'White Spines' by Nicholas Royle

Here’s a niche book - not just about collecting books, but books by just a single publisher, and, deeper into nichedom, only the books by that publisher which have one distinctive design feature. By the time White Spines: confessions of a book collector was recently published (by Salt, and thus the only change on the spine from the original format) Nicholas Royle had amassed almost 1000 books collected on his white bookshelves: they look like they’re on the set of a recent Ishiguro novel, gazing at us patiently.

I never collected white spine Picadors deliberately in that fashion, but when I fished them out from various locations recently, realised I had more than expected (above). Scanning these shows what an extraordinary variety there was in the series, and of course in Royle’s account that variety is even more startling, including some books and authors I’ve never even heard of.

Royle is an author and publisher himself, and isn’t a ‘mere’ collector of physical objects:

I wonder if it has ever occurred to me that my books are alive. It’s undeniable that I love them and treat them with the kind of care one might reserve for living things, but I also respect and can become deeply involved with their contents.

What is inside the books excites him - not just the texts themselves, but what is literally in them, what he calls ‘inclusions’ - postcards, notes, bills, tickets - and clues about the previous owner/s. There are the stories in the books, and then the paper objects bring other stories with them in further layers. For Royle, part of the thrill of the hunt is discovering these accreted narratives (he Googles away researching names revealed by those inclusions). Then there are the stories of the bookshops and the booksellers, as he scours Britain’s small towns as well as its cities (he has a refined sense of which are the better Oxfam branches to search): some of the stories have an almost Chaucerian reach.

For those of us who love books and their physicality (their design, their second-hand markings, even their smell), this is just the thing. Self-aware, self-deprecating and funny, Nicholas Royle is the perfect guide.