Nicholas Royle: The book collector's book collector

From white stripes and the Rev W Awdry to books whose title is London ______

It’s always interesting talking to people who collect books, even if what they collect has nothing to do with your own personal assemblage of volumes (in my case Gawain and the Green Knight, and Spain). I interviewed the marvellous Nicholas Royle for Fine Books & Collections magazine about his bibliographical gatherings (main focus: white-spined Picadors) and his three recent books on the subject, the excellent White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector, Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf, and his forthcoming Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books out in spring 2026, all published by Salt.

Nicholas has also been running Nightjar Press since 2009, publishing original uncanny and experimental short stories by authors including Alison Moore, Cynan Jones, M John Harrison, Will Eaves, Jean Sprackland, Livi Michael and John Foxx. Where possible, he delivers these by hand and on foot, a service he calls ‘Royle Mail’ following routes past favourite secondhand bookshops (I’ve been the happy recipient of such a delivery, it was a delightful surprise).

Anyway, you can read that piece in the summer issue of FB out now (or online here), but as always it’s impossible to shoehorn entire interviews into the white space available in a magazine so I thought you might be interested in the original director’s cut. I’ve tickled the transcript ever so slightly so you get more of Nicholas, who is interesting, and less of the inquisitor, who is not so much. Anyway, it’s all aboard the Skylark and off we go:

Can you tell me a bit about the third book in the trilogy, Finders Keepers?

Finders, Keepers will follow naturally on from White Spines and Shadow Lines, with more of the same, but also lots of new material, and new ideas. There will be a chapter devoted to collecting books with train tickets left inside them by previous owners. I will recreate the book’s journey, by travelling from, for example, London King’s Cross to Newcastle while reading Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature. I’ll write about the book and the journey and about any bookshops I visit while in Newcastle. There will be a chapter on found maps, as in maps that I find in books, left there by previous readers. Where possible, I’ll walk the map while reading the book. I may not visit New Zealand to walk the hand-drawn map I found in a copy of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, but wandering around Crystal Palace while reading Edmund White’s States of Desire, which contained a photocopied page from the London A–Z, is eminently doable. In fact I’ve already done it.

There will be chapters on free books, on returning found - or lost - library books to their rightful homes, on what to do with business cards one finds in books, and lots more.

What connects the trilogy?

The three books are linked by an endless curiosity for the things I find in second-hand books, which I call ‘inclusions’, the term used for insects in amber, and for the past lives of these books, traces of which are revealed through other clues (names, book plates, inscriptions, etc). If these books encourage any readers to find more interest in and obtain more pleasure from second-hand books than is already obtainable from the text itself, I’ll be pleased.

How did your Picador collection [pictured above] begin?

The white-spined Picadors ae from the list’s launch in 1972 to 1999/2000 when they rashly abandoned the uniform design. It started either when I bought a copy of Anna Kavan’s Ice from Skoob Books in 1982, or when my parents gave me a copy of Alberto Manguel’s fabulous anthology Black Water for Christmas the following year, depending on whether you believe a single book can represent the start of a collection, or whether you think you need to add a second book for your collection to really become a collection. I can imagine it might be unique, but I don’t know.

What other book collections do you have?

Quite a few. The Rev W Awdry’s Railway Series. The Pan Book of Horror Stories. New Writings in SF. Best Short Stories (ed Giles Gordon and David Hughes). Penguin Modern Stories. Reasonably sized collections of orange Penguins and green Penguins. Small collection of eggshell-green Penguin Modern Classics. White-spined paperbacks from Abacus, Sceptre, Vintage, King Penguin, Paladin, etc. Editions de Minuit and Gallimard’s Folio series before they changed the typeface to something sans serif and introduced colour to the type – why do redesigns so rarely improve on the original? Books whose title is London _____ so, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London would not qualify even though I have a copy and have read it and love it, but Christianna Brand’s London Particular does. I suppose I’ve reached the stage where I have a collection of collections.

When did you start collecting? Any favourites? And any you're on the lookout for?

I started in the early 1980s when I was a student living in London and I found Skoob Books and the then affordable book stalls under Waterloo Bridge and would visit my friend Nigel in Oxford and we would go to second-hand bookshops on the Cowley Road. I bought a copy of Skoob’s Directory of Second-hand Bookshops and started exploring further afield. A short list of favourites might include Manguel’s Black Water and Anna Kavan’s Ice, which cost almost nothing, but also a first edition of BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates (Panther), his famous book in a box, which cost me £90 from Oxfam in Liverpool. I try not to look for particular books, because I might find they simply do not exist, like a Penguin edition of Hamlet with a David Gentleman cover [some existing examples by Gentleman pictured below] but for books to add to my growing collections.

What have been the most intriguing inclusions you've come across?

Brushes with fame are exciting – it was fun working out that a particular book with a card in it addressed to ‘Ben’ had previously belonged to actor Ben Whishaw, for example – but I’m more intrigued by the airmail love letters I found in the Penguin copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women I bought from Oxfam in Sheffield in November last year. Al had gone skiing in Austria, leaving her man, John, without his woman. She loved him and missed him, she said, but was not short of male attention on and off the slopes.

Next week we reach the halfway point in our book club reading of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time with The Kindly Ones. There’s still time to join us and catch up!