Tim Hardy

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen expresses her fear that her readers will have guessed that a happy ending is coming up -

Seeing in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.

The experience of reading an ebook is fundamentally different to that of reading a printed edition. However sharp the electronic ink, however cleverly the scroll bar may indicate how close we are to the end, nothing compares to the direct physical experience of that “tell-tale compression”.

I bought a Sony PRS-505 last year to help me catch up on some of the classics I’ve missed and I love it. After the experience of carrying a print edition of Anna Karenina around for a couple of months, I really appreciate the convenience of the device which made it possible to read War and Peace even in those cramped conditions on the London Underground where the press of bodies makes it impossible to move your hands enough to turn the pages of a printed book. I also appreciate the relative lightness of it.

Ironically perhaps, the ability to read the world’s classics for free in e-ink has given me a new love for the book as a physical object. Instead of my former habit of repeated, relatively cheap purchases of poor quality printed books, I download (legal) editions lovingly edited by ebook fans on the forums of sites like mobileread and with the money I save, buy beautiful editions such as the Bill Amberg leather-bound classics or McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.

I have also rediscovered the joys of tracking down rare and out-of-print works and for those with this goal I whole-heartedly recommend Andmeister Books whose proprietor, Andrew Nunn, recently went out of his way to ensure delivery of a copy of Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book in time for a birthday.

It is a real joy to find a small trader with a passion for his work who is happy to go the extra mile to satisfy a fellow book lover. If you are looking for something special, please try him. I don’t believe that all of his stock is on the website so if you cannot find what you are looking for please use his contact form to get in touch and I am sure he will do his best to help.

I’ve recently finished Jan Potocki’s “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa”, a fantastical novel written between 1800 and 1815 that consists of a series of stories within stories told over a period of sixty-six days in the manner of Arabian Nights or The Decameron.

The principal narrator, Alphonse van Worden, is the son of a man so pathologically obsessed with the finer points of honour manifested in the “tribunal of blood” that he thinks nothing of fighting a dozen duels in a day and punctiliously records the history of each in his notebook. His mother takes aristocratic traits to a similarly absurd degree. Having decided that the French are beneath her, she endures her stay in Paris by maintaining an absolute disdain: “She made it a rule not only not to learn French but also never to listen to it when it was spoken.”

Abandoned by his valet and mulateer while traversing the mountain range of Sierra Morena, a land rumoured to be inhabited by smugglers, bandits, murderous gypsies and terrifying ghosts, Alphonse finds himself bewitched by a pair of beautiful women who may be his cousins or may be succubi whose mysterious appearances and disappearances are woven into a narrative composed of encounters with a wide range of characters united in their love of story telling.

Stories interrupt stories in Tristram Shandy-esque digressions as each narrative introduces further characters who in turn narrate their own tales, the stories recursing back in on themselves until narratives are four or five levels deep and the listeners at the outer level announce themselves as confused as the reader would be in danger of becoming had Potocki not exercised considerable skill in managing the various threads.

The book’s end is slightly disappointing, perhaps inevitably since the beauty of the book lies in the digressions not in the forward impulse of the underlying plot, but the charm and humour of the stories carries the day.

It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

Das Kapital, Karl Marx

At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or “Unit Headline Language”. A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
A total of 86.4 % of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why.

(Michael Frayn, The Tin Men.)

Christopher Hitchens’s : Fleet Street’s finest is a hilarious round-up of the portrayals of journalists by novelists.

The above extract reminds me of the newspaper headlines and advertising catchlines in Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit, a great comic novel that deserves to be better known.