Shadow Lines: ‘The Bookseller’ Season Highlight for Spring/Summer 2024 - Softcover

Royle, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784633070 ISBN 13: 9781784633073

Verlag: Salt, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The ‘shadow line’ is a term Royle uses to describe the faint line on the top edge of the text block that allows him to see whether a book on a shelf contains an inclusion – those items inserted into books and long forgotten.

The shadow line is a constant reminder of how Royle started to think of books as more than just the printed stories or information they contain. He is always looking for shadow lines when scanning the shelves of second-hand bookstores, charity shops, hotels, Little Free Libraries and Airbnbs.

He’s no longer only looking for books that are just books. He’s looking for the book that contains a hand-drawn map of an unnamed town in Ireland that he can try to identify so he can read the book while walking the streets depicted on the map. He’s looking for the book that contains a 1957 delivery note for an address in Bristol, so that he can send the book, complete with delivery note, to whoever lives there now and invite them to welcome it back into its former home.

He's also looking, beyond the bookshelves, for books dumped in the street, for books used as props in art installations, for books left on bedside tables in films. He’s looking for books that are Doppelgängers of other books, for books that are named after places (where they might not be set), for books with two-word titles the first of which is London. He’s looking for books that don’t exist.

This follow-up to White Spines, Royle’s instant classic published in 2021, shows his search takes many forms, giving a shape and a structure to this compelling new work, just as the search for the Picadors informed the former. Strange, haunting, comic and poignant, Shadow Lines is the perfect book for those who love physical books and the stories beyond their pages.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited thirty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in chapbook format. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is Paris Fantastique, and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books (Salt).

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Salt
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1784633070
• ISBN 13: 9781784633073
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar