s a good plan but...

Going Roeg

I make my first visit in a year to Notting Hill’s Book & Comic Exchange. I could go more often, as long as I’m not selling. If I’m selling, once a year is about the limit, although, if your ego is intact, there is something strangely thrilling about the level of disdain with which some staff there treat customers wishing to sell books. I say some staff. When I lived down the road in the 1990s and would go along with unwanted review copies to convert into part-exchange vouchers, there was one...

Royal Sands

At what point does a harmless interest in collecting books become pathological? Perhaps when you start buying books you know you already have, in exactly the same edition, the same printing, in equally good condition. Virtually indistinguishable, in fact.
 
I decide, because a former student has been on my mind, to go to Southport. From Manchester you may take a direct train to Southport, but why would you do that when you can go via Liverpool, a city with three excellent dedicated second hand...

Direct marketing

Leeds. The first Leeds Record and Book Fair. Leeds Kirkgate Market, one of the biggest covered markets in Europe, was voted Britain’s favourite market for the second consecutive year in January 2017. I’m here for the city’s first monthly fair for secondhand books and vinyl. I would probably have come anyway, but my publisher, Confingo Publishing, was offered a stall to sell copies of their excellent magazine, Confingo, and copies of my short story collection, Ornithology, and so I am also he...

Specific north-west

One of my oldest friends gets married in Grasmere. A happy event in itself, but I also get to climb Helvellyn and, on the drive back to Manchester, visit two of the best second hand bookshops in the north-west, if not the country. I can’t remember what took me to the Carnforth Bookshop the first time I visited it, but a personal recommendation from someone like John Oakey or Claire Dean or Paul Kondras seems most likely. I have now been several times. It’s easily accessible both by road (jus...

En vacances

I may be spending a few days in France – en vacances, I suppose you could say – but that’s no reason not to be keeping an eye out for additions to my various small-but-growing French-language collections. Simenon novels in Livre de Poche. Attractive editions of titles by Boris Vian/Vernon Sullivan, Marguerite Duras, Roland Topor. Anything I haven’t already got by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Monique Wittig, Tanguy Viel or Jean Ravey in Editions de Minuit. In fact, anything I...

The only way is Essex

The initial signs are unpromising. I get off the train and walk down the pedestrian shopping street to the sea front, which is a mess of contradictions. Grand buildings with trashy signs, a supposed amusement park, and a famous landmark that may be the longest ‘pleasure pier’ in the world but is short on charm and costs two quid to go on. I’ll save my £2 and buy an extra book with it, because the reason I’ve come to Southend is to visit the Bookshop Experience.
 
Away from the front and drifti...

Bushy tale

I am in a park. There are trees and a wall to the left of the path, a vast open space to the right. The sun is beating down. I am wearing a warm jacket and carrying a bag that is slightly too heavy. Sweat is trickling into the small of my back. In front of me and on either side and – I check – behind, a herd of deer displays a languid form of Brownian motion. Two young stags trot across the path like drag queens in high heels balancing elaborate candelabras on their heads.
 
It might seem like...

Park life

Last time I went shopping for books in Muswell Hill, north London, Bridget O’Connor was still working behind the till in the Muswell Hill Bookshop. A friendly and vivacious bookseller, Bridget was also a screenwriter and author of the short story collections Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997). She died in 2010, aged 49.
 
I set out to walk from Stoke Newington to Muswell Hill on the second-longest (and probably second-hottest) day of the year. I don’t want to load up with...

High times in the Highlands

Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s creative writing centre, is located in the Highlands, fourteen miles south-west of Inverness. It is quite remote, fairly isolated and totally wonderful. Once a year I spend a week there with a group of enormously talented writers, mainly former MA students from the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Daily from Tuesday to Friday I’ll put in a day’s work, then spend the evening doubled up with laughter, grateful that I remembered to bring...