Gavin Lyall's Harry Maxim / Secret Servant Spy Series: Uncorrected Proof Editions

A big part of the appeal of book collecting for me is the pursuit and acquisition of that which is rare. Sometimes that can mean first editions; sometimes it can mean little-seen later editions or scarce paperback editions; sometimes it can mean signed or, better yet, inscribed editions; and sometimes, on occasion, it can mean uncorrected proofs.

Uncorrected proofs, for the uninitiated, are advanced copies of books, printed and bound with paper or card covers bearing bibliographic details and/or blurbs, which are sent out to proofreaders, authors, reviewers and, increasingly, bloggers, for a variety of purposes. That purpose initially, as the name suggests, was for authors and proofreaders to spot and mark up any typos that had slipped through the net, but in more recent years uncorrected proofs, or advance review copies (ARCs) as they're also referred to, have been used primarily to drum up publicity.

You could argue that uncorrected proofs are the true first state of any printed book, preceding, as they do, the first edition. But even if you accept that, I think it's fair to say that most book collectors, myself included, would still prefer the first edition; apart from anything else, uncorrected proofs are frequently unlovely and, by nature, unfinished things, whereas firsts benefit from designed dust jackets and hardback binding. Still, uncorrected proofs can be scarce things, and as such can sometimes be of interest to me – say, for example, if a novel has a certain significance, and a first edition isn't quite enough, and a signed edition isn't available, as with Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground; or to give another, more recent, example, if an entire series, one which I enjoy and admire, suddenly becomes available in its entirety in uncorrected proof – well, that would be very hard to pass up indeed.

So it proved when the latter three of Gavin Lyall's four Harry Maxim spy novels popped up on eBay a few months back – The Conduct of Major Maxim, The Crocus List and Uncle Target. Despite owning entirely serviceable first editions of all three, I was sorely tempted even so; and when I then noticed an inexpensive uncorrected proof of the first Harry Maxim novel, The Secret Servant (which I also own in first), elsewhere online, the notion of nabbing the whole series in uncorrected proof proved irresistible. Individually they're quite uncommon things – at present I can see online one other uncorrected proof of The Secret Servant, one of The Crocus List, two of Uncle Target, and none of The Conduct of Major Maxim – but taken together they are, I'd venture, quite a unique and potentially intriguing collection. Well, I reckon so anyway; whether anyone else will think so too is debatable, but here they are anyway.

The Secret Servant (Hodder & Stoughton, 1980)
The first Harry Maxim novel – which I reviewed here – this proof of The Secret Servant comes with a dust jacket (designed by none other than Raymond Hawkey, utilising a photograph by Peter Williams), something which in my experience is atypical for an uncorrected proof, although not unheard of. (At least in the 1980s and earlier; nowadays uncorrected proofs frequently have full colour covers.) The inner card cover, meanwhile – which the jacket has been trimmed to fit – bears no text at all – again, atypical for a proof, but not unheard of. What is really unusual is the width of the thing: the pages are a lot wider than those of the finished book, and on some of the later pages in the proof– which looks to me to have been photocopied rather than printed – the edges of the original pages can be seen.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Conduct of Major Maxim (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982)
No dust jacket here, and a printed card cover, bearing publication info, which is more typical of an uncorrected proof. The interesting thing with this proof is the copyright page, which bears one notable difference from that in the finished, printed book, which can be seen below:

Evidently The Conduct of Major Maxim was titled A Slightly Private War until shortly before publication.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Crocus List (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985)
It's possible sometimes to spot typos and errors in uncorrected proofs – they are, after all, uncorrected – especially if one compares them to the finished first editions. And then there are those errors that can be spotted without comparison, like the one on page 6 of The Crocus List proof:

I can confirm that that was caught and fixed for the finished book.

. . . . . . . . . .

Uncle Target (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988)
As with the first Harry Maxim spy thriller, the uncorrected proof of the final one also comes with a dust jacket, although the inner card cover is printed too, more in line with the proofs of The Conduct of Major Maxim and The Crocus List – more so, in fact: the front of the inner cover replicates the jacket front in black and white, while the back cover copy features details of the promotional plans for the book, including a "Powerful Saatchi and Saatchi national advertising campaign", no less. Unlike The Secret Servant, however, the jacket on the proof of Uncle Target isn't final. Colour scheme apart – presumably that's a proof placeholder – though the various elements of the design remained the same for the final (uncredited) version, they were rearranged thusly:

The Secondhand Bookshops of Tunbridge Wells, or, Wot I Did on My Birthday This Year

I tend not to accord my birthdays more than a passing mention on Existential Ennui – I can't imagine they're of even passing interest to the (meagre) readership of this blog – usually post-event and in connection with whichever book I might have acquired as a result of managing to stay alive for another year. But my most recent birthday, which was last week, merits a lengthier report, I feel, as it entailed a trip to Tunbridge Wells for a mooch around the secondhand bookshops in that Royal Kentish town – a mooch which netted me one book in particular which I was absolutely cock-a-hoop to have come across.

The day got off to a pretty decent start even before we got to Tunbridge Wells, when I received this from the lovely Rachel:

A first edition of Desmond Cory's Intrigue, published by Shakespeare Head – the Australian sister publisher to British outfit Frederick Muller (although still printed in the UK, so in fact it's an export edition) – in 1954 (dust jacket designer unknown). The fourth in Cory's Johnny Fedora spy novel series, in common with other entries in that series this is quite a rare book; I can see just four other copies in any edition online at present: a Muller second impression, another Muller edition with no details as to impression or presence of dust jacket (or anything really), and two paperback editions, one under the alternate American title of Trieste. A nice addition, then, to my Fedora-in-first collection, which now numbers twelve volumes out of a possible sixteen.

And so to Tunbridge Wells, and its handful of secondhand bookshops. First port of call was here:

Ah, actually, let's skip the first port of call and go straight to the second port of call, which was here:

The Aviation Bookshop, tucked away on Vale Road. I've visited this place before, and in truth their stock doesn't really fall within my fields of interest – plus I've yet to work out how to navigate my way around that stock (books are shelved under broad subject areas, but not, as far as I can work out, in any sort of order thereafter) – but I applaud the idea of there being a bookshop devoted to aviation, and anyone with an interest in that sort of thing will doubtless find much to divert them. I, however, moved swiftly on, to here:

The Oxfam Bookshop, on Chapel Place. Unfortunately, despite the manager kindly checking the stock for obscure postwar crime and spy fiction after I'd mentioned on Twitter the previous day that I'd be popping by, there was nothing for me. And neither was there here:

The Pantiles Bookshop, on the Pantiles, oddly enough. I did spy a signed first of P. D. James's The Children of Men, but I was in two minds as to whether to buy it – I already own an unsigned first edition and I haven't even read that yet – so while I deliberated we went across the way and had tea and cake in a cafe, in which, sitting at a window table, slightly incongruously given the sedate surroundings, was Rick Parfitt of Status Quo fame and his missus. Anyway, by the time I got back to the shop, the book had gone. Parfitt left the cafe before me; perhaps it was him wot bought it, the git.

Fortunately, by that point, as you might be able to tell from the bag in my hand, I'd already had some success elsewhere, namely here:

Hall's Bookshop, which was my real reason for visiting Tunbridge Wells. Hall's has been situated on Chapel Place for decades, but last year it was taken over by London expat bookseller Adrian Harrington, who completely refurbished the joint and installed his own wares upstairs. The net result is that Hall's is now, I'd wager, one of the finest secondhand bookshops in the country: pleasant to browse in, with an excellent stock, and not bad prices. I managed to find something on the cheapo paperback racks outside even before I'd set foot in the place:

And after a thorough survey of the shelves inside – and a look at Adrian Harrington's stock upstairs, which, while fascinating, was mostly priced well beyond my means – emerged about an hour later with another two books. (Rachel found something for herself as well, plus a couple of books for Edie). To wit:

From the left, a 1963 Corgi paperback of Brian Cleeve's Assignment to Vengeance; a 1982 Granada hardback first edition of Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, jacket illustration by Michel Whelan; and a 1965 Michael Joseph hardback first edition of P. M. Hubbard's The Holm Oaks, dust jacket design by the wonderfully named H. Bridgeman Grimley. Finding the Hubbard in particular was one of those secondhand bookshop moments of which one dreams but seldom gets to experience: I've been on the lookout for a first edition of The Holm Oaks, the author's fourth novel for adults (sixth overall, counting his two children's novels) and the only one of his books I didn't own in any edition, for nearly four years, so to chance upon a highly scarce first, in lovely condition, in a bookshop which was my main purpose for visiting Tunbridge Wells, was serendipitous in the extreme. Rest assured I'll be blogging about it in full before too long.

Lauren R. Weinstein's Girl Stories (Henry Holt, 2006) and Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons (Sasquatch Books, 2002)

NB: linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Over the past few months I've been unearthing graphic novels – more accurately unboxing, I suppose; for the most part they've been sitting in cardboard boxes in the loft – that I've owned for years but for whatever reason haven't got round to reading until now(ish). I have a vague plan, hatched in this post last month on three graphic novels from 2014 and destined, no doubt, like other vague plans before it, to be abandoned before it amounts to much of anything, to group some of them together in configurations which strike me as likely to prompt a few thoughts, arbitrary and asinine though those configurations – and thoughts – may be. This configuration being a case in point:

Girl Stories by Lauren R. Weinstein, published in paperback by Henry Holt in 2006, and One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry, published in hardback by Sasquatch Books in 2002. Aha! I hear you cry. He's grouped these two graphic novels together because they're both by women. Oho! I rejoin. That is only part of the reason. In fact my major rationale for grouping the two books together is even more prosaic than that: when I retrieved them from the loft it struck me that they're both in a landscape format, and almost exactly the same TPS – about 150mm by 240mm.

Slightly more interestingly, both books are episodically autobiographical in nature and deal with similarly formative periods in their authors' lives, so despite my facile comparisons they do share more in common than just gender and size.

Of the two, I liked Girl Stories the best. Why it took me nearly ten years to finally read the damn thing I've no idea; I've long loved Weinstein's idiosyncratic, unpredictable Inside Vineyland (Alternative Comics, 2003), and though Girl Stories isn't quite as demented as that debut, it has the same zip and energy, just directed to keenly felt, scratchily rendered vignettes of school life and suburban home life (instead of stories about lovelorn robots and depressed dogs), with meditations on the perils of social climbing, the trouble with boyfriends and the problem of body fascism.

It's taken me even longer to get round to One Hundred Demons – over a dozen years, which is ridiculous really. I mean, what's the point in even owning a book if it's just going sit there unread for a dozen years? He types, looking round guiltily at the hundreds of books sitting on his shelves unread for half a dozen years. But anyway: Barry's comics are as honest and raw as Weinstein's – rawer even: there are allusions in One Hundred Demons to a very dark and painful episode in Barry's childhood. As a cartoonist, though, Barry prefers to tell rather than show, to the extent that the words in her panels frequently overwhelm and crowd out the pictures. That said, she may lack Weinstein's light touch, but there's a reflective strength, and consequently an affecting depth, to a story like "Cicadas".

War Game by Anthony Price (Gollancz, 1976; David Audley Series #7): Book Review

NB: One of this Friday's Forgotten Books.

'Formulaic' is a word oft applied to genre fiction, and in many cases rightly so: think of contemporary crime fiction, with its interminable parade of interchangeable detective-inspectors and mutilated female corpses. But though formulaic may be a derogatory term, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with developing or adhering to a formula. Some of the best and most influential crime and spy series ever published – Richard Stark's Parker novels and Ian Fleming's Bond ones spring to (my) mind – were written to formulas, and yet individual books within those series still stand as distinctive works of fiction in their own right. The key is to mix things up a bit – to, as Mike Love of the Beach Boys memorably put it, "fuck with the formula" (Love was actually advising Brian Wilson against doing that, but Wilson ignored him, with spectacular results) – and this is what Anthony Price does with his David Audley series of spy novels.

Since I first encountered the series in 2011 I've read seven of Price's nineteen Audley thrillers – most recently War Game, published by Victor Gollancz in 1976 – and though the elements – the formula – that comprise the novels have become familiar – a preoccupation with the past and, often, archaeology, one which feeds into a (then) present day mystery concerning state security; a reliance on dialogue rather than description as a means of unravelling that mystery – Price always finds a way to fuck with that formula.

His chief method of doing so is by changing the principal viewpoint character, beginning with the clever and prickly Audley himself in The Labyrinth Makers (1970), then moving through a variety of other operatives of the Research and Development Section of British Intelligence – plus the odd stray Italian and American – as the novels progress, and arriving, Magic Faraway Tree-style, back at Audley as of War Game. This is an older and more seasoned Audley, however – in Price's stories time marches on at roughly the same pace as the books were originally published, so a good six or seven years have elapsed since the events of The Labyrinth Makers – one who gazes upon subordinates Paul Mitchell and Frances Fitzgibbon and, despite being respectively irritated and beguiled by them, sees a pair of stars destined to rise further in the Intelligence firmament than he ever has or will.

But it's still Audley who for the most part makes the intellectual running here, doing his damndest to work out how leftie firebrand Charlie Ratcliffe has managed to unearth £2 million in 17th century gold – with which he intends to fund his radical workers' newspaper – and have his brother bumped off during a Civil War reenactment into the bargain, thus securing the fortune for himself. As before in the series, there's more – or perhaps less – going on than meets the eye, and so even though Price's own politics show through on occasion – the moral matter of whether a government minister should really be turning an apparatus of state to the undoing of a left-wing irritant is never fully addressed – there is a genuine threat to national security at play, one which must be countered. The identity of that threat may not come as a huge surprise, but the rug-pulling reveal of its method demonstrates there's plenty of fun to be had with Price's formula yet.

Patricia Highsmith's The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head: Signed Inscribed Edition (Eurographica, 1986)

NB: Included in Friday's Forgotten Books, 6/3/15.

Much as I love a beautiful dust jacket (especially a British one dating from, say, the 1950s or the 1960s), sometimes the most extraordinary of books come in the plainest of wrappers. Like this one:

The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head and Other Stories by Patricia Highsmith, published by Eurographica of Helsinki, Finland (or Helsinki, Sweden, as newsreader Harvey Johnson has it in Die Hard), in 1986 as part of their Mystery and Spy Authors in Signed Limited Editions series (number four in that series, to be precise). Printed, as noted in the back of the book, "by Tipografia Nobili, established in Pesaro in 1823, on special Michelangelo paper made at the Magnani Paper Mills in Pescia, Italy" – and suitably and pleasingly thick and rough and deckled that paper is too – it was limited to 350 numbered copies signed by Highsmith, with "20 additional copies printed for the personal use of the author". This is one of those 20 additional copies:

Which Highsmith inscribed to a Catherine Schelbert – who may well be the translator Catherine Schelbert – in March 1990. A handful of copies of the signed and numbered run of The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head can be found on AbeBooks (for upwards of £100) – as can a similar number of Where the Action Is and Other Stories, a second limited edition of Highsmith tales published by Eurographica in 1989 – but I can't see any other copies of the "personal use" run, so this one is quite a rare item, and as such nice addition to my steadily growing collection of signed and inscribed Highsmith books (see here, here, here and here).

The four stories in The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head are taken from the 1979 collection Slowly, Slowly in the Wind, although three, "Something You Have to Live With", "Slowly, Slowly in the Wind" itself and "A Curious Suicide", were first published earlier than that, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ("A Curious Suicide" as "Who Lives, Who Dies?"). The best by far is the title story, in which Highsmith drily demonstrates, using the case of one E. Taylor Cheever, that one needn't go to the bother of actually writing any novels in order to become a celebrated novelist – a finding which, for myself, having attempted on more than one occasion to write a novel only to discover that my talents – if indeed any exist – almost certainly lie elsewhere, is music to the ears.

The other three stories are all very good too, though – the macabre and mildly gruesome "Slowly, Slowly in the Wind", with its wonderfully original method of disposing of a body, in an obvious sort of way, "Something You Have to Live With" and "A Curious Suicide" working a more subtle magic, both dealing with the lingering aftereffects of killing; "A Curious Suicide" in particular comes off like a condensed Highsmith novel, complete with a murderer who gets away with it almost in spite of himself. All of which leads me to suspect that the rest of Slowly, Slowly in the Wind will be well worth reading too – so it's a good job I have a first edition of that collection, which I'll doubtless be blogging about down the line, and adding to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, where I've deposited The Man Who Wrote Books in His Head (under "Patriciaphernalia"). And I'll be blogging about another signed and inscribed Highsmith book before too long as well – a very special association copy of a Tom Ripley novel, no less.

Best Graphic Novels of 2014? Ant Colony by Michael DeForge, Megahex by Simon Hanselmann and It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden

For some reason – possibly to do with the life and work upheavals of the past few months; a retreat to the familiar, perhaps? – I've been on something of a graphic novels kick of late: catching up on books which were published last year but which I missed; rediscovering ones I've owned for, in some cases, a decade or more but which have been sitting in the loft, unread. My vague plan is to group some of them together in various configurations for blog posts over the coming weeks and – most likely – months in – even more likely, I imagine – intermittent fashion, beginning with three graphic novels that have little in common other than they were all published in 2014 and they're the three best graphic novels published in 2014 that I've read:

Ant Colony by Michael DeForge (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014), Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics, 2014), and It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden (Uncivilized Books, 2014). Ant Colony I've already mentioned on Existential Ennui; it took the number eight spot in my year-end top ten of the best books I read in 2014, the only graphic novel to make it into that top ten, although if I'd read Hanselmann's or Alden's books before the end of last year it's entirely possible one or the other of those would have made it in too. But anyway: Ant Colony is extraordinary, a mad and trippy meditation on the nature of society, the role of the individual within that society, and how that society might explode and eventually reintegrate in new forms in the wake of an apocalyptic event, all enacted by ants (and spiders, and centipedes, and sundry cameoing insects).

Just as philosophical in their own ways are Megahex and It Never Happened Again. The former is initially deceptive in that it starts out like a (very) low key Furry Freak Brothers, detailing the everyday lives of a pair of stoners – Megg and her kind-of lover Mogg (respectively a witch and a cat; Hanselmann took inspiration from the Meg and Mog children's books) – and their housemate Owl; but as the short stories within this collection progress (like Ant Colony, large parts of Megahex originally appeared in serial form online), Hanselmann invests his characters with a surprising depth, suggesting that their slacker antics are merely a facade and that underneath they're as lost and at sea as, well, some of the insect stars of DeForge's book.

Actually, on reflection, maybe these three graphic novels have more in common than I figured, because the two stories in It Never Happened Again also deal with loss, alienation and estrangement (and at least one of them originally appeared online too) – the first, "Hawaii 1997", in the form of a joyful encounter on a beach between a young boy and girl which ends with a devastating parting shot, the second, "Anime", by examining a wannabe Otaku's futile search for meaning and belonging in places and things rather than in real life. Alden's loose pencil approach helps to lend the enterprise its naturalistic feel, but the flow of the storytelling is just as important; there's a serious talent at work here, as a glance at Alden's Tumblr and website will confirm, one that in the scope of the artist's extant comics and the potential of those still to come brings to my mind at least the great David Mazzucchelli.