Neil Pearson

Building a library is a very egalitarian form of collecting. There’s more than one of everything, and not everything is expensive — you can pootle around in the foothills of your subject without breaking the bank. I was quite a young child when I began to like books as objects as well as for what they contained. I remember enjoying the heft of a book, the way its weight distribution changed as you read. I was in primary school when I discovered Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings novels, stories set in a boarding school, a romanticised world of tuck shops and midnight feasts and getting your head stuck in railings. I decided that if I had to go to secondary school (and apparently I did) then that was the type of school for me.

   My mother found herself a single parent when I was five, and the oldest of three. Paying for my secondary education would have been impossible, but following my declaration that, like Jennings, I would like to be sent away to school, she discovered Woolverstone Hall, a state-run boarding school in Suffolk. Most pupils were from what were then called ‘broken homes’ — single-parent families — but there was also a small group of children whose parents were in the armed forces, and who paid fees. This resulted in a pleasing social role reversal in which the children of military parents were the wimps, the fewer parents you had the cooler you were, and if your home life was so screwed up you didn’t go home at half-term, you ran the place. 

   Peter Donaldson, the BBC Radio4 newsreader and alumnus of Woolverstone Hall, said the school took children from Labour backgrounds, plonked them down in a conservative environment, gave them a liberal education, and turned out anarchists. Ian McEwan was a pupil there, and the school plays a big part in his brilliant, semi-autobiographical novel Lessons. McEwan renames the school Harding House in the book, but uses the real names of his teachers at Woolverstone — among them Neil Clayton, the man who taught McEwan (and later, me) English. Clayton became a good friend to both of us in later life.  He wasn’t interested in motivating the unmotivated, but if you showed interest he would get you in to Cambridge: he had an extraordinary mind, and a breadth of reading to match.

   The school offered so many opportunities. Children from the poorer parts of London were suddenly able to go sailing and learn archery, to sing madrigals and play in an orchestra. I discovered and developed my interest in the performing arts there. That place was the making of me, and I’ll be eternally grateful to my mother for finding it.

   When everyone started studying for university, I auditioned for the Central School of Speech and Drama, got in, scraped my A levels the following summer to keep my mother happy, and arrived at Central in September. The first year was fairly light on syllabus and, with time to fill and being a good five years younger than most of that year’s intake, I felt badly under-read as well as socially awkward. (This last didn’t seem to be a problem for another of the year’s ‘babies’, Rupert Everett, who spent most of his down time being photographed in nightclubs with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol, which really didn’t help.) I clung on to the coat tails of Robert Demeger, a much older classmate, previously an English teacher, and later a successful actor and lifelong friend. I pumped him for reading lists, and through the three years of Central I read a play a day and a novel a week. Over time what had begun as a catching-up exercise became just a thing I did.

   I left drama school in 1980, and worked in repertory theatre, the fringe in London and bits and pieces in television before being cast with Paul McGann as the lovers in Joe Orton’s Loot in the West End in 1984, with Leonard Rossiter as Truscott. I was still trying to read a novel a week, and one week that summer was reading Temporary Kings, the penultimate novel in Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time. I was reading my paperback copy while walking through Cecil Court on my way to a matinée when I saw a copy of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the twelfth and final volume of Dance, in the window of Bell, Book and Radmall. It was a hardback — a first edition, it was explained to me — gleaming in its dust-jacket, and I decided to buy it as a suitably ceremonial way to finish reading Dance. It cost me thirty quid at the time, and a lot more subsequently. The bug had bitten, and by the time I’d gathered up the other eleven volumes I had a lot more books besides, and a lot less money than I would have had if I’d taken a different route to work that day.

   You either get this or you don’t (and your readers do) but there’s a quiet thrill about a book of some age, in first edition, still in its dust-jacket, looking exactly as the author would have seen it when their copies were delivered — in theatrical terms, it’s the first-night version of a book. The fact that a first edition of The Great Gatsby costs at least £100,000 more with its original dust-jacket than without sounds mad, I’ll grant you — ok, it is mad — but as a collector you’re paying for the privilege as well as the pleasure of looking after these objects, of ensuring they survive, and are loved. When I started collecting someone wise advised me only to buy what I loved so that I would still have something of value to me if the bottom fell out of the market. At that time I was immersed in George Orwell and Henry Miller. I couldn’t afford first editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Tropic of Cancer, but both authors were critics and essayists as well as novelists, and frequent contributors to literary journals like The Adelphi and The Booster. These more affordable items gradually began to accrete around me and to tell a story together, to contextualise each other, something that happens when material is gathered in one place.

   When I first read Tropic of Cancer, I didn’t understand how such a book could possibly have been published openly in 1934. The novel wasn’t published legally in the United States until 1960. How was it able to dodge all the bullets of censorship and persecution? I began to discover the extraordinary role that Paris played in publishing many of the greatest English-language books of the twentieth century. And as I did so, I discovered my spiritual home in the expatriate literary movement of Paris between the World Wars. Noël Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation is the bible for the period. She writes with a rare combination of bullet-proof scholarship and great enthusiasm — glee, even — in her descriptions of Paris and the writers who frequented Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Beach published Ulysses in 1922, of course.

   As the French obscenity laws were only ever used against books written in French (and even then only rarely), Paris provided a literary oasis for the publication of books like Tropic of Cancer, considered pornographic in Anglophone countries. This loophole was partly due to the French very sensibly deciding that French-speaking juries might struggle to establish whether a book written in English was obscene, and an ongoing embarrassment at having prosecuted both Flaubert and Baudelaire in the nineteenth century, which years later they continued to see as something of a stain on their professed reverence for art, culture and the intellectual.

Tropic of Cancer was published by Jack Kahane, who founded the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1929, and over a period of ten years also published Cyril Connolly, Norman Douglas, Anaïs Nin and Lawrence Durrell. I was surprised to find that no complete bibliography of Kahane’s publications existed. Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris has a list, but there are gaps in it, as I discovered when my own Obelisk collection began to grow. After spending a long time working my way around institutional libraries, it occurred to me that I had collected so much information that I had inadvertently started to write a book. As I was busy with my acting career, it took me four and a half years to complete Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press, published by Liverpool University Press in 2007. 

   When you publish a bibliography, you’re sending out a message in a bottle. People read it for the information it contains but they also look for gaps, and I certainly know more now than when I wrote the book. I got Princess Paul Troubetzkoy wrong, and — infuriatingly — I missed Jack Kahane’s first book as a writer. Obelisk had only been out for a month when Martin Stone, book scout and friend of blessed memory, rang me from Paris to say that he ‘might have something for me’ — the phrase that he used to excite collectors and dealers alike. Before moving to Paris, Kahane had dabbled as a playwright, and two of his plays were published together in his home town of Manchester in 1911, and the book is listed in Obelisk as his first. But Martin knew better. As a young man Kahane wrote advertising copy for a firm of Manchester tobacconists. One of his puff pieces was a poem about the glories of tobacco composed in the style of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and it was published and distributed to the smokers of Manchester. During my years of research scouring library catalogues this pamphlet never surfaced: Kahane’s name appears only as ‘J.K.’ on the title-page. And then Martin Stone offered me a copy, containing a letter from the tobacconist to one of his customers, and identifying the author of the poem as Kahane. How Martin found it I don’t know. I just wish he’d found it a couple of months sooner.

   Martin was a lead guitarist in a number of big rock bands in the late 1960s and early ’70s, before succumbing to — and surviving — massive alcohol and drug habits. He had always collected books, and became a legendary scout. Shortly before Martin’s death in 2015, I took a camera man to Paris and we followed him around for a typical weekend of visiting flea markets and booksellers. The camera loved him: his beetling eyebrows, his two-tone shoes, his hat that he never removed. A dapper Rackham pixie. He was perfect for television and I wanted to make a series with him, driving him to wherever he wanted to go in the search for books (Martin didn’t drive), talking all things books on the way. Antiques Road Trip meets Thelma and Louise. Never happened, but I have all the footage from that weekend, and when I’ve time I’m going to get some contributions from his friends and whip it up into something. Everyone adored him, and they all have their own Martin Stone story.

   Although plenty of actors collect books, I’m not aware of anyone else who deals in them too. In 2011 I started my business, dealing in a wide variety of material, but with accent currently on the performing arts. I have the advantage of a good address book in that area, and an understanding of the material: screenplays, play scripts, contracts and correspondence to working copies of rehearsal scripts, rewrites, call sheets and so on. There’s an interesting difference between the most collectable state of a novel and that of a screenplay. Collectors want the first edition, first impression of a novel, but the most collectable version of a screenplay tends to be the last version, not the first, as the last will most closely approximate to the finished film. An annotated working script of a film screenplay is a scarce thing. The only people on a film set who carry around the entire screenplay tend to be the director, possibly the First A.D., and the continuity, hair and makeup, and wardrobe departments. The actors work from ‘sides’, single sheets carrying the scenes they need for the day’s filming. On the other hand, a stage actor will keep the entire script with them through the rehearsal period, and then in their dressing room for reference once the play is running. Unlike screenplays, they’re usually covered in notes. Call sheets are the mayflies of film production, obsolete after twenty-four hours and only ever kept by mistake. In our recent Performing Arts catalogue there’s a call sheet for the filming of the climactic carnival scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train. A fabulous thing which had no business surviving. We’ve co-produced with Tom Carter, of Thomas Carter Rare Books, very much the new kid on the block. I first met Tom at a book fair in Edinburgh two or three years ago. He has a wonderful eye, a great knack of just finding stuff, and is depressingly young. A child of the internet, he somehow tracks down auction houses in places that no-one’s ever heard of.

   Bookselling is like running an orphanage; you’re looking for good homes for things. I recently sold the archive of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the creators of Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son, to the University of York. The Borthwick Institute at York is developing a stellar collection of twentieth century British popular culture, mainly due to the enthusiasm of Gary Brannan, the Institute’s Curator. I enjoy working on single-person archives: as with acting, you’re trying to understand a character through the available information. The two sides of my professional life are pleasingly symbiotic.

Interviewed for The Book Collector in Winter 2025