Nicholas Royle's Blog, page 2

Back down south

Brighton. The hottest day of the year. I’m here to do an event with the other Nicholas Royle at Waterstones. We did one last night at Piccadilly Waterstones in London, which seemed to go well, promoting my new collection, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing), and Nick’s new novel, An English Guide to Birdwatching (Myriad Editions). Maybe tonight we’ll find out if the double act has legs.
 
Meanwhile, poet Neil Rollinson wonders if I’d like to meet for a coffee. There’s something not quite congruo...

Five millimetres

When I set eyes on the 1993 Picador edition of Daniel L Magida's novel The Rules of Seduction in the general fiction section of Sharston Books, I experience a visceral reaction. Mild, but still visceral. I think my unconscious mind spots the anomaly first. The colophon, or publisher's logo, is placed horizontally on the spine instead of vertically. I pick the book up, but put it down again. I leave it. I mean, why would I want to buy that? It's not right. I buy some other books and carry the...

Black water, white spines

In my local Oxfam I spot a fat white Picador spine on the shelf where I always look first, the one reserved for short stories. The book is Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature edited by Alberto Manguel. This was my first Picador, given to me for Christmas by my parents in the year it came out, 1983. I don't remember if I asked for it or if they simply made an excellent choice. What Alberto Manguel did with this book was take a lot of writers and actual stories I had come across...

Double act

I call him the Other Nicholas Royle. He probably calls me the same. For a long time he wrote non-fiction and I wrote fiction, so it was relatively easy to distinguish between us, although I did encourage him to cross over by commissioning him to write a couple of short stories. Anyway, Nicholas Royle is publishing his second novel, An English Guide to Birdwatching (Myriad Editions), and I am bringing out my second collection of short stories, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing) at the same tim...

Enchantment in the East Midlands

Everyone I meet in Leicester says, 'It's not as warm as yesterday.' I can believe it; it only warms up when I'm walking briskly between bookshops. The meeting I'm in town for, at De Montfort University, is on Tuesday morning, early enough that they're putting me up in a hotel on Monday night. A little online research suggests I will be able to fill an afternoon easily enough before paying a visit to the family of my late friend, the writer Graham Joyce.

I start at Maynard & Bradley on Silver...

Long live Skoob!

It's 1982 and I've just moved to London as a student of modern languages. I enter Skoob Books on Sicilian Avenue, just off Kingsway, close to Covent Garden. This popular secondhand bookshop has two rooms. Inside the second room, accessed via a doorway just beyond the counter, is a bookcase devoted to white-spined books. Why would you do that, I think to myself. I examine them. They are all published by Picador. What is special about Picador, I ask myself. 

Twenty-five years later, I have...

Prevailing Osterley

Until today, I had never been to Osterley. It follows that, until today, I had never been to the Osterley Bookshop.

Encouraging me in my quest to collect every Picador paperback published between the 1970s and the end of the 1990s – during which period the imprint stuck mainly to a design template of white spine with uniform (or fairly uniform) black lettering – my agent John Saddler offered to take me to Osterley in west London. If anyone offers to take you to Osterley, do accept. There's a...

Charity begins at home

I know that I have to get up early if I want to beat my near-neighbour Adrian Slatcher to any new stock in the charity shops of Didsbury Village. I fear, however, that whatever time I venture abroad, he will be one step ahead of me. On the one occasion he visited the Stockport Book and Record Fair after me, he still managed to spot a Picador edition of Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon I'd somehow missed. Being a decent chap, though, he very kindly offered it to me. Obviously I accepte...

Of Paramount importance

Thank God it's Friday, I often think when I'm in Manchester, on a Friday, which I usually am. Nothing to do with the arrival of the weekend. As someone who hasn't had a nine-to-five job for about seventeen years, I don't get over-excited about weekends. And don't get me started on Bank Holidays – no post, half the shops closed, rail-replacement buses.

Paramount Books on Shude Hill in Manchester opens on Fridays and Saturdays only. The last remaining secondhand bookshop in Manchester city cent...

Of Paramount Importance

Thank God it's Friday, I often think when I'm in Manchester, on a Friday, which I usually am. Nothing to do with the arrival of the weekend. As someone who hasn't had a nine-to-five job for about seventeen years, I don't get over-excited about weekends. And don't get me started on Bank Holidays – no post, half the shops closed, rail-replacement buses.

Paramount Books on Shude Hill in Manchester opens on Fridays and Saturdays only. The last remaining secondhand bookshop in Manchester city cent...