Between The Sheets

In a road parallel to the seafront, there is a jewel of a shop for those of a mind to find it. The frontage is painted royal blue, and the lettering above the shop is rendered in gold gothic script. It has two Georgian bay windows, and the glass betrays its liquid nature by bulging slightly beneath the bullseyes. No one would look twice if Charles Dickens were to tinkle the bell above the door. It is called The Underground Library, which is intriguing and provoking in equal measure, for it sells books from the past which do not meet the ideas of the modern set of book lenders and sellers. Middle-class, healthy girls playing hockey, for instance - or five children on an island, all of whom are now denounced as objectionable.

This is not a library in the lending sense, but a second-hand book shop which is more in keeping with the wall-to-wall libraries of wealthy bygone polymaths. Upon the shelves, which are dusted regularly because, (as George Orwell once noted), flies like to die on the top of books, the browser can find all manner of Victorian and twentieth-century books which have survived the purge.  

The owner of the shop is called Patrick. He doesn’t earn a grand sum from his enterprise, but he does own the building, including the flat upstairs. When things get a little tight, which is most months, he pulls a few pints in the pub at the end of the street.  He is content, a state of being which is superior to all other forms of happiness.  

The subject matter of the books, the literary intent, is not always what piques Patrick’s interest. It is the throwaway nature of the stories between the sheets, the covers, the pages, that exert the greatest fascination: those little scribbles in the endpapers or annotations in the margins which lend these often tatty old books their glamour.  

Sometimes this evidence of past ownership is not so whimsical. He has lost count of the times he has flicked through a book to find a dead, flat spider pinned to the page like a ghastly flower, or the contents of an historic nostril. These books do not often survive Patrick’s own little purges.

Just this morning, a gentlemen deposited three books at the shop and airily waved away Patrick’s offer of money.  

‘I don’t need it. They’re not worth a pint,’ he said on leaving, presumably to the pub at the end of the road.  

The first was a fourth impression of The Memoirs of Emma Lady Hamilton, (1899). The pages are thick and course, and the inner hinges can be seen and felt with the fingers. It is a book which visibly displays the bookbinder’s craft. It is all in one piece, with un-torn tissue paper protecting the frontispiece, and fully illustrated throughout. Many people will know that Emma was Nelson’s mistress who died in Calais, rather plump and impoverished, a decade after his death at Trafalgar. Towards the end of the book, (and consequently towards the end of Emma’s life), Patrick read a description which made him fall in love with his language, which he does every day.  

“She had for some years lost that elegance of form which in former days rendered her an object of general admiration. This corpulency was increased by a gross voluptuary indulgence, and an indolent course of life, which brought on bilious complaints and flatulency.”

It is impossible to imagine anyone putting it better than that. And on the pastedown is a pristine sticker which reads:

From the library of

T.W. Moody

Professor of Modern History

Trinity College, Dublin

To think that it once adorned the library of a professor, (with his own Wikipedia page) at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. How did it come to leave Ireland and end up in the hands of the coastal man from the west country of England? It shall never be known.  

The second book is a faded, red, calf leather-bound poetry complication called The Seven Seas, by Rudyard Kipling. This is a thirty-fifth addition published in 1920, during the long weekend between the wars. On the front is an elephant’s head, etched in gold, within a circle. It is an Indian elephant, and Patrick knows this for two reasons. The first is that the ears are much smaller than an African elephant’s. Secondly, above the eye is a swastika.  

This will predictably outrage the students of the town, who regularly visit his shop in order to complain and argue petulantly about the content of the scripts. There does not appear to be anything written before they were born which meets with their approval. The swastika, of course, is a Hindu symbol of good fortune, and it was widely used throughout the world, as an adornment and talisman, until the Brown Shirts decided to appropriate it. As late as 1939, US air force planes often had a swastika adorning their tails. Maybe they should have kept abreast of foreign news a little better, but either way, in 1920 it was an innocent decorative device.  

But most of the students who go to Patrick’s shop are not programmed to listen to logic and reason, and so he puts it to one side while he decides where to display it so that it will be safe from them.  

The third book, again bound in soft leather, is the coronation bible of King George VI, (1937). These are ubiquitous, but the quality is rather good. Here, on the blank pages before Genesis kicks it all off, is what Patrick treasures the most: inscriptions in often faded ink.  

Wm. Lesley from D J Massy

March 1937.

Underneath, in the flowery script of a teenage girl is:

Bunty Nowell

1968.  

Patrick flicks through the pages, as he does with all his books. There are no dead insects or arachnids, and it is otherwise unmarked. The only sacrilege, perhaps, are some large foxing spots just at the moment when Noah began begatting.  

And it is this book, this bible, that Patrick puts in his box so that he can attend to an Indian lady, a regular customer of his, who is currently in raptures over an old, hardback copy of Little Women with complete dust jacket. There is just a little nibbling on the head cap and tail. She is working on a collection of the stories she read so avidly as a child in Uttar Pradesh. No doubt the students would dismiss this too, but when she was a girl, books were hard to come by, and so they are cherished.  

Just before he closes, a lady deposits a mid-Victorian copy of Aeneas’s How to Survive Under Siege - a manual of civilian survival written four centuries before Christ. Of course, it’s dry, but it’s worth a bit, and Patrick pays her what he is prepared to part with. She’s grateful, and the bell tinkles just as he puts the CLOSED sign up.  

Over the years, Patrick has developed a talent for finding a piece of text which either makes him laugh or think, and this comment by an ancient Greek makes him laugh. As he’s riffling through the pages, looking for annotations or other scribbles, he spots “HA! HA!” about midway through, in pencil. Whoever wrote this was tickled by a passage where Aeneus suggests making a city’s army look larger than it is by dressing women up in pots and pans, (suggestive of armour from a distance), and making them parade the city walls. But Aeneus is careful to warn them against throwing anything. He writes, “ … for you can tell a woman a long way off by the way that she throws.”

This one he locks in the display cabinet by the counter. He dims the lights, closes his laptop, puts his laptop under his arm, and makes his way to the pub at the end of the road.  

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Patrick’s sideline is what gives him the greatest pleasure. Books that have names in them, or some other identification marker, are posted on his Facebook page, which he calls Between the Sheets. In the two years since its creation, it has become a cosy diversion for good-hearted souls and amateur sleuths. Many people have been reunited with their old books in this manner. Those that go unclaimed are eventually put on the shelves, but Patrick always feels a twinge of sadness when he does this. It’s silly, really, but for some people it is resonant. It is personal. People have often repatriated a book that belonged to an antecedent, and those moments of reunion are truly special. It is a good community, safe from dissenting voices. He has people from every continent and disposition on his site, because it is breathtaking how far a book can travel.  

This evening, with a pint by his side, he makes two additions. The bible is the first and he uploads the photos from his phone. Bunty Nowell, 1968, should not be too hard to find and he has high hopes with this one.  

The other should also be easy; a book that came in yesterday. In the Fifth at Mallory Towers, Enid Blyton, 1978 edition, first published 1950. Inside the front cover is a young girl’s handwriting - a girl called Debby Murray, a name that will not be uncommon. But she had also written:

I ❤️ Patrick P  

XXX

This amuses him because his surname is Parnell, and if she was between nine and eleven when she wrote this, they are of a similar age. It’s certainly been a while since anyone loved Patrick P, he thinks, before closing his laptop and mingling with the old-timers at the bar.  

Several days later, the news is in about Bunty Nowell. She unfortunately passed away some years ago, but her daughter is travelling down to collect the bible. She even provided a little insight into the other two names from the 1930s. William Lesley was an uncle, and so it will soon be back where it belongs, whether it is read or not.  

A couple of weeks after Patrick posted the Enid Blyton book, he got a lead from a sleuth who thought she might be a lady whose married name is Chancellor. And a couple of weeks after that, Patrick gets a Facebook message. She is extremely embarrassed about the message she wrote, but she was only ten at the time! And yes, she has seen his photo, and he is the Patrick P she had a crush on. How silly! He was the year above her in primary school, but of course that gulf of a few months is huge at that age … It is a gushing but diffident message which comes with a photo. She is not the ugliest woman Patrick has ever seen.  

She lives twenty-five miles away, in the same village where they both went to school. She is divorced and says she’s content. They meet for lunch at the pub down the road, and marvel at how her book ended up in his shop. It is not a far distance to travel, but she has no recollection of ever parting with it - which is the story most people tell when they are reunited.  

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Perhaps it is time our dusty bookseller raised his eyes from the marginalia and the fly leafs occasionally. Perhaps it is time he asserted himself in his own story. Or perhaps being a dusty bookseller is his story. He is a bachelor through choice, and Debby, who is lovely, appears to be a woman who must be married. She talks a lot about her ex-husband and she has children who Patrick does not feel an urge to ingratiate himself with. He thinks back to Aeneas, whose preoccupation was with securing the city from inside the walls, because he knew that it was not the predatory armies on the outside that were the problem, but those who opened the doors from within.  

He is a romantic man, but not on a personal level. For him, the books are his romance. The pub is his romance. Fishing on a Sunday morning is his romance. Debby, grateful for the return of her favourite, errant book from happier days, believes that this is all too fortuitous to overlook, and suggests that they are meant to be together. But she is really seeking a new book to read, a book this particular bookseller cannot procure for her. So she kisses his cheek and departs with a wistful look which will not last too long nor cut too deep, because he has made sure of it.  

He is already content, a state of being which is superior to all other forms of happiness.