Raymond Chandler's list of “THINGS I HATE”

Everybody loves a literary listicle

Whichever word you use for them - catalogues, inventories, indexes, tallies - people love lists. Shaun Usher has sold large roomfuls of his wonderful Lists of Note book which included such delights as an ancient Egyptian list of workmen’s absences and Galileo’s shopping list. If you search online for books about lists you won’t break the internet but you’ll certainly give it a little bend.

They’ve certainly been good to me - I’m still earning decent royalties from my A Book of Book Lists published back in 2017 (“From Bin Laden's bookshelf to the books most frequently left in hotels, from prisoners' favourite books to MPs' most borrowed books, these lists are proof that a person's bookcase tells you everything you need to know about them, and sometimes more besides” apparently). And I’m not the only one.

Rose Macaulay stuffed her 1935 book of essays Personal Pleasures (available secondhand but I’d recommend the Handheld Press edition as they are fine folk) with a list of 80 things she liked. Among them were the intriguing ‘Elephants in Bloomsbury’, ‘Bakery in the Night’, and the very true ‘Not Going to Parties’. Personal favourites include two on Bed, the first ‘Getting into it’ and the second ‘Not getting out of it’. Hannah Jane Parkinson did something similar a couple of years ago with her The Joy of Small Things, a 100-strong list celebrating nice stuff such as dressing gowns, ice cream vans, and clean bedding.

Coming up for auction next month at the US auctioneers Doyle is a collection of items relating to the writer Raymond ‘The Big Sleep’ Chandler. As well as his favourite typewriter - a 1953 Olivetti Studio 44 portable in its red original travel case which he used to write his 1957 novel Playback - you can raise your paddle for his silk scarf (patterned, with red flannel backing and fringe, pictured below, quite snazzy, eh?), and his glass cocktail muddlers.

The item I’m most tempted to empty my wallet for is a lighthearted list he put together entitled (caps and all) "THINGS I HATE". Among the 46 items which you can see for yourself in the picture at the top of this newsletter are:

• Golf Talk

• Hard-boiled eggs

• Watering the lawn

• Early Rising

• Automobile Salesmen

• Novels about people who can't make any money

• Novels by writers who don't use quotation marks

• Novels about arty people

• Speeches by Ramsay MacDonald

• Giving money to panhandlers and feeling stung/Not giving money to beggars and feeling cheap

• English caricatures of Americans

• American caricatures of Englishmen

Chandler was fond of lists and kept them in a series of notebooks - now available in a handy volume - including possible titles for his books, and similes or descriptions (“a mouth like wilted lettuce) for later use in his novels. But I’d suggest the writer who showed most commitment to his listings was Charles Dickens who kept a handwritten inventory of his wine cellar (in 1865 this included a 50 gallon cask of ale, an 18 gallon cask of gin, a nine gallon cask of brandy, and a nine gallon cask of rum - by 1870 it also features “5 Gallons in Stone Jars of the Whisky”). The final entry is for the day he died in 1870.