​At what point does a harmless interest in collecting books become pathological? Perhaps when you start buying books you know you already have, in exactly the same edition, the same printing, in equally good condition. Virtually indistinguishable, in fact.
 
I decide, because a former student has been on my mind, to go to Southport. From Manchester you may take a direct train to Southport, but why would you do that when you can go via Liverpool, a city with three excellent dedicated second hand bookshops to central Manchester’s one? But, because I’ve left it slightly late to set off, I don’t have time to visit Kernaghan Books, Henry Bohn Books or Reid of Liverpool. I do have time, however, to pay a quick visit to the Oxfam shop on Bold Street, which, it cannot be denied, has a bigger and better selection of books than Oxfam on Oldham Street in Manchester’s so-called Northern Quarter. Unusually, I don’t find any paperbacks to add to my growing collections, but as I pass a glass display cabinet I do a double take so dramatic I almost pull a muscle in my back. Surely that’s not a first edition of BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates, his 1969 book-in-a-box published by Panther in association with Secker & Warburg and reissued in another box 30 years later by Picador? But, yes, it is, and they want 90 quid for it. I wouldn’t begrudge Oxfam 90 quid, but can I afford it? Can I justify it? The latter is easy; the money goes to good causes. As for whether I can afford it, maybe I should think about it while I’m in Southport. I can come back through Liverpool and pop into Oxfam before it closes.
 
On the Northern Line of the Merseyrail network I work on a short story about dead actors that I want to finish before next Tuesday, when I’m doing an event at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham with Alison Moore, Megan Taylor and Giselle Leeb. The stations pass by, their names mostly unknown to me until Formby and, later, Birkdale. I jump up, closing the laptop and almost dropping it on the platform after lurching off the train. I turn left on to Weld Road and walk, past Prince Charles Gardens, in the direction of the sea, or the beach, since the sea is invariably far, far away in this part of the world. I am a mile south of Southport proper, in Birkdale, an affluent area of Victorian and Edwardian housing. Towards the bottom of Weld Road, from 1866 until its demolition in 1969, stood the reputedly haunted Palace Hotel, which my student Alyson Byrne was using as a setting – indeed more or less a character – in the Gothic novel she was writing for her MA.
 
A former headmistress, Alyson had not long retired when she started the MA at the Manchester Writing School and found herself a student again, enormously popular with staff and students alike. She was great in workshops, offering honest opinions and sage advice, saying when something didn’t work, but always finding a kind way to say it. She received comments on her own work with great interest; they were almost always positive, because she was writing an excellent novel, the first of a projected trilogy, she told me in one of our tutorials, which I always looked forward to and greatly enjoyed. Anyone who knew Alyson will not mind if I say that she was one of my favourite students, a lovely, kind, vivacious, talented woman.
 
Alyson suspended her studies in her second year, having become poorly with a chest infection. The chest infection became pneumonia and the pneumonia, very sadly, bewilderingly, turned out to be lung cancer, and Alyson, a non-smoker, died in February of this year.
 
The only trace I can find of the old hotel is a road name, Palace Road, which turns left off Weld Road just before it reaches the coast, but I can remember the powerful language of Alyson’s novel, with its renamed Royal Sands Hotel and ‘heavy coils of cloud wrapping themselves around the dark towers of its chimneys’. I turn right on to the Esplanade, the route Alyson’s narrator, Emily, takes one stormy night in her badly rusted Mini. Any badly rusted Mini coming down this way today would not fare well. Heavy rain has created a minor flood. Like Emily, I used to drive an old Mini. Three old Minis, in fact, one after another. None of them liked the wet.
 
Alyson was a devotee of the famous Broadhursts second hand bookshop in Southport, but it’s to Freshfields Book Shop that I head most urgently, for fear it should close early. Freshfields is an animal welfare charity and their bookshop on Wesley Street is one of the best charity bookshops in the region. I last visited in October 2016 and came away with three Picadors, two Picador Classics, a King Penguin and a Penguin, all for £7.75. On this occasion, as previously, there is a friendly, chatty ambience created by the manager and his staff. The books are shelved neatly in sections that mysteriously repeat. So, general fiction, A–Z, is on the wall on the left just past the counter. But it’s also on the free-standing units further in on the right. Under these units are blue plastic boxes containing books by individual popular writers. I pull out the Agatha Christie box. There are several of the Fontana paperbacks with the Tom Adams covers that I collect – The Big Four, Postern of Fate, A Pocket Full of Rye, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Evil Under the Sun – but a quick check on my phone reveals I have them all. I slide the box back under the shelf and continue down the room. I reach the far wall and turn through a hundred and eighty degrees, walking now between two shelving units. On the right is Freshfields’ classics section and visible underneath the bottom shelf are more blue boxes. The authors’ names are familiar, which seems consistent with the two sections of general fiction. I see another Agatha Christie box. Maybe this one will yield a Fontana I don’t have. I pull it out. Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, A Pocket Full of Rye – extraordinary! Like the other box, it contains several Tom Adams Fontanas, even some of the same titles. Postern of Fate, The Big Four. All the same titles! In my head I rehearse a conversation with the manager. You must have done it on purpose, I will say to him. Two boxes containing the same titles.
 
I’m so glad I realise before I get to the counter that it was the same box sliding one way out from under the shelves – and then the other.
 
Empty handed I ask permission to enter the store room, which is not really a room, but part of the same shop floor, its access points subtly obscured. Permission is granted. Within I find the B-format paperback edition of American author Mark Richard’s debut novel Fish Boy (Sceptre), a strange and brilliant novel that I remember reviewing for Time Out when it was published in 1994. I have the C-format trade paperback at home. On the cover of this B-format edition there’s a quote: ‘A dazzling novel full of extraordinary imaginative twists’ Time Out. Did I write that? I suppose I must have done, but it’s a curiously dissociating feeling not recognising your own words.
 
Moving deeper into the gloom, I find some of the B-format white spines that feed my addiction. Three Sceptres – William McIlvanney’s Docherty, Geoff Nicholson’s Hunters and Gatherers and William Wharton’s Franky Furbo as well as Jean Colombier’s The Photograph (Abacus). Plus – and this is a thrill – a first edition hardback of David Wheldon’s third novel A Vocation (The Bodley Head). A thrill even though I already have a copy of the first edition of this novel. Why would I want another? Wheldon is a fascinating writer who I had never heard of until David Rose made me aware of him and having become aware of him I found myself suddenly hungry to read his work – and indeed publish some of it.
 
This copy of A Vocation has 75p pencilled on the flyleaf. I need no further encouragement. At the till the manager looks at the 75p and says, ‘You realise…’ and instantly I do realise that because it was in the store room it hadn’t yet been priced. ‘Of course,’ I say. He says I can get three for a fiver, twice, so I hand over a tenner.
 
Broadhursts is still open. On the cheap shelves outside I find two Picadors – Farrukh Dhondy’s Bombay Duck, which I don’t have, and DM Thomas’s The Flute-Player, which I do, but I will buy this for my friend Nick Rogers who gave me some of his Picadors earlier in the summer and who told me the other night he has read The Flute-Player, but no longer has a copy (and not because he gave it to me). Broadhursts is one of those lovely antiquarian bookshops that are lined with leatherbound volumes but also packed with paperbacks. It smells wonderfully of old books on the upper floors, the ground floor being given over to new titles, and you won’t find any sour notices asking you to leave bags at the counter. When I’m here, I always head to a room on the second floor that has a couple of shelves of literary magazines and on this occasion I pick out four copies of London Magazine from 1995 to 2001, when it was still edited by Alan Ross. I’m drawn by the presence in these issues of stories by Angela Readman and Alan Wall, by a story entitled ‘The Nightingale’ (by Rebecca Camu) and by a series of printing errors – four blank spreads – that render stories by Monica Tracey and Robert Raymer tantalisingly incomplete and poems by Beatrice Garland completely invisible.
 
I run for the train back to Liverpool and, when I get to Bold Street, Oxfam is just closing. BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates will have to remain in its box in its cabinet and my £90 in my bank account.

Leeds. The first Leeds Record and Book Fair. Leeds Kirkgate Market, one of the biggest covered markets in Europe, was voted Britain’s favourite market for the second consecutive year in January 2017. I’m here for the city’s first monthly fair for secondhand books and vinyl. I would probably have come anyway, but my publisher, Confingo Publishing, was offered a stall to sell copies of their excellent magazine, Confingo, and copies of my short story collection, Ornithology, and so I am also here to support their efforts, in some way yet to be worked out.
 
When I arrive at about 10.30am on Saturday 12 August, the fair is up and running but there’s no sign of Janet, my editor/publisher’s partner and Confingo’s only outward-facing representative (Tim prefers to keep a low profile). One reason I got here only half an hour into the fair was so that I might beat my Manchester neighbour Adrian Slatcher, who has indicated he might come along, to any bargains, so, while there’s no sign of him either, I have a mooch around and come up with a yellowed and slightly battered 1975 Picador edition of Bob Dylan: A Retrospective edited by Craig McGregor. I buy this off the organiser, Lee Stannard, who also kindly gives me a copy of Broken Sky, his collection of stories and poems (pictured below).
 
I decide to take a reasonably long walk down Memory Lane to Headingley, where I used to visit old friends Mark Morris and Nel Whatmore when we were all a lot younger. There is, you see, these days, an Oxfam Bookshop in Headingley. I text my publisher, telling him there’s no sign of Janet. Headingley looks rather different from how it looked in the late 1980s. There’s a Pizza Express and an artisan baker in addition to the Oxfam Bookshop, which fills two rooms with great bounty and promise. I’m almost too excited to start looking, but I get a grip and go straight to the Fiction shelves. My first find is Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge by Evan S Connell. You’ll see I’ve put all of that in italics even though, as you no doubt know, Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge were separate novels, first published in 1959 and 1969 respectively, but Picador issued them together in this 1987 publication. Picador created similar combined volumes for a number of authors including Bruno Schulz, Marcel Pagnol, Henry Green, Samuel Beckett and Martha Gellhorn, as well as crime writers Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, James Lee Burke, James Crumley, Dashiell Hammett, Carl Hiaasen, and Jim Thompson. They also published ‘readers’ for Beckett and Burroughs. I have all of these, but no doubt there are others I don’t have.
 
Moving through the alphabet, I find a Penguin edition of Andrea Newman’s Three Into Two Won’t Go, which will go nicely with my other Andrea Newman titles in Penguin with their uniform photographic covers by Elisabeth Novick. I remember seeing Peter Hall’s 1969 adaptation of Three Into Two Won’t Go with Rod Steiger, Judy Geeson and Claire Bloom. In my Film 81 notebook (one of a series of blue, hardbacked exercise books dating from the late 70s and early 80s) I see I rated it an A but only the sixth best film I saw on television in January that year (Wait Until Dark, The Graduate, Papillon, Charlie Bubbles and Spring and Port Wine were, in my generally precocious opinion, all better than it).
 
I also pick out Paul Sayer’s third novel, The Absolution Game (I already have his first two in my slowly growing white-spined Sceptre collection) and three more Picadors – Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt, Nicholas Shakespeare’s The Vision of Elena Silves and Josef Skvorecky’s The Swell Season.
 
At the till, I tell the volunteer it’s one of the best Oxfam Bookshops I’ve visited. He tells me confidently that it’s actually the seventh best. When I ask him what he means, he says it has the seventh highest turnover. He shows me a list. You can’t really argue with that.
 
Tim texts me back. Janet’s car broke down near Rochdale, but she continued her journey by train and should be there by the time I get back to town. Indeed, an hour later, I find her deep in conversation with a gentleman from Co Wicklow who puts forward some surprising views on psychopaths and sociogenesis or is it psychosociogenesis? It’s hard to follow his argument, partly because of his half-whisper and the distracting way the corners of his mouth turn up as he approaches the end of every sentence. Janet doesn’t let him leave until she has introduced me as the author of the book in front of her and asked him straight out if he’s going to buy a copy. His tenner is already earmarked for a couple of hefty volumes from the secondhand stalls, but he’ll get more money and come back, he tells her. When he’s gone I tell her he won’t come back and she insists he will. Do I want to bet on it, Janet asks; 50p is suggested. I accept.
 
Janet could not be more different from me, and indeed from Tim. If anyone so much as glances towards her stall she immediately engages them and starts telling them about Confingo. When Adrian Slatcher turns up I’m delighted because it means I can be talking to him and pretend to be unable to hear her when I can actually hear her saying ‘and this is the author right here’ and the latest punter, pinned like a butterfly on a board, turns their eyes briefly in my direction. In the look I half-glimpse there is more scorn and suspicion, or just plain indifference, than I can ever remember seeing in a single human face. What’s he doing here, the look says. I’ve never heard of him. He’s rubbish. I can tell, just by looking at him. I wouldn’t buy his book if it cost 20p and each copy had a free £20 note inside it.
 
When Adrian goes off to visit the Tetley, which he claims is an art gallery despite its sounding much more like a public house, I tell Janet I need to make a move, but first, as if to soften the blow, I’ll have another quick look round the tables. I find a centenary issue, dated 1960, of The Cornhill Magazine featuring a story, ‘The Lorelei of the Roads’, by one of my favourite short story writers, William Sansom. Equally at home in the Pan Books of Horror Stories as in his smart jacketed collections from the Hogarth Press and Penguin paperbacks, Sansom combined an elaborate, lyrical, even musical prose style with a strong sense of the strange and macabre. And, finally, I select a Panther paperback of After the Rain by John Bowen. I’ve never heard of the author, but I like the title, I like the length (140pp) and I love the cover, which looks much more modern than 1967 (the novel was first published, by Faber, in 1958). I will read this next.
 
After I have left, Janet sells three books and three magazines. She’s clearly more effective without my ‘help’. I may well visit the Leeds Record and Book Fair again, but only as a punter. Also, I owe Janet 50p.

One of my oldest friends gets married in Grasmere. A happy event in itself, but I also get to climb Helvellyn and, on the drive back to Manchester, visit two of the best second hand bookshops in the north-west, if not the country. I can’t remember what took me to the Carnforth Bookshop the first time I visited it, but a personal recommendation from someone like John Oakey or Claire Dean or Paul Kondras seems most likely. I have now been several times. It’s easily accessible both by road (just off the M6) and by rail (David Lean filmed Brief Encounter in the town’s station, which, despite having been somewhat heritaged up, is still lovely).

The Carnforth Bookshop sells new books on the ground floor and second hand books upstairs. The first book I find is a Picador, Christopher Hope’s Signs of the Heart: Love and Death in Languedoc. On the back is a sticker with, on it, the name of the bookshop I’m in and the price, £6.99, which is the book’s RRP. So, either a customer bought it, read it and sold it back to the shop, or it simply migrated up here from the ground floor having failed to sell at full price. I pick out three other books – Thomas Healy’s boxing memoir A Hurting Business (Picador), Paul Bowles’s 1966 novel Up Above the World in an attractive white-spined Abacus edition to go with four others I have in the same series, and Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan, which, somehow, I have never read – inexplicable when I think about how much I loved Fullalove.

The Carnforth Bookshop is tidy and well ordered. Yes, there are a lot of rooms, but you won’t get lost, unlike six miles down the road in the Old Pier Bookshop in Morecambe. Twenty-six years ago, the owner, who calls himself Mr Bookshop on the shop’s Facebook page, put a couple of shelves up in his mother’s cafe. A quarter of a century later Mr Bookshop presides over an interior space that is a cross between an Escher diagram and twice Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Mike Nelson’s head-spinning installation The Coral Reef. But the Old Pier Bookshop is not only a work of art; it’s also a warm and welcoming shop packed full of reasonably priced books. While chaos might be your first impression, you soon start to spot some vestigial signs of category separation, but wherever gaps had been left, they have been filled with, it seems, random books, perhaps what was to hand, or what would fit the space. The books seem almost like building materials; you wonder what would happen if they were all removed.

From scattered locations within the maze-like funhouse I find three Picadors – Andre Dubus’s Broken Vessels, Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race, Hermann Hesse’s Demian – and one Picador Classic, Hesse’s Siddharta. But that’s not all. Three 1970s Penguins – two Andrea Newmans and a Françoise Sagan – and a Hardy Boys novel, The Mystery of the Samurai Sword, which I see is number 58 in Franklin W Dixon’s series of children’s novels about brothers Frank and Joe Hardy and the various scrapes they get into. This makes me think about my impulse to collect these books.

I’ve got about ten Hardy Boys books. Maybe one or two have been mine since I was a child and I enjoyed reading the Hardy Boys’ adventures. The others I’ve bought since, mainly in recent years. I have no intention of rereading them. And there are at least 58. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not rational.

A similar thing is going on with Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta. Once I buy this Picador Classics edition, I will own three copies of the 1922 novel, the other two being the 1973 Picador edition (given to me by David Rose) and a 1998 Picador edition (from Chorlton Oxfam Bookshop) that manages to be almost twice as long, thanks partly to a 70-page introduction. If I am ever going to read Siddharta – and that’s far from certain – I surely don’t need three copies (the same translation features in each). But I can justify the retention of each one according to the parameters of my process. I am collecting all the white-spined Picadors, including different editions of the same book where there is a substantial difference between them (oh, all right, also including different covers if each cover is sufficiently noteworthy), and all the black-spined Picador Classics (there are many fewer of them). If the collecting impulse itself is irrational, the ways in which I am pursuing my aims are, I think, perfectly rational. If I am going mad, I am at least doing it in an ordered way.

​If the Old Pier Bookshop represents the collecting impulse, the Carnforth Bookshop is an analogue for my modus operandi. I wouldn’t want one without the other; I need both.

I may be spending a few days in France – en vacances, I suppose you could say – but that’s no reason not to be keeping an eye out for additions to my various small-but-growing French-language collections. Simenon novels in Livre de Poche. Attractive editions of titles by Boris Vian/Vernon Sullivan, Marguerite Duras, Roland Topor. Anything I haven’t already got by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Monique Wittig, Tanguy Viel or Jean Ravey in Editions de Minuit. In fact, anything I haven’t already got in Editions de Minuit. They’re pretty much my French Picador.
 
We’re staying in the countryside near Bussières-Galant, nearest city Limoges, with one of my oldest friends and his wife. On the first day we go for an hour’s walk in country lanes and see three buzzards, a red kite, loads of jays and three black redstarts. At other times there are glimpses of a green woodpecker, a barn owl, a heron and numerous great tits. As we sit out in the evening and watch dusk steal the light from the sky, a churring starts up that sounds a lot like a nightjar.
 
On a visit to the Dordogne town of Périgueux I leave my companions sitting outside a café to nip back to an alleyway we have just passed – rue de Berthe Bonaventure – and, at No.9, one of the smallest secondhand bookshops I’ve ever been in. In fact, it’s so small that as soon as you’ve entered, all you can do it turn around and go back outside again, and it’s on the tables outside that I find an Editions de Minuit – Forever Valley by Marie Redonnet. I’ve never heard of Redonnet, but the Editions de Minuit logo is an undisputable badge of quality and the books, which essentially all look the same, are beautiful, in that understated French way.
 
If you want to return to London from one of the cities in the South of France that are served by Eurostar, you have to disembark at Lille and go through security there and then reboard the same train. It’s all a bit of a faff and frankly it’s much more civilised to travel via Paris and spend a night there, avoiding Lille altogether. This also means you can visit any number of wonderful librairies d’occasions like Le Livre à Venir (pictured, above right) on fashionable rue Oberkampf in the 11th, where I find Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s 2002 novel Faire L’Amour in Editions de Minuit. When I said all Editions de Minuit books look alike I was of course ignoring their ‘Double’ series of mass-market editions, which are smaller format and have photographic covers. I imagine that when Editions de Minuit introduced the ‘Double’ collection, it was a bit like Dylan going electric, and it’s true that I would always prefer an Editions de Minuit first edition, but the photographic covers can be good and you can have some fun with them (see below). I buy Faire L’Amour, which has a cover picture of Tokyo at night taken by the author himself.
 
We end up in our favourite bar, Les Pieds Sous la Table, on rue St Maur, also in the 11th. I’m not normally a dog person, but Eugène offers patrons a warm welcome. His owner is friendly, too; plus, she keeps a little library of free books in one corner of the bar. The idea is you bring a book, you take a book. Or take a book and bring one next time. I take L’événement by Annie Ernaux. As with Redonnet, I’ve never heard of Ernaux, but it’s Gallimard, alors – quality, again.
 
Spending a night in Paris, in a hotel where the black-and-yellow spines of Série Noire crime paperbacks decorate the bar, means we can spend most of the following day indulging the flâneur – and flâneuse – inside us. At Librairie L’Atelier, which seems to have three outlets on rue du Jourdain in the 20th, one of them devoted to secondhand stock (pictured, above left), I find a first edition of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s 2013 novel Nue in Editions de Minuit. It’s the final part of the tetralogy that started with Faire L’Amour and it’s only €5, which is not bad going. Toussaint, a Belgian, sent his first novel, La Salle de bain (1985), to Editions de Minuit, who accepted it and have been his publisher ever since.
 
I’m grateful to my teachers at school and university, in particular Barry Packham and Roger Huss, without whose patience and encouragement I wouldn’t be able to read Toussaint, Ernaux and Redonnet in their original language. Merci, messieurs.

The initial signs are unpromising. I get off the train and walk down the pedestrian shopping street to the sea front, which is a mess of contradictions. Grand buildings with trashy signs, a supposed amusement park, and a famous landmark that may be the longest ‘pleasure pier’ in the world but is short on charm and costs two quid to go on. I’ll save my £2 and buy an extra book with it, because the reason I’ve come to Southend is to visit the Bookshop Experience.
 
Away from the front and drifting westwards, Southend acquires a more attractive character. Indeed, it becomes Westcliff-on-Sea. The burble of blackbirds, hum of bees on buddleia, clink of china from tiny wrought-iron balconies. London Road, when I reach it, may be slightly less blissfully suburban, but it doesn’t take too long to reach no.307. As soon as I enter the Bookshop Experience, I know I’m in luck. I’m looking at the shelves and immediately taking books down. Paul Bowles – two Abacus collections, A Thousand Days For Mokhtar and Call at Corazón, in the same series, with excellent photographic covers, as two titles I already have, Pages From Cold Point and Let it Come Down. Calvino’s The Literature Machine, in the Brothers Quai (sic) series of covers from Picador (a separate series is credited to the Brothers Quay). Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains, which I already have in Picador, but this is a King Penguin with a beautiful James Marsh cover (which, when I get home, I discover I also already have, but that’s the way it goes sometimes). And then – increasing heartbeat – I spot an early Sceptre paperback of Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.
 
I love The Blindfold. My edition is later and features a woman’s midriff in a crop top that has always felt slightly off to me, as if it was trying to appeal to a particular kind of audience and not the one I would imagine as the novel’s ideal readership. I like this earlier, uncredited cover with its blindfold, its disembodied eyes, Chrysler Building and 109th Street sign. Next, a King Penguin edition of BS Johnson’s best-known novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, cover by Dan Fern, that, as with The Blindfold, I didn’t even known existed. Finally, I can’t quite believe it, but, yes, there, under K, a copy of the white-spined Picador edition of Kafka’s The Trial, which I have only seen once before, in the home of writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.
 
When I saw it at David and Clare’s, I was excited, because I had never seen it anywhere before, had not even known it existed. Obviously The Trial exists in a great many editions, from different publishers, with different covers. This Picador cover, by Steven Singer, is not my favourite, but it has the distinction of having been previously, to me at least, invisible. Normally, if there’s a Picador I know I want, because I’ve seen it somewhere, I don’t go online and find it in two minutes and buy it, because I would rather come across it by chance in an actual shop, in, say, Westcliff-on-Sea. In the case of The Trial, however, I couldn’t resist and did go online and did order, off eBay, a copy of what appeared to be the same edition. When it arrived it was a Picador Classics edition, which is of course quite different. The same translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, but in the black spine of Picador Classics, with a cover illustration by Peter Till. Of course, I kept it, because I’m collecting the black-spined Picador Classics as well, and so the search for the white-spined edition went on but, my lesson learnt, only in the real world, where you can take a book down from the shelf and flick through it to see if there might be anything within its pages apart from the faintest smell of cigarettes.
 
I’m now carrying half a dozen books and I’m not even half way through the fiction. I’m almost relieved to find the second half of the alphabet a little quieter. I find a lovely A-format Penguin edition of David Storey’s This Sporting Life, cover by Allan Manham, to go alongside Flight into Camden, A Temporary Life, Pasmore and others.
 
At the till is Celeste, the loveliest, most charming woman I can remember meeting in a secondhand bookshop, and I don’t say this only because she knocks the odd 50p off prices that are already very reasonable (£1–£3). We chat about the shop, about its owner, Andy, who is off somewhere taking care of business online, about there being good days and bad days, about how they hope to attract more passing trade – and I say I hope they do. I say that when I write about the shop I will mention the glass cases full of Celeste’s beautiful handmade jewellery and Celeste tells me I don’t have to and I say that I will anyway. I’m just turning reluctantly to go when I see something that I haven’t seen, outside of my own home, for about thirty-five years: a dedicated Picador bookcase. I don’t mean one of the Picador spinners that one sees occasionally (in Halewood & Sons in Preston, for example, and Abacus Books in Altrincham), but a set of shelves, like those I saw in Skoob Books, filled with nothing but white-spined Picadors.
 
I get down on my hands and knees – and only partly because these shelves are near to the floor. I start again. The Lay of Sir Tristram, second novel by Paul Griffiths, whose first novel, also in Picador, I already have. Stefan Heym’s The Wandering Jew. Five Black Ships by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León – I almost leave this because it’s covered in sticky-back plastic, as Blue Peter presenters used to call Sellotape, but it’s only 50p and, like so many others of these books in my arms, I’ve never seen it before. Kenzaburo Oë’s Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, which Celeste tells me she’s read after Andy recommended it. Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe. A John Cowper Powys novel, After My Fashion, that not only have I not seen before but Powys-lovers had not seen before 1980, despite its having been completed (and put aside) in 1919. Then, another white spine that I already have in black – Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front – and a book I remember seeing somewhere but for some reason not buying, Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist, ‘introduced’ by Jill Tweedie. And finally, José Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda.
 
Am I imagining it or has a slight nervousness crept into Celeste’s demeanour? Are her fingers searching under the counter for the panic button? Who is this raving lunatic? Why does he insist on showing her a picture on his phone of what he claims is his collection of more than 700 Picadors? She tots up the figures, knocks 50p off the Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León, which, you’ll remember, only cost 50p to begin with. She says Andy has more Picadors where these came from and I’m already looking forward to making another visit to the Bookshop Experience, which turns out to be well named and easily among the best second hand bookshops in the south of England. Andy certainly has some gaps to fill on his shelves, while my bag is full and I still have to walk a mile or so to the next shop on my list, not to mention four miles across the mudflats to Benfleet, if I’m to stick to the plan recommended by my friend Gareth Evans, who advised me to come out here in the first place.
 
Luckily – and I don’t often say this – the next shop is closed, but it looks good, so I’ll drop in on my next visit. I realise that the home of The Canal author Lee Rourke is between where I am now and Leigh-on-Sea, where I will pick up the path across Hadleigh Marsh; it would be rude not to photograph his house and post it on Twitter with the message, ‘Daddy, that strange man is outside the house again’. Having done so I descend to sea-level, then climb back up over the railway, and strike out across the marsh. The path meanders and time seems to slow down. I take numerous pictures of Canvey Island in honour of my former Time Out colleague Lesley McCave and, indeed, of Lee Rourke, whose Vulgar Things was set there and who has, I see, responded to my tweet: ‘HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!’ he writes.
 
The sun comes out from behind the clouds and goes back in. To the right, toy trains pass beneath the castle on the hill. Crows and gulls commingle on the mudflats to my left. I stop and try to identify the call of a bird hiding in a bush some thirty yards distant. Chup chup chup chup-chup-chup. It shows itself: black head, white collar, brown and white body. I step off the path, telling myself I don’t have time for this. I have to be back in London for a reading at Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston at 7pm. But what am I reading from, what am I promoting? My new collection, Ornithology, uncanny stories about birds. A bird call to me is a siren, drawing me from the path. I move closer and, as the black-headed bird flies off to a bush further away, I am reminded of a line in TH White’s The Goshawk: ‘… if you saw a bird… it had already seen you.’ I follow it from bush to bush for a while and do what experience has taught me to do if immediate identification is impossible: make notes and check later.
 
On the train from Benfleet I try the RSPB bird identifier: ‘No Matches found. Please try fewer search options.’ I imagine it was an exotic migrant blown off course, stranded here. Tomorrow there will be armies of men with binoculars and telephoto lenses parking in the narrow lane by the cockle sellers at Leigh-on-Sea. When I get home and check the books I see that what I saw was a reed bunting. So, not an exotic migrant, but a beautiful bird nevertheless.

I am in a park. There are trees and a wall to the left of the path, a vast open space to the right. The sun is beating down. I am wearing a warm jacket and carrying a bag that is slightly too heavy. Sweat is trickling into the small of my back. In front of me and on either side and – I check – behind, a herd of deer displays a languid form of Brownian motion. Two young stags trot across the path like drag queens in high heels balancing elaborate candelabras on their heads.
 
It might seem like a dream, but it’s all very real. I am on my way to Norbiton in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, where I will meet with one of four daughters of Colette de Curzon, the author of one of two new short stories I am publishing this month in the form of Nightjar Press chapbooks. Colette, at 89, is my oldest Nightjar author, but when she wrote her story, in 1949, she was only 22, so in a sense she’s my youngest. When Colette was widowed last year, her daughter Gaby (the novelist Gabrielle Kimm) found among various papers a short story apparently written by her mother. Her mother explained she had indeed written it and, knowing nothing about how she might go about getting it published, had put it away and sort of forgotten about it. Gaby conferred with her colleague Alison MacLeod at the University of Chichester who suggested she send it to me.
 
Colette has signed all 200 chapbooks and another of her daughters, Buffy, has brought them  up to Norbiton, where I will meet her to pick them up. But if I have to go to Norbiton – and I imply no hardship in having to make that trip – then I would be a fool not to go also to Teddington, where Fara, a charity for children and young people in Romania, has a bookshop, and Kingston, where the Oxfam bookshop has been highly recommended.
 
The first thing I see in Teddington, apart from the train station where I disembark, is in fact an Oxfam shop and I’m in luck. They have a white-spined Picador I don’t have – PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores. I buy it, of course, and walk on, looking for Fara, which turns out to be just off the main street. The shelves are a slightly odd shape and there’s not much space, even for a modestly proportioned individual, so I struggle a little, partly also because there’s a larger customer making his presence felt by at least two of my senses. There’s only one Picador – Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, which I have – and several lovely books from Peirene Press, plus a copy of Wyl Menmuir’s The Many. Wyl was my student at the Manchester Writing School and I later acquired his novel for Salt (it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). I also spot Nina Allan’s prize-winning novella, The Harlequin, published by Sandstone Press. I’m still holding out for a copy of this from the publishers, since publication was the prize in a competition judged by Alison Moore and myself. It was published in 2015, so I suppose it’s unlikely a copy is going to turn up any day soon, but you never know.
 
I leave empty handed and within a few minutes find myself in Bushy Park surrounded by deer.
 
Kingston, even on such a beautiful afternoon, could be an anticlimax after this, but the Oxfam bookshop is an oasis of cool, calm culture, and – what’s that? Another PJ O’Rourke Picador – All the Trouble in the World. And there’s another white spine – Clive James’s Other Passports. This volume of his poetry from 1958 to 1985 will bring the number of Clive James books I have in Picador to thirteen. And, as a bonus, when I check a Penguin copy of Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss, the same edition I have at home, I see it contains an inclusion, a partial piece of paper with a metres–feet conversion chart on one side and, on the other, in beautifully neat handwriting, ‘1 thinfilm positive. Dutch study RRCCS 1A/4207,’ and a name, which I will not include here in case, as I suspect, this has something to do with its owner’s medical history. I buy the book to replace my own copy, for the inclusion.
 
I walk on to Norbiton where Buffy makes me a wonderfully refreshing cup of Yorkshire Tea before I heft the box of signed chapbooks and walk the few hundred yards to the station and catch a train to Waterloo. When I get back home I discover that one of the O’Rourkes is – like my copy of Charles Nicholls’ The Reckoning – 5mm shorter than it should be, so it will have to go back, as a donation, to another branch of Oxfam, but, balancing out that disappointment, I see that the copy of Kiss Kiss I have decided to replace really did need replacing as it is missing four pages from the middle of one story. I find them folded up at the back of the book in the form, I suppose, of an inclusion, but not one I had been aware of or find in any way welcome or interesting.

Last time I went shopping for books in Muswell Hill, north London, Bridget O’Connor was still working behind the till in the Muswell Hill Bookshop. A friendly and vivacious bookseller, Bridget was also a screenwriter and author of the short story collections Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her You Love Her (1997). She died in 2010, aged 49.
 
I set out to walk from Stoke Newington to Muswell Hill on the second-longest (and probably second-hottest) day of the year. I don’t want to load up with books at the start of the walk but the Mind shop on Stoke Newington High Street is open, so I can hardly walk past it without going in. They have a Picador I’ve never seen before, Daniel Richler’s Kicking Tomorrow. The author, born in London, moved to Canada and hosts – or hosted, when this was published in 1993 – Canada’s weekly TV books show. Later I discover his biological father was screenwriter Stanley Mann, who adapted John Fowles’ The Collector (which I have in my Picador collection). Daniel’s mother, Florence Wood, divorced Mann and married Mordecai Richler in 1960. The guy on the till in Mind tells me he donated Kicking Tomorrow to the shop. It’s a great read, he tells me; he hung on to it for years before deciding he probably wasn’t going to read it again.
 
Around the corner on Stoke Newington Church Street I do walk past Church Street Bookshop, but only because I was in there last night and I don’t want the proprietor to think I’m weird going in again. In truth I go in there a lot, always in the hope that he’ll have unpacked some more of the boxes of books that are stacked in the middle of the shop. He’s always playing jazz and I always ask him who it is and it’s almost always Charlie Haden. I once, foolishly, told him I wasn’t a big Charlie Haden fan and watched his smile fade, so then I bought a Charlie Haden album – Jasmine with Keith Jarrett on ECM – and now I’m a Charlie Haden fan. Last night I bought a US edition of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, because I’ve been curious about it for some time, a lovely old Penguin edition of John Barth’s first novel The Floating Opera, and a copy of Rupert Thomson’s The Book of Revelation for my daughter because she’s about to travel to Amsterdam (I have my own copy that I want to keep).
 
Just past Church Street Bookshop I see a man walking towards me who looks a lot like Wish You Were Here and A Walk in the Park author Travis Elborough. I’ve seen Travis in the ’hood before – can I say ‘in the ’hood’? – and in fact there’s no mistaking him in his cool black-framed glasses. Travis tells me he’s just rescued a frog from his neighbour’s cat. He’s on his way back from Clissold Park, where he took the frog to release it into the pond. Having, in the past, failed to rescue mice and birds from the truculent clutches of the Royle family cat, I’m full of admiration for Travis, but time is getting on and the sun is beating down, so I take my own walk in the park (no sign of the frog, though, worryingly, a heron stands watchfully in his waders in the shallows) and then wander through the streets of Finsbury Park and across the open space of Finsbury Park to the start of the Parkland Walk.
 
No one seems able to agree on the length of the Parkland Walk. It’s variously described as 1.7 miles, 2.5 miles, 4 miles and even 4.5 miles long. This may be down to the fact that it’s in two parts, north and south. The south part takes you, along the trackbed of a former railway line, from Finsbury Park to just south of Highgate tube, where I’m looking forward to paying a visit to the excellent Ripping Yarns secondhand bookshop, where, last time I was in, I chatted to book blogger and author Jen Campbell. I’ve bought many books and back copies of Ambit from Ripping Yarns over the years. The old offices of Ambit were so close to Ripping Yarns you could have stood outside the bookshop, fashioned a paper aeroplane out of your manuscript and submitted it to Martin Bax by launching it across Archway Road.
 
When I reach the top of the south section of the Parkland Walk, I pass the Boogaloo, where Serpent’s Tail used to hold readings, and cross Archway Road to enter, first, another Mind shop, which I remember has a particularly good selection of books. This, I’m pleased to see, is still the case. Once I’m able to tear my eyes away from the spines of two of my own books – my difficult second novel Saxophone Dreams (‘not exactly beach reading,’ BBC Three Counties radio presenter) and almost-but-not-quite-filmed fourth novel The Director’s Cut (‘You haven’t quite managed to get what I most loved about the novel into the script,’ Jeremy Thomas) – I find some gems. Among the Picadors there’s a second novel from Julie Myerson, The Touch, which I can’t remember ever seeing before in this edition, and Hermann Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer with a vibrant yellow illustration in a notable series of covers by Peter Le Vasseur. Additionally I am unable to resist a Grafton paperback of Ian Watson’s Evil Water (to sit alongside his Slow Birds), a first novel, I Hear Voices (Abacus), by Paul Ableman, and a hardcover US first edition of Stephen Schneck’s The Nightclerk (Grove Press), which starts, interestingly, mid-sentence. I’ve read something somewhere about this novel recently, but, annoyingly, I can’t remember what or where.
 
I worry about my memory some more when I leave the Mind shop and walk up Archway Road to look for Ripping Yarns. It’s not where I thought it would be, so I walk back down past the Mind shop to the lower set of traffic lights. I know it’s by a set of traffic lights, but not this low down, surely. I walk back up to the higher set of lights. I’m pretty sure that Handsome Mens Grooming BarberShop is where Ripping Yarns should be. I feel disoriented and disgruntled – and not just on account of the missing apostrophe. A quick look at my phone tells me that Ripping Yarns closed in 2015 following a rent rise. I feel a sudden emptiness inside, a hollowing-out. Like the world needs another men’s barbershop. I run my hand over my bald head and cross the road, then dive into Highgate Wood. I walk slowly along a path that runs parallel with Muswell Hill Road. Couples overtake me, men saying to women, ‘I think we need to take this to another level…’ and ‘Unless it comes from the artist himself, it’s meaningless, decision by committee…’
 
Muswell Hill is sweltering in the noonday sun. I buy more suncream and drink a litre of smoothie made from various blue fruits. The Muswell Hill Bookshop is not how I remember it. It’s smaller, for a start, or seems it. I wonder if it’s moved along the row, into smaller premises. In the Oxfam bookshop I’m pleased to see, as I always am, Julian Barnes’s 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters shelved in History. In Fiction I select John Burnside’s recent short story collection Something Like Happy (Vintage) and Colm Tóibín’s The Story of the Night in white-spined Picador. I bought The Story of the Night last October from Dalston Oxfam for 99p, but this copy contains two inclusions: the folded-up Pasatiempos page from La Vanguardia Catalan newspaper dated 23 December 2011 on which the difícil sudoku has been completed, the fácil puzzle is part-completed and the intermedio grid remains blank, and a business card from a Soho café with two handwritten Miami phone numbers on the back.
 
I start walking down the hill towards Crouch End, setting and title of a 1980 Lovecraftian short story by Stephen King, where, in 1983 and 1984 I would sit in Clive Barker’s front room on Hillfield Avenue as the evenings drew in and we would talk about Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison and Arthur Machen and many others (Peter Straub had lived on the same road and King had stayed with him while they worked on The Talisman together). I divert on to the north part of the Parkland Walk and feel myself being taken in the wrong direction and so, at Cranley Gardens, return to street level and walk past the former home of mass-murderer Dennis Nilsen, who lived in the top flat at No.23 from October 1981 to February 1983. I recall that some years later, seeing a For Sale sign outside, I had made an appointment to view the flat and had been struck by the way in which it had been remodelled, its bathroom gone, replaced by a shower room and a toilet. I wonder if I would be so ghoulish in middle age.
 
In Crouch End’s Oxfam bookshop I find a Corgi paperback of Arthur Machen’s Black Crusade and a historically interesting edition of an Agatha Christie novel that was later reissued, with a less controversial title, as And Then There Were None. Even more exciting, for a Picador collector, are a white-spined edition of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is usually seen in the orange wraparound cover of the film tie-in edition, an edition of Ian McEwan’s In Between the Sheets that doesn’t have a topless model on the cover but does still picture an unmade bed (photographed by Tony Evans) instead of one of Russell Mills’s lovely abstract compositions, and The Beckett Trilogy containing Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable (cover by the prolific Russell Mills).
 
I walk up Crouch Hill, seeking the shade of the right-hand pavement, and then back down on to the south part of the Parkland Walk. When I reach Stoke Newington, the straps of my book bag cutting ever more deeply into my shoulder, I look wistfully at Church Street Bookshop and wonder if 24 hours is long enough, but I have to acknowledge a simple fact: the book bag is full. 

Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s creative writing centre, is located in the Highlands, fourteen miles south-west of Inverness. It is quite remote, fairly isolated and totally wonderful. Once a year I spend a week there with a group of enormously talented writers, mainly former MA students from the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Daily from Tuesday to Friday I’ll put in a day’s work, then spend the evening doubled up with laughter, grateful that I remembered to bring a suitcase full of Rennies. One of the many things I have learnt at MM is that good and plentiful food + sustained merriment = indigestion. By the end of the week, no matter how lovely one’s loved ones and how comfortable one’s own bed at home, one is sorry to leave. Repressurising after MM is not unlike the comedown from MDMA, or so I’ve been told. This year, in an attempt to combat this effect, I have decided to stay in the Highlands for a few days and have persuaded one of my loved ones to fly to Inverness, where I pick her up from the airport on Saturday morning.
 
We drive back into Inverness. Despite the fact I’ve been in the vicinity since Monday afternoon, this is my first opportunity of the week to visit one of the best secondhand bookshops in the British Isles. With its exposed spiral staircase, mezzanine floor and balconies, Leakey’s (pictured above), on Church Street, achieves the remarkable feat of making the majority of its stock on at least three levels visible to the visitor from almost any location inside the premises. There’s a woodburning stove in the middle of the ground floor, not required to be lit on our visit, and a large desk/counter where you will find owner Charles Leakey busy making sales and graciously accepting compliments on his extraordinarily beautiful bookshop.
 
The first book I pick out is actually a Paladin paperback. The New Review Anthology edited by Ian Hamilton is packed with stories, poems and articles and has a wonderful cover illustration by Neil Breedon. But my eye is soon alighting on the white spines of Picadors. I have a large collection of titles by Jonathan Raban, but I’ve never seen Bad Land before. Brian Appleyard’s Understanding the Present will join the ranks of some of Picador’s non-fiction that, if I am honest, I am unlikely to read; at least some, if not all, of the science will have dated since 1992. I am more likely to read William Styron’s The Long March, which, at 88 pages, is only four pages longer than his Darkness Visible, which I have read. John Livingston Lowes’ The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination looks not dissimilar to the lovely covers on Hermann Hesse’s Picador titles; they share the same cover artist in Peter le Vasseur. I also pick up a copy of Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, in spite of the red band that runs right around the cover, including across the spine. I add it to my pile for two reasons: one, because I am, even if I don’t like to admit it, assembling a side collection of those Picadors on which the art department were permitted to break the mould (wraparound photographic covers, inset illustrative details, solid blocks of colour etc), and two, for another reason to do with novelist Stav Sherez that will be covered in a future post.
 
We drive from east coast to west, fetching up in Ullapool, where I find, in the New Broom Community Shop & Hub, the following Picadors: The Greenpeace Chronicle by Robert Hunter, Picture This by Joseph Heller and Sex & Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer. I already have the Heller and the Greer, but the shop is practically giving them away at £2 for three and both these books, I am delighted to see, contain inclusions. Just twelve pages from the end of Picture This is a Polaroid – a picture of a window ledge with a pot plant and some bottles of perfume – while at pp46/47 of the Greer is a handwritten receipt for Aus $26.55 from a medical & scientific booksellers in Carlton, Victoria, dated 22.4.88.
 
After a couple of days’ walking, driving and birdwatching – from the plump house sparrows of Plockton to the redpolls, ravens and golden eagles of Skye (the publication date of my new short story collection, Ornithology, from Confingo Publishing, happened to fall on the Friday at MM) – we find ourselves in Edinburgh. There’s time to visit just two of the city’s secondhand bookshops before getting back on the road. Edinburgh Books on West Port has an impressive collection, and the stuffed head of a water buffalo, but a number of signs advising customers to leave bags at the desk (handbags excepted). Whether or not my laptop bag could be classified as a handbag, I react to these signs as I always do. I take them personally. Don’t the two staff present in the shop this morning know I wouldn’t steal from a bookshop in a million years? Of course they don’t; nevertheless, I bristle. If they ask me to leave my bag at the desk I will instead simply leave. On the way out I will attempt to explain why I am leaving and I will get flustered and the words will come out wrong. I am like John Hegley, who has a line in his poem ‘The Stand-up Comedian Sits Down’ about coming up with the perfect reposte to a heckler, but coming up with it on the bus home. It is only later, halfway down the M6, that I will craft the perfect response to the proprietor’s perfectly reasonable objection to losing however many hundreds of pounds a year to shoplifters. But they don’t ask me to leave my bag and I get over myself sufficiently to purchase a Fontana paperback edition of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence with its superb Tom Adams cover featuring a white dove and a black crow. It’s somewhat expensive at £4 and I feel weirdly transparent and predictable when I see, next to the price on the flyleaf, the pencilled words ‘Tom Adams cover’.
 
There’s a different vibe over the road in Armchair Books. There appear to be just as many books and just as good a selection and the prices are again a little on the high side, although Brenda Maddox’s Picador biography of WB Yeats, George’s Ghosts, is only £2 and I feel that William Burroughs’s The Place of Dead Roads, in a Paladin edition, is worth £3.80, partly for its inclusion (pp40/41) of a scrap of paper featuring a handwritten eight-digit number that I suspect relates to a bank acount. But it’s the Picador edition of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, with a striking cover by Richard Parent, that animates the young man at the till. ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘This is a fucking great book.’ I have to admit I haven’t read it, but I’ve been asked twice by poet Robert Sheppard – Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University – if I’m a Malcolm Lowry fan, so I’ve long felt I should read him. The young man tells me the novel contains the greatest description he’s ever read, something to do with the sound of the name, when spoken, of a town in Mexico. I resolve to read the book partly inspired by the young man and partly so that if Robert Sheppard ever asks me again I’ll be able to give him a better answer.
 
As we drive down the A7 towards Carlisle and the M6, and the dramatic scenery of mountains and glens of the Highlands gives way to the softer, gentler landscape of the Borders, I reflect on the outcome of my MM comedown coping strategy and decide it has been a complete success. Maybe, before next year, I should recommend it to the rest of the group.

Brighton. The hottest day of the year. I’m here to do an event with the other Nicholas Royle at Waterstones. We did one last night at Piccadilly Waterstones in London, which seemed to go well, promoting my new collection, Ornithology (Confingo Publishing), and Nick’s new novel, An English Guide to Birdwatching (Myriad Editions). Maybe tonight we’ll find out if the double act has legs.
 
Meanwhile, poet Neil Rollinson wonders if I’d like to meet for a coffee. There’s something not quite congruous about this earthy, northern wordsmith living on the south coast. We last saw each other about ten years ago at Lumb Bank, the Arvon Foundation’s West Yorkshire centre, when he was relief centre director and I was guest reader (if anyone from Arvon is reading this, doing the guest reader slot at Lumb Bank is one of my favourite things in the whole world and I haven’t done it for a while and, well, I’m always happy to be invited, even at the last minute should Julian Barnes pull out). We talk about poetry, creative writing and football. All writers need promotion, but in Neil’s case, as a Newcastle fan living in Brighton, he’s probably had enough promotion to be going on with (joke – barely – that only football fans will get). Anyway, Neil is off to the South Downs to do some walking and I tell him I want to go to Fiveways to visit Savery Books. He gives me a copy of his latest collection, Talking Dead, and tells me Fiveways is just beyond the station and we walk that way, parting at the bus stop. When I reach Seven Dials rather than Fiveways I realise I’ve been walking in the wrong direction, so I check the map and turn right. I walk up and down so many steep hills I decide I’ve made it to the South Downs and wonder if I’ll bump into Neil, but then I catch sight of Preston Drove.
 
Preston Drove is one of those evocative addresses that connect me so strongly to my past I feel as if I’m 25 again. In the mid-1980s I was constantly photocopying short stories and sticking them in envelopes addressed to David Pringle, then editor of Interzone, which in those days was publishing Angela Carter, JG Ballard, M John Harrison and other writers I admired. David Pringle lived on Preston Drove, which I remember checking, not wanting my submisions to go astray. Surely it was Preston Drive, but no, Preston Drove. And David Pringle, of course, was constantly slipping my stories into the stamped addressed envelopes I supplied and returning them to me – until one day he didn’t and he accepted a story, and then another, and I became, to my great and lasting excitement, for a number of years anyway, an Interzone writer.
 
I walk down Preston Drove and enact a small act of homage outside what was – and may still be – David Pringle’s address. No one calls the police.
 
Just around the corner from Preston Drove, on Ditchling Road, is Savery Books. Two women browse the boxes of crime novels outside in the sunshine. ‘Mum, have you seen this?’ one of them says and when I enter the shop I think I hear another voice say, ‘Mum, shall we put these railway books out tomorrow?’ As I look over the stock, I listen to these two conversations continuing between two different mothers and daughters, visitors to and proprietors of this lovely shop bursting with books. The shelves are full and piles of books grow from the floor like stalagmites. ‘I put out two more Du Mauriers,’ says one mother and, ‘I’ve read that one, love,’ says the other.
 
I find some Picadors I don’t have – Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars, Hunter S Thompson’s Songs of the Doomed, Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Sebastian de Grazia’s Machiavelli in Hell – and take them to the till. I ask how long the shop has been there. Twenty-five years, they tell me, but selling exclusively books only twelve. I hear later, from Professor Peter Boxall, Nicholas Royle’s colleague at Sussex University, that they used to have shops on both sides of the road selling antiques.
 
I walk down the hill back towards the centre of Brighton, reading Kerry Hadley-Pryce’s new novel in manuscript as I go. It’s strange reading about the Black Country in an environment that is very different. There are flyers and posters everywhere demonstrating support, in the coming election, for the Greens’ Caroline Lucas. Cyclists climb the hill in first gear, expending extraordinary effort to achieve walking pace. The English Channel, in the distance, has the appearance of a vertical blue wall, creating the optical illusion that, even near the top of this steep hill, we have somehow found ourselves below sea level. I think of Ballard’s story, one of his most haunting, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, with its brilliant opening line – ‘Again at night Mason heard the sounds of the approaching sea, the muffled thunder of breakers rolling up the near-by streets.’
 
I drift eastwards, aiming for Kemptown. My friend the poet Michael Kemp and his lovely wife Sooty, who I hope will come tonight, don’t live in Kemptown, but I think my other friends the artist and illustrator Les Edwards and his equally lovely wife Val might. (I am lucky, I think to myself, to have so many lovely friends.) Outside the Studio Bookshop on St James’s Street are shelves of books that appear to stay out in all weathers: £1 each and customers are invited to post money through the letter box if the shop is shut, but it’s open, so I’m able to pay in person for the 1972 poetry pamphlet/revolutionary tract edited by Bernard J Kelly that I buy as a gift for Michael Kemp.
 
When I was a student and then a ‘struggling writer’ living in London in the 1980s, I would travel down to Brighton once or twice a year, drawn by the junk shops and secondhand bookshops of North Laine. It’s to there I head next. In the Oxfam Bookshop on Kensington Gardens the only Picadors on view are the ubiquitous Once in a House on Fire by Andrea Ashworth and Last Orders by Graham Swift. It occurs to me, not the first first time, that I could start buying up copies of Last Orders – by some way the secondhand Picador book one sees most often – as an art project inspired by Rutherford Chang’s collection of copies of The Beatles’ White Album. But what Oxfam does also have is a 1984 Abacus edition of Shena Mackay’s collection Babies in Rhinestones, which will sit nicely alongside my Abacus edition of her later collection, Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags.
 
In Snoopers Paradise, a warren of stalls selling everything from books to beetles, stuffed foxes and pheasants, mannequin heads and dead men’s jackets, I find another attractive Abacus collection, Paul Bowles’s Pages From Cold Point, and, in Picador, the second volume of F Scott Fitzgerald’s stories, as well as The Torch in My Ear by Elias Canetti, which contains not one but two inclusions – a London Underground Travelcard dated January 1992 and a ticket for a London Film Festival screening of Stella Does Tricks in November 1996 – and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary.
 
By the time I enter Brighton Books at the north end of Kensington Gardens I am experiencing the beginnings of Collector’s Fatigue, the surest sign of which is the faintest desire not to find any books you might want to buy. But fatigue or no fatigue, I can’t resist a couple of Picadors – MJ Fitzgerald’s Concertina and Haniel Long’s The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca.
 
Finally, there’s just time for a quick visit to the Books for Amnesty shop in Sydney Street. As I browse, I can hear birdsong. Is it a recording? Have studies shown that birdsong encourages shoppers to buy? But as I work my way around the shop, picking up only one book for use in an art project that I do intend to work on at some future point, I see that at the back of the shop is an open door and beyond it a tiny garden filled with greenery and sunshine and actual birdsong. The signs of fatigue melt away as house sparrows and a wren sing their little hearts out and I head off to meet my namesake and his publisher for a couple of pre-gig St Stefanus blondes with a definite spring in my step.
 
Does the double act have legs? Michael and Sooty Kemp enjoy it and my old school friend Brian ‘Brimo’ Walsh and Man Met MA student and short story writer Bee Lewis and Confingo art editor Zoë McLean. (Again, I feel lucky.) I drink a lot of water to dilute the effect of two St Stefanus blondes and on the train back to London I read Neil Rollinson’s collection. His ‘Ode to a Piss’ makes me laugh out loud in hilarious yet painful recognition.
 

When I set eyes on the 1993 Picador edition of Daniel L Magida's novel The Rules of Seduction in the general fiction section of Sharston Books, I experience a visceral reaction. Mild, but still visceral. I think my unconscious mind spots the anomaly first. The colophon, or publisher's logo, is placed horizontally on the spine instead of vertically. I pick the book up, but put it down again. I leave it. I mean, why would I want to buy that? It's not right. I buy some other books and carry them home, but can't stop thinking about the Magida. The next day I go back and buy it.

Since buying the Magida, I've come across the same horizontally placed colophon on two more old Picadors – John Fowles's The Magus and WB Yeats's Collected Poems. I bought The Magus even though I already had a 'correct' copy, so now I have two copies of that novel in Picador, one 'good' and one 'bad'. If I ever see the Yeats with a vertical colophon I'll buy that, too.

I have a copy of Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. It's a Picador and it also dates from 1993. Maybe the planets were in misalignment that year. Every time I walk past my Picador shelves, I regard this book with distaste. I give a little shiver. It's been badly trimmed and is five millimetres shorter than the books either side of it. Five millimetres. That's half a centimetre. Picture it. As soon as I find a reasonably priced replacement in a charity shop, this copy is history. They have a correctly trimmed copy among the secondhand paperbacks at my local independent bookshop, Morten's, in Didsbury Village, but it's £3 and I don't know if I can justify spending £3 on five millimetres when it's not even for charity.

Also at Morten's they have a Picador edition of The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher. I caught sight of it there about a week ago, but saw immediately it wasn't quite right. I placed it next to the other Picadors they had – a Jonathan Raban and a Don DeLillo, both of which I have, in those editions – and saw it was, like the Charles Nicholl on my shelf, five millimetres short of the correct size. I didn't buy it, because there are mistakes and there are mistakes. A horizontally placed colophon is weird and worth keeping as a curiosity, but a badly trimmed copy is just a badly trimmed copy and of no interest. Not like a spelling mistake. Imagine a spelling mistake on the spine of your book. Michael Kelly, author of Martyrs' Day, doesn't have to imagine it. On the spine of a 1994 Picador edition, he is Micheal Kelly. On the spine of a 1991 Picador edition of Oliver Sacks's A Leg to Stand On, the author and professor of neurology became briefly plural. 

What is it about spines? Is the spine a weak point? Is it that when an editor or an art editor is checking a final proof, assuming it's on screen and assuming they don't turn the cover through 90 degrees, they are reading letters on their side and so it's easier to miss a couple of transposed vowels or an extra 's'? That's my theory anyway and I quite like it.

I'm not having a go. I have nothing but respect, affection and admiration – love, even – for Picador's output between 1972 and 1999. A small handful of anomalies and typos out of more than 600 books (the current size of my collection) is pretty good going. Who doesn't make mistakes?

I buy the short copy of MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating, which I notice on Twitter or Instagram is being reissued by Daunt Books, because I remember that my agent, John Saddler, collects books about cooking. Not cookbooks, but books about cooking. Did he say cooking or food – books about food? I can't remember, even though it wasn't long ago. It was the day we went to the Osterley Bookshop. So I buy The Art of Eating from Morten's and take it home where I allow it to sit, very briefly, on my shelf while I photograph it, to show you how wrong it looks, and then I take it off the shelf and stick it in a padded envelope and write John's address on the front. I hope he will get more pleasure out of it than it could possibly ever give me. I feel fairly sure he won't mind about the five millimetres.