Paul McAuley’s Shelfie
Here are three shelves of non-fiction books about London, where I’ve lived for the past thirty years. There’s been a vague attempt to sort this somewhat random selection by subject – people, rivers, night, crime, war, and so on. But quite often I’ve squeezed in new acquisitions wherever there’s a space, and a second stack of paperbacks lurks behind those overhanging the edge of the middle shelf.
Roughly in the middle of the bottom shelf is the book which started it all: a Penguin edition of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Illustrated, like his diary columns in the Telegraph, by the author’s ink-and-pen drawings, it was first published in 1962, breezily chronicling an eclectic mix of architectural landmarks and curiosities, with accounts of Camden Town, Islington and ‘the Mysterious East’ (which were then, as Fletcher’s critic pointed out, the parts of London that Telegraph readers didn’t know). A documentary based on the book, filmed in 1967 from a script by Fletcher, features James Mason rambling about the city, marvelling at its revenants and grumbling about the modernisation that was beginning to erase so much of its wonderful variety.
Cut a diagonal to the righthand side of the top shelf and you’ll find a first edition of R.S.R. Fitter’s London’s Natural History, #3 in Collins Natural History Series, published in 1945. A comprehensive history that begins long before the first human settlement, when Neolithic hunters were pursuing mammoths across the Thames flood plain, and ends with an account of plants colonising the ruins and craters left by the Blitz, the first signs of the city’s post-war healing.
On the middle shelf there’s an incomplete run of Smoke, A London Peculiar. A little magazine from the first years of this millennium, its articles, photographs and cartoons not only celebrate the variety of London’s half-forgotten corners, but also the minutiae and absurdities of city life. A time capsule in 18 issues (if anyone wants to sell #1 – 4 do get in touch).
And slanted just above is London Pubs, by actor and writer Alan Reeve-Jones (amongst other things, he wrote songs for The Alma Cogan Show and episodes of Ivanhoe). Published, like The London Nobody Knows, in 1962, this copy came with tipped-in pub and restaurant reviews clipped from the Telegraph in the same year. Brief accounts of around 160 pubs, ornamented with a whimsical skits and a running joke about Dickens’s ubiquity. Like Fletcher’s book, it has, over time, transformed from a vade mecum to a memento mori of lost London: of those 160 public houses, more than a third have been demolished or converted into flats.
So it goes. London is constantly reinventing itself. There’s no end to its stories, or the books that tell them. And, unfortunately, only so much shelf space…
Paul McAuley became a full-time writer after working as a research biologist and university lecturer. He has publishedmore than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, and has won or been nominated for numerous awards. His latest novel is Loss Protocol.
Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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