posted on 03 Mar 2019

Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore by Nancy and Larry Goldstone

Just a little over three years ago, I reviewed a book, Used and Rare by Nancy and Larry Goldstone, that I found myself liking despite all my instincts. I said at that time that the Goldstones have that unnerving, very American quality of good-natured openness that can sometimes come across as privileged naivety. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they wouldn’t be out of place as a featured couple in the sort of brochures that promote golf holidays. But, I also noted:

"What makes the book a hit for me is their openness and their frank willingness to confess how little they know / knew and just how wide-eyed and unprepared they were for the eccentric and sometimes plain crazy world of books and book collecting. By the end of this instalment I was positively rooting for them to find their bargains or to stump up incautiously large amounts of  money for something they just had to have."

Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore is their follow-up to Used and Rare and in my original review I did promise to read it and bring you an update on what I found. Three years later on, numerous other books read, I’m now making good on my promise.

And, to tell the truth, I rather wish I wasn’t because most of the things that gave Used and Rare it’s unlikely charm and its overall buoyancy is missing from this rather plodding follow-up. And it's all really frustrating because when they focus on the visits to bookshops or book fairs, the old magic is still there but, my word, there’s a hell of a lot of pointless padding. Without the tedious details of their meals out, trips to theatre productions and a very ill-judged anecdote about Larry’s trip to Jamaica (just skip it please!), this sequel might only run to fifty or sixty pages.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to try diversifying the storytelling away from their scratchy attempts to become book collectors to a wider notion of adventures in ‘vaguely-book-related-world’ but whoever it was clearly had no real understanding of where the charm of Used and Rare lay. Look, it’s not that difficult. Your audience is going to be people who love going to bookshops and who might like a few vicarious thrills hearing someone else describing their discovery of that world. Easy. Give the reader what they want. What they don’t want are descriptions of what you had for dinner or how your social life benefitted from a trip to the theatre.

There’s still just enough here to make reading the book worthwhile: in fact, there’s probably one episode in particular when the authors take a trip to Philadelphia that, for me at least, merited the time I spent with it. They go in search of a bookshop owned by Clarence Wolf which turns out to be situated down an obscure alley and the experience seems to have been lifted almost wholesale from one of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind novels. There’s something here that captures the spirit of the Goldstone’s and their ‘innocents abroad’ shtick – at their best they have the ability to take you along on one of their trips.

And then, wouldn’t you know it, they undo all the good stuff by packing the book out with a very trying section about the New York auction of the bits and pieces belonging to the famous but pointless Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson.

So, all in all, a bit of a let down after Used and Rare  -  this one is for only the most dedicated bibliophile.

 

Terry Potter

March 2019