Beautiful books

Here at Sun Dried Sparrows Towers, ‘Operation De-clutter’ is underway.  It seems as if every available flat surface has been used up to put things on and the floor is now fast becoming a storage space, to the point where I'm starting to forget what colour the carpet is, or if we even have one….   So the time has come to have a big sort out of all the things that have accumulated in this tiny house over the last few years and to make more room for ourselves.

As well as being a practical necessity, I find it very therapeutic to get rid of excessive clutter, but an added bonus is that I realise how much I value the things I decide to keep.  Amongst these are my favourite beautiful books.

And one of these is ‘City Of Spades’ by Colin MacInnes, which now joins its bookshelf companions, ‘Absolute Beginners’ and ‘Mr Love and Justice’.  I was so pleased and grateful to have been given this recently.  As I’ve only just started reading it I can’t provide a full review yet, but it already earns its place amongst a select few – the  lovely, special, old paperbacks that I value for so much more than just their content.  Like the other two in the series (which I’ve written about previously on here) it’s a 1964 edition Penguin with a classic orange spine and a Peter Blake cover illustration.  Its pages are tanned and creased, its cover a little bent at the corners, the bottom of its spine worn from all the times it has no doubt been removed from and then returned to various book shelves.  Who knows how many homes it has had, how many thumbs have flicked through its pages, how much it has been loved and discussed, how many people it has perhaps inspired or influenced, how many emotions it has charged?   I’ll never know.  I can only imagine.  Perhaps that’s part of the appeal.

These beautiful, characterful books are travelling no further.  They’re staying here now, where they can join me in the remaining chapters of my own life.

http://sundriedsparrows.blogspot.com/2011/05/mr-love-and-justice_15.html

http://sundriedsparrows.blogspot.com/2011/02/absolutely-beguiling.html

Mr Love and Justice

A little while ago I was very kindly given another beautiful old paperback.  And yes, it’s another Penguin, another Colin MacInnes and with another Peter Blake cover – it doesn’t get much better than this! 

Like my copy of ‘Absolute Beginners’ (see post Feb 2011) this is an endearingly worn 1964 edition with toast-brown pages and a front cover the colour of single cream.  It is the story of two young men – one an ex-seaman who finds himself involved with a prostitute and working as her pimp, and the other a newly appointed Vice Squad officer; inevitably their paths cross and their lives become irrevocably intertwined.

Turn the book over to look at its characteristic orange binding and the blurb on the back from the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard sums it up well:

 “….Trainee cop and apprentice ponce both have their problems and we learn with them as this modern Mayhew takes us on an eye-opening tour of the corner-caff, cellar-club world of off-street London vice…”

“A penetrating, riveting, and convincing analysis of the relations between the criminal and the Force”

As in ‘Absolute Beginners’, MacInnes displays an incredibly sharp understanding, awareness and perception of the subjects he writes about, in this instance the different but yet not so dissimilar workings of both the leading characters’ lives and careers.  I found myself rooting for Frankie, the book’s lovable criminal, and his prostitute girlfriend in ways I had not expected.  I also found myself feeling mistrustful and cynical of the police in so many aspects portrayed here (but in ways that perhaps I did expect…)

‘Mr Love and Justice’ presents an insightful view of late 1950s London – perhaps superficially quite different from the city that exists today and yet, in essence, it seems little has changed.  MacInnes’ lead men are multi-faceted enough to seem very real and his anti-police stance surprisingly blatant.  He manages to express this skilfully in a way that shows no prejudice by presenting the thoughts and words of his characters with honest and realistic conviction.

On putting this book down I just found myself singing this great song by the Equals (I wonder why!) – also later covered nicely by the Clash…. 

Don’t you just love this?

Absolutely beguiling

Talking of Peter Blake…. I love this book cover by the man himself and feel privileged to have been given this beautifully yellowed 1964 copy of the excellent Colin MacInnes novel, ‘Absolute Beginners’ which I treasure. As a child I used to love that pristine-ness of a brand new book, the way the pages were hard to open (which added to the excitement), the smell of the paper and the perfection of the binding – now funnily enough I really love faded, old, creased and discoloured books.  There’s probably something subconscious in there about getting old and a bit creased oneself…

So… if you don’t already know it, this is a compelling and entertaining read as well as being historically educational in its own way - it really does evoke something of the time in which it was set.  Apart from portraying the more overt aspects of racism leading to the Notting Hill riots of 1958, it also captures very well that sense of being an ‘outsider’, which anyone who has ever been into any sort of vaguely underground scene, or has ever felt marginalised by any kind of prejudice, would understand, I’m sure.

Linguistically it’s really fascinating too – the book’s highly likeable narrator (or, as described on the back cover blurb: ‘our guide on this conducted tour of London’s teenage sub-groups’) has a very natural, engaging style which makes it feel as if he’s speaking to you and it’s full of colloquialisms of the time; words such as ‘hip’, ‘cat’, ‘man’, ‘dig’ and ‘junkie’ make several appearances as examples of teenage speak (I’d always wrongly believed that some of those words didn’t appear until later, but the proof is here.)

Rather endearingly my 1964 edition has been censored; expletives are shown as ‘f—k’ and ‘a—e’, there’s even a ‘f—t’ in there (would have thought that might have passed) and you can also find ‘c—t’.    I’m guessing that this was some kind of compromise (?) on the part of Penguin Books, following their trial under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 over ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, as D H Lawrence’s 1928 novel was published in its unexpurgated totality in 1960 (including the expletives I’ve mentioned above), only after the jury at the trial returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’.  Apparently the 1959 act had allowed the possibility for publishers not to be convicted for obscenity if a work was decided to be of ‘literary merit’ -  and Lawrence’s was.  Presumably the expletives in ‘Absolute Beginners’ in this edition were only allowed through in this censored form, which seems a bit daft to me considering that you’re going to read them in your head as the full word anyway…(and if you didn’t know what ‘f—k’ stood for, you probably wouldn’t be the type to read the book in the first place…)  Would love to know more about how the degrees of censorship changed in books over the years if anyone has any more info, as I know f—k-all about it…

Anyway…today’s song has a fairly tenuous link: just that it’s from 1959, the year of the book’s publication, nothing else. (Yes, I’m avoiding the obvious again, no Bowie or Jam.)  But Johnny Kidd and the Pirates ‘Please Don’t Touch’ is just so good and I like to think it might have been playing on a jukebox in a coffee bar as the book’s un-named narrator makes his way through Soho.  And of course the song is also memorable for being covered so well by Motorhead & Girlschool.