Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf

‘Shadow Lines very much celebrates the world of books’ —Telegraph Nicholas Royle’s love of second-hand books and the ‘inclusions’ he finds inside them, their presence betrayed by ‘shadow lines’, is about making connections. Someone has scribbled a number in a book? He’ll text or call. An old address? He’ll return the book to where it used to live. Follow him as he walks between bookshops, reading as he goes, on the hunt for treasure, for ways to make us feel closer – to the books on our shelves, to each other and to our own lives. Share in Royle’s enthusiasm for the Rev W Awdry’s Railway Series, Penguin Modern Stories and Paul Auster’s cult classic, The New York Trilogy, as well as books in art and film. If you love books, bookshops and browsing, this is your perfect all-year gift – head to your happy place with a copy Shadow Lines today! (Note: ‘inclusions’ not supplied.)

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

Review :
★★★★ If you're a book sort of person, you're going to enjoy this book, which is a book about books, by a book sort of person, and for book sort of people. Nicholas Royle is fast becoming the bibliophile's bibliophile. Royle invests more passion into his subject than EL James did in whips, and it’s all incredibly infectious. He leavens any perceived pedantry with droll self-deprecation and, personally, I haven’t laughed harder with a book for a long time. This is a book about books and bookshops that will bring joy to every reader and collector, but it is also about the strangeness and sublimity of individuals, and our tender contacts with each other. Shadow Lines is all about the connections between humans and language and books and covers and art and walking and reading and collecting; the joy of tracking down titles and of lucky finds and random inclusions. It appears to be all about Nicholas Royle but actually it is about all of us who read. Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines is a bibliophile’s dream: a series of linked essays about his obsession for secondhand books. The attraction for Royle is not just the books themselves, but the detritus he finds inside them – old postcards, tickets, receipts, you name it. He observes his own mania with wit and wry self-deprecation. I absolutely loved reading Shadow Lines because that love comes across so strongly. If you solely love stories, just as happy to have them as ebooks as books, then this particular book probably isn’t for you. If you are a bibliophile in the purist sense of the word, then race towards Shadow Lines. And if you end up giving it away, make sure to leave the strangest possible inclusion inside it. I recommended White Spines as the perfect read for any book lover, and I have to say the same about Shadow Lines. Published again by lovely Salt (in a very Picadorian design!), it’s a thoroughly entertaining and surprisingly thought-provoking book, taking in musings on mortality, why we collect the books we do and what they say about us, the kindness of strangers and much, much more. Both of Nicholas Royle’s books have a special place on my shelves, and I can only hope that he’ll go on to write another volume and give us a trilogy! Nicholas Royle’s love of second-hand books and the ‘inclusions’ he finds inside them, their presence betrayed by ‘shadow lines’, is about making connections. Someone has scribbled a number in a book? He’ll text or call. An old address? He’ll return the book to where it used to live. Follow him as he walks between bookshops, reading as he goes, on the hunt for treasure, for ways to make us feel closer – to the books on our shelves, to each other and to our own lives.