“Not part of the mainstream” – an interview with Nicholas Royle, author of Shadow Lines

We loved his last book of nonfiction, White Spines, and so the release of a new book, Shadow Lines (potentially the second in what is shaping up to be a trilogy) piqued our interest. Bookmunch regular Richard Clegg spoke to Nicholas Royle on all things book-shaped.

Richard Clegg (RC): Your current non-fiction books are about collecting. What else do you collect? How do you keep track of your collecting?

Nicholas Royle (NR): I collect found business cards, found playing cards, found photographs and found shopping lists. I collect the little plastic ties you get around the necks of bagged loaves of sliced bread – just those that have sell-by dates on them. I stick these on the insides of my kitchen cupboard doors in descending columns. The resemblance between these accumulating columns of dates and advancing chalk marks on a cell wall is not lost on me.

As a boy I collected train numbers and as a man gingerly pushing open the door leading into to my sixties, when I see a Type 3 diesel locomotive or an HST power car, my eye remains as strongly drawn to the engine number as it always was. I will even note it down and check my 1982 Locoshed Directory to see if this was a train I had spotted when I last collected such numbers.

I collect DVDs – films I like or am interested in or want to write about. I collect anything distributed by Curzon Artificial Eye. I collect CDs – albums by particular artists, albums of work within certain genres, anything at all on ECM, with the exception of Pat Metheny albums, and I’ll even buy his albums if they feature interesting sidemen, but there’s something about the Pat Metheny style of jazz guitar playing that’s incompatible with my remaining awake.

I collect Tootal scarves.

I collect pieces of broken rear light red glass from accident sites.

I store my collections of books, DVDs and CDs on shelves, by category, and within categories using alphabetical order. Artificial Eye DVDs and ECM CDs are shelved separately, just as certain imprints are kept together on my bookshelves. For the books, I keep notes, but not for anything else. The Tootal scarves live on a tailor’s dummy, the shards of red glass in a clear glass jar with a red lid.

RC: You are a devotee of French contemporary literature, so you surprised me with your train book enthusiasm and Thomas and his engine colleagues. It seemed slightly incongruous, being so English.

NR: My first exposure to the Railway Series of books by the Rev W Awdry came about when I was probably about eight or nine. I was fascinated by these engines with faces. Within a few years I became interested in real trains, but only diesels and electrics. I was slightly too late for steam. Yes, Awdry’s stories and the illustrations by C Reginald Dalby and other artists do strongly evoke a sense of a lost England, which I find exerts a strong pull on my imagination. The sun shines – and the rain falls – on an imagined corner of the country, indeed a self-evidently fictitious island with the strange name of Sodor, and yet I believe in it and feel as viscerally connected to it as I do to the idealised English heaths and woodlands and pastoral scenes that appear as backgrounds in the illustrations of birds and animals in the Ladybird Books that I read (and collected) during the same early, formative years of my childhood.

RC: If you could leave a shadow line in a book, what would it be?

NR: I occasionally come across the odd fiver or tenner – even a £20 note – that I’ve slipped into random books on my shelves.

RC: You discard books, sometimes by the page, as well as collecting them. How do you decide on the books to discard?

NR: I’m forever trying to free up more space by thinning out various collections. I might decide I no longer want to read, or keep, or collect a certain author or type of book. In some cases, once I’ve written about a book, I feel I can give it away. For White Spines I collected duplicate copies of the Picador edition of Graham Swift’s Last Orders and DM Thomas’s The White Hotel (King Penguin). Once White Spines was published, I felt I could start giving those away, so now, whenever I’m taking a bag of books to Oxfam or Red Cross or Mind, there’s at least one Last Orders and one The White Hotel among them. Thinking about Shadow Lines, I haven’t yet reached the point where I feel I can give away any of the copies of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy that I amassed or any volumes of the Penguin Modern Stories series. Indeed, I’m still hoping to reach my goal of having 12 copies of volume 12, 11 copies of volume 11 and so on.

RC: I expected books on green and orange spines next. Is that likely to happen?

NR: There are just so many orange-spined Penguins and even the green spines of Penguin Crime and so for now my collections are limited by the amount of space on the bookcases devoted to them. That doesn’t mean I can’t write about them, however.

RC: Will there be a third book in the book collecting series?

NR: Yes, due out before the end of 2025. I deliberately held over a number of subjects I had intended to write about for Shadow Lines.

RC: Your style is classical English prose with thematic undercurrents that are often  very different from what might be expected in the mainstream. Do you see this in your work?

NR: I’m not sure. I suppose I have always felt that what I do is not part of the mainstream. I have been fortunate to be published by some mainstream publishers, among them Penguin and Little, Brown/Abacus and Jonathan Cape/Vintage, but I’ve never kidded myself that in commercial terms I’m what those publishers would consider a successful writer. I have always written about subjects that interest me without ever asking myself if there’s an audience for what I’m doing. Which is not to say I don’t appreciate the reaction of and interaction with readers. I love how social media makes this possible.

RC: Your collecting seems always to be in a state of becoming. Can you see a time when you might stop? Do you see your book collection as an art object or art objects? Have you ever thought of exhibiting in an art gallery?

NR: It’s possible that my collection of Picador paperbacks might be unique and I do occasionally think about what might become of it eventually. I wonder if they might one day have room for it, for example, in the Special Collections Museum in the library at Manchester Metropolitan University. I hope these matters will remain merely theoretical for a long time yet. There might be some interest, also, in my growing collections of books with inclusions. When might I stop collecting? When there’s no more room or I am no longer capable.

RC: Your next set of stories is set in Paris. Is there an overlap with your current non-fiction? I was thinking of the theme of collecting.

NR: There’s often overlap between the fiction and the non-fiction. I bought a crime novel in Paris – Aveugle, que veux-tu? by Robert Destanque – that was inscribed by the author: ‘To my friends Vincent and Odette, of rue Germain Pilon, for many years a favourite hang-out where our friendship will always live on.’ I’ve translated the inscription, rather loosely, from the French. The title of the novel translates, literally, as Blind Man, What Do You Want? As far as I know it has never been translated, although it was adapted for French TV in 1984. Indeed, my copy of the book also includes a clipping about the adaptation from a French TV listings magazine dated 25 February 1984. It was part of a series called Série Noire, no doubt named after the great French crime imprint in the which the novel had appeared eight years earlier. I read the novel while I was in Paris. Indeed, I read part of it while walking up and down rue Germain Pilon, which I realised would be a good location for one of the stories I’m currently writing for Paris Fantastique. So, now, one of my characters lives in a small apartment about half way up rue Germain Pilon. Lucky him – it’s a lovely street with a nice, relaxed, creative feel about it.

RC: You are a champion of smaller publishers? Why is this?

NR: Most smaller publishers do it for the love of it, for the love of the work and for the love of publishing it, so they’re less motivated by profit and are free to publish interesting, innovative work. It’s getting increasingly difficult for small publishers, however. Royal Mail’s price rises will soon become more frequent than their postal deliveries. Print costs are soaring. Poetry publisher Longbarrow Press recently tweeted: ‘In season 10 of the taut thriller “24”, retired federal agent Jack Bauer resurfaces as a small press publisher, tasked with his most difficult mission yet: to sell a single copy of a poetry book in a 24-hour period while facing down a seemingly interminable fusillade of unsolicited submissions, even though the contact page of the website clearly states “No unsolicited submissions”.’ Longbarrow publisher Brian Lewis’s tweet is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time, partly because it’s so truthful. Times are hard for small presses. Sales are slowing down, while submissions continue to come through the virtual letterbox in an unstoppable torrent. If everyone who submits work were to place an order, or more to the point were to have placed an order, it would relieve some of the pressure. Some do, of course, and we appreciate their doing so, but most don’t. So, yes, I champion small presses. Many of them deserve it and they all need it.

Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle is published by Salt Books and is available now.