I happened to be walking through Southsea today and went into a couple of secondhand bookshops.
In the second one, the Poetry and Literature was in a room at the back and all the usual dried up and hopeless copies of Shakespeare and Chaucer were there, mixed in with a few rarer names that were perhaps briefly fashionable. But once a book gets into a room like that, it is unlikely to ever get read again.
There were a number of pamphlets and booklets and I picked up one with a black cover that actually turned out to be by me. It was one of the first 'bad' batch of my booklet Re-reading Derrida on a Train (2000), with the badly photocopied pages. It didn't have a price on it but since it's out of print and I've only got one or two copies myself, it could actually be worth nearly a pound.
So, I walked home wondering who passed that swiftly on to the bookshop after I'd given it to them or if it was a review copy I'd sent out. There were probably no more than 30 or 40 copies printed but precious few were actually sold for money. But obviously not every copy was retained lovingly and referred to on a daily basis. As well as the title poem, it included such poems as The Skylight Blind, Kiss and Anaximander and Phil Simmons in PQR wrote at the time that I had 'a facility for spreading long, discursive sentences over short, well-constructed lines that might be descibed as Larkinesque' (thanks, mate).
There's a real bargain waiting to be discovered in Albert Road. Get there before someone else buys it.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
Also currently appearing at
Saturday, 21 March 2009
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