Pint taken

We have received further nominations for our list of the best books about public houses (July 26). “I’m afraid this [subject] will prove as inexhaustible as ‘The TLS in Literature’”, Jerry White observes, while chipping in with several excellent examples of London pub names immortalized as the titles of novels. Not so very far from The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton, for example, stands The Hole in the Wall (Arthur Morrison, 1902), not to mention The Sun in Splendour (Thomas Burke, 1927) and The Case Is Altered (William Plomer, 1932). We know this last example will put some learned readers in mind of Ben Jonson, whose play of this name was first published in 1609. Burke’s other works include a capital guidebook, Will Someone Lead Me to a Pub? (1936).

For London’s gay pubs in the postwar era, such as the Lord Barrymore near Regent’s Park, see Rodney Garland’s novel The Heart in Exile (1953). But Mr White hastens to add that it should not be assumed that the pub is the sole preserve of the male novelist. The collector of pub-lit would do well to look out for This Bed Thy Centre (1935) by Pamela Hansford Johnson, for its portrayal of an establishment in Clapham called the Admiral Drake. Maureen Duffy, meanwhile, went up the road to the Sugarloaf in Battersea for Wounds (1969).

Frances Twinn also writes from London, but directs us further afield – to “pubs frequented by characters in detective fiction”. We have room for one at least: the Oxford Bar (or the Ox) in Edinburgh’s New Town; this is DI John Rebus’s favoured watering hole. Much further afield is the Hotel Melody Sam – “surely among the more unusual” of such fictional hostelries, writes Alan Contreras from Eugene, Oregon. Located in the outback town of Daybreak in northwestern Australia, the Melody Sam is the focal point of Arthur Upfield’s novel Journey to the Hangman (1959). Its “bar and adjacent rooms inspire various murders … Upfield’s famous detective Bony signs up to work at the bar in order to solve the murders”.

Times have been tough at the British Library. For one thing, there was, in May, the attempt to get at the Magna Carta by two octogenarians, the Reverend Sue Parfitt and Judith Bruce, in the course of a Just Stop Oil protest. (The eco-message got through; and the BL diagnosed only “minor damage” to the Magna Carta’s display case.)

Of greater concern to many has been the library’s ongoing struggle to restore order following the ruinous cyberattack it suffered last October. Many key services are still to be restored, although some significant steps forward have been made this month. “More than 262 kilometres of items held in our Additional Storage Building in Boston Spa” have been made available to researchers again, according to a blog post by Sir Roly Keating, the BL’s chief executive. Vast sums have been expended. But normality still seems a long way off.

The doctored cartoon reproduced here must have pleased its recipient greatly. Leslie Johnston, who opened a second-hand bookshop in Blairgowrie in 1982, put this gift from his American son-in-law in the shop window a couple of years later. “I have watched from my seat on the other side of the window”, he could write, later still, “scores and scores of people looking at, and presumably reading, that notice. I cannot recall a single smile appearing on any face.” As well as rare and out-of-print books, perhaps some passers-by imagined that there really were “nonexistent books” to be sold.

We found Mr Johnston’s story in a perfectly existent back issue of the Private Library, for winter 1987. Here the veteran bookseller reveals his history of “messing about in books”, attending flea markets and running a market stall, for many years before he set up shop in Blairgowrie. There were also his digressive catalogues issued under the name “Lorien Books”, to which he gave codenames likewise derived from J. R. R. Tolkien: Aragorn, Bombadil, Chetwood (all the way through to Zaragamba and back again). And of course he tells tales of buying as well as selling – of discovering the “old book with a spine but no covers and with the first three of four dedicatory pages missing” was actually the second edition of Sidney’s Arcadia (“the rarest, I believe”). Buying books simply established a useful reputation for being in the market – and then “two or three times a year someone will bring in something really worthwhile”.

We enjoyed this essayistic trip to Blairgowrie all the more for making it via Norwich. Locals will know that this city doesn’t do badly for bookshops. As well the admirable independent bookshop Book Hive, there are a few decent secondhand dealers. Tombland Bookshop is one of them. In this medieval, timber-framed building opposite the cathedral, we found our copy of the Private Library, as well as much of the usual pleasure in deep-shelved browsing. Although not every Tombland book was available to be browsed. “Please do not rootle!”, read a piece of paper topping a range of books heaped near the till. “These books are not yet for sale.” We have made a note to go back and see if that sign is still there in a few months’ time.

Correspondence. We mentioned literary limericks (September 6), thinking specifically of those that were either written by or inspired by T. S. Eliot. “Well worth repeating”, replies John Walsh from North Marden, West Sussex, is “All the world’s a stage” as limericked by Robert Conquest:

Seven ages: first puking and mewling;
Then very pissed off with one’s schooling;
Then fucks; and then fights;
Then judging chaps’ rights;
Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

Limerick-wise, we are duly tempted to branch out – although it is the contrast between the frivolity of the form and the “Pope Eliot” brand of high modernism that, at heart, we continue to seek out.

We also mentioned the 350th anniversary of the death of Thomas Traherne (September 20). From Ledbury Philip Weaver writes to add that Rowan Williams (another poet-priest) “will be giving the Jeremy Maule lecture on Traherne on the date of his burial” – October 10 – “in the Vicars Choral Hall at Hereford Cathedral, a few miles east of his old rectory at Credenhill”. See the Traherne Association website for further details.

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