Pen and Ink!

Yesterday I headed back into central London and met up with some chums to have a look through the musty old books at The Paperback Pulp Book Fair at The Royal National Hotel in Russell Square. It was a pretty impressing affair. Albeit one where there was a pretty high amount of stinky body odour!

Amongst the eclectic mix of old hardbacks and postcards in the larger outer area were some fair sized stacks of comics. They were not obsessively boxed up in bags as you might get at a Comic Mart or hope to get at a Comic Convention but rather in piles without order or seeming care. Like the back room of a charity shop or a seaside second hand bookshop or a much ignored family shed this kind of has a charm of its own. As I looked at the books and comics it did occur to me that I’d much rather be here than at that abominable cash grab of self obsessed and attention grabbing individuals going on in East London at precisely the same moment.

I wandered about and spotted some bargains and a whole lot of nostalgia. New England Library had a fair representation. Books about Skinheads, Bikers, Punks, dodgy cops and Mods adorned a number of the shelves. These were little dirty secrets of books that dealt with the dodgy subcultures of the UK in the seventies and eighties. A little transgressive sure but they are looked back on with affection by many who read them at the time. These were books that had been read by someone on a break at work and here often showed some wear and tear - but ain’t that kind of the point of a second hand book?

Confessions of a Window Cleaner - Come on! They really did novelisations of this series of cack films? Christ on a Bike! I then headed into the smaller but much more tightly packed back room. This was a ruddy goldmine of crime books, sci-if, movie adaption, annuals, retro porn, comics and more. Piles of cheap novels and magazines were all over the shop!

Some of these books just screamed at me like a teenager on the Embankment for a photo! Minder!

How much? I’d love to read this but £65 is a hefty price tag.

We forget that some of these books were the only access we had to movies. I remember picking up the movie novelisations long before the film got a UK release (back in the seventies and eighties movies came out sometimes months earlier in the States). I was chatting to some pals last night about this very subject. I have an overly affectionate titled towards some less than average films because I read the adaptions first. Dragonslayer anyone?

I have no flaming idea what they were going for here? Looks like a combination of two sci-fi franchises because they both began with ‘Star’? This was kindly bought for me by Mr Wilson. 

So... here is the obligatory haul photo. Great to get these, especially the Avengers novelisation and the Oz Trials book as I’ve been looking to read them both for a while. I cant wait to crack them open.

Thanks to Jason Wilson and Sarah Harris for the company and chats as we wandered around feeling like the youngsters in God’s Waiting Room!

A cracking day all round!

Many thanks for reading.