Literary Locations #2: Platform 9¾, Kings Cross Station



The current site of the platform

Kings Cross Railway Station

Euston Road

London

N1 9AL

Admission charge: Free

“Harry looked behind him and saw a wrought-iron archway where the ticket box had been, with the words Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on it. He had done it”

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. K. Rowling (Bloomsbury, 1997)

Platform 9¾, Kings Cross features in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as the departure point for the Hogwarts Express, the rail service by which Harry and his friends reach Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Although it is invisible to those without magical ability, the platform can be reached by passing through a brick wall barrier located between platforms 9 and 10.

Following the success of the books and subsequent film series, a “Platform 9¾” sign was erected at the station. Below it the rear wheels and handle of a luggage trolley were set into the bricks to give the appearance that it is moving through the wall.

The new concourse at Kings Cross

The sign and trolley were originally located on the wall of a separate annex to Kings Cross which houses the real platforms 9 and 10. However, they can now be found on a wall of the impressive new station concourse – the canopy of which is the largest single span structure in Europe – which was opened on 19 March 2012.

Whilst it’s worth a visit if you happen to be passing through Kings Cross and young children will enjoy the photo opportunity that it provides, it’s not worth making a special trip to see it unless you are a diehard Harry Potter fan.

Rating (out of 10): 3

Literary Locations #1: Dr Johnson’s House

17 Gough Square
London
EC4A 3DE

Website: www.drjohnsonshouse.org 

Admission charge: £4.50 (Adult)

17 Gough Square is the former home of the eighteenth century lexicographer, writer and wit Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) whose best known work was his highly influential A Dictionary of the English Language. Published in 1755, this was the leading English dictionary for almost 130 years until the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in 1884. Johnson, who was commissioned to write the dictionary by a syndicate of London booksellers in 1746, had originally claimed that he would complete the work in three years. In the end this considerable feat of scholarship, which involved writing definitions for over 42,000 words and compiling 114,000 literary quotations to illustrate them, eventually took him nine. Johnson was immortalised by his friend and biographer James Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791.

In 1911 Johnson's former home was bought by the liberal politician and newspaper magnate Cecil Harmsworth. Since Johnson’s occupancy it had been put to a number of uses including a hotel, printer’s workshop and warehouse space and had fallen into a state of disrepair. Harmsworth spent a considerable amount of his own money conserving and renovating the house, following two rules – that nothing old should be taken out and that nothing new should be brought in – so that a visitor today can form a good impression of how it would have looked in Johnson’s day. Although he received a fee of 1,500 guineas (the equivalent of about £230,000 in today’s money) for his dictionary, Johnson spent much of his life in financial difficulty and this fact is reflected in the simple and modest way in which the house is furnished and decorated.

There are four floors of the house to visit, starting in the entrance hall which doubles as a gift shop selling a range of books as well as paperweights and tea towels. You then work your way up through the living room, library and eventually into the garret in which the work of compiling the dictionary was carried out. During World War 2, members of the Auxiliary Fire Service were allowed to use the house as a social centre and this proved invaluable in saving the building when it was hit by incendiaries and a barrel of burning oil during air raids– events which are still evidenced today by the scorched beams in the roof.

One feature that will enhance your visit to the house is the excellent audio commentary which is provided on a portable handset with headphones. This is well worth the additional £2.00 charge and will enable you to gain a much better appreciation of the features and history of the house as well as Johnson’s life and his circle of friends, including his Jamaican manservant Francis Barber and the actor David Garrick. You should allow about an hour for a self-guided tour around the house with the audio commentary.

Rating (out of 10): 8

Classic Novels #1: Bomber by Len Deighton

First edition: Jonathan Cape, 1970

Current first edition value (in VG condition): £60-£70

After establishing himself as an author during the 1960s with his series of spy novels featuring a laconic, nameless protagonist (who became “Harry Palmer” for the subsequent films starring Michael Caine) Deighton turned to another of his major interests for inspiration – the Second World War.

Bomber - his seventh novel – was his most ambitious work to date and recounts a botched Allied bombing raid on Germany in 1943. Although the personalities involved and the details of the raid are fictitious (the action is said to take place on the non-existent date of 31^st June) it was meticulously researched to ensure that it provided an authentic and gripping portrayal of what it was like to  participate in – and experience the effects of – an air attack. This depth of research is particularly evident in Deighton’s mastery of technical details. Weather patterns, the workings of the German radar defence system and even how many fragments a flak shell might disintegrate into upon exploding are all described with a cool detachment that provides a counterpoint to the intense human drama of the story.

Deighton provides a variety of different viewpoints to recount the action. In addition to the bomber crews themselves the reader sees events unfold from the perspective of German Luftwaffe radar station operatives and night-fighter pilots as well as civilians in the small town of Altgarten that becomes the unintended target of the raid after marker bombs are dropped short of the industrial centre of Krefeld. This narrative technique helps to provide a balanced picture of both the effectiveness and morality of the Allied night bombing strategy – a feature which was unusual in a novel published just 25 years after the end of the conflict. Similarly, Deighton employs light and shade in his portrayal of individual characters with heroes and villain appearing on both sides, from the Luftwaffe pilot who learns of the horrific experiments being carried out within the concentration camps to the RAF ground crew who profit by selling their base’s provisions on the black market.

Bomber is one of Deighton’s most critically-acclaimed works. Kingsley Amis rated it as one of the ten best books of the 20^th century whilst Anthony Burgess included it within his list of the 99 best English novels published since 1939. These factors have helped to make it one of the more collectable of the author’s later works and you can expect to pay upwards of £60 for a copy of the first edition in very good condition in its Ray Hawkey-designed dust-jacket featuring detail from the Turner painting “Fisherman at Sea off the Needles”.

Novel facts:

1.     Bomber provided the inspiration for heavy metal band Motörhead’s album of the same name, which was released in 1979.

2.     In his introduction to the 2009 reissue, Deighton describes how Bomber was the first novel to be written on a word-processor after he was permitted to become the only private owner of an IBM MT 72 computer which was “the size and shape of a small upright piano”!

Collector's Guide to Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon

My collector’s guide to the novels of Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon has just been published as an ebook by Famous Firsts. American Greats provides an assessment of the works of two of America's leading living novelists including V, Gravity's Rainbow, Blood Meridian and The Road together with a complete guide to current first edition prices. It is available as from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Collector's Guide to Poker Books

My collector’s guide to poker books Dealer’s Choice has recently been published as an ebook by Famous Firsts. Looking at titles from the origins of the game up to the present day and featuring a bibliography complete with guide to current first edition prices it is available as from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Collector's Guide to Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler

Part 8 of the Guide to Collecting Modern Books, which looks at the genre of spy fiction, will be coming soon. In the meantime, my collector's guide to the war novels of Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler, Nazis in Fiction, has recently been published by Famous Firsts and is available as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store in both the US and the UK.

Part 7: Literary prize winners

Introduction

Collecting the first editions of literary prize winners is a popular avenue for a number of book collectors. Not only does the theme provide some guarantee that the books you collect will have some literary merit but a collection of prize-winning titles spanning a number of years can provide a fascinating insight into changing tastes over time. This instalment of the Guide looks at the increasing number of literary prizes on offer and some of the more collectable works within each.





Image supplied by Jonkers Rare Books
http://www.jonkers.co.uk/

The Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize is probably the world’s best known literary award and aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The prize, which was established by international food distribution company Booker McConnell, was launched in 1969 when the inaugural winner was P H Newby’s Something to Answer For. Whilst today the prize has the power to transform an author’s profile and transport them to the top of the bestseller lists, in those days it had a limited influence upon a book’s sales with Newby’s publishers Faber & Faber attributing just 1,800 copies of the novel’s total sales of 6,400 to the award. This relatively low print run means that it is one of the scarcer winning titles and you can now expect to pay between £150 and £200 for a copy of Something to Answer For in very good condition.

The award attracted some controversy, particularly in its early years. For example John Berger (whose novel G was the winner in 1972) used the award ceremony to criticise what he saw as the prize sponsors’ exploitation of foreign workers and gave half of his £5,000 prize money to the Black Panthers. Today the prize is worth ten times this amount. The award of the prize in 1982 to Schindler’s Ark by the Australian author Thomas Keneally was also criticised by some who considered that his narrative of the wartime exploits of industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved over 1,200 Polish Jews from Nazi concentration camps, was more a work of biography or history than fiction. Another controversial winner came in 1994 with How Late it Was, How Late by the Scottish author James Kelman. Written as a stream of conscious narrative in Glaswegian dialect and liberally interspersed with profanities, the work follows the fortunes of ex-convict and shoplifter Sammy. The subject matter and style of Kelman’s work did not prove universally popular with the judging panel with Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatening to resign if it won and branding it a “disgrace”. Kelman has since said that the negative publicity surrounding his win actually made publishers more reluctant to handle his work.

Some authors have been particularly favoured by the prize’s judging panel over the years with both the South African J M Coetzee and Australian Peter Carey winning it twice. Coetzee with Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999 and Carey with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The only other author to have won the prize more than once is J G Farrell, although here the circumstances were somewhat unusual. Farrell won the prize in 1973 with the second book in his Empire Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur. When it was originally launched the Booker was a prize that was awarded retrospectively. However, in 1971 the rules were changed so that it became a prize for the best novel in the year of publication and the award ceremony was moved from April to November. The upshot of this was that much of the fiction published during 1970 was never eligible to be considered. Forty years later, steps were taken to rectify this position and in May 2010 the Lost Man Booker Prize was awarded to the first novel in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, The Troubles. Farrell, who drowned in Bantry Bay in Ireland in 1979, thus became the Prize’s only posthumous winner.

In terms of value the most expensive Booker winners for the collector to obtain are Stanley Middleton’s Holiday (which was co-winner in 1974 along with Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which took the prize in 1981. Very good copies of either are worth between £400 and £600. Whilst Middleton was the author of over 40 well observed and realistic novels, evidence of changing reading tastes is provided by the fact that when the Sunday Times sent the opening chapter of Holiday to 21 leading publishers and literary agents in 2006, all but one of the responses was a rejection. Midnight’s Children on the other hand was also voted as the Best of the Booker in 2008 – a one-off award to celebrate the Prize’s fortieth anniversary.

In addition to collecting the winning titles (a full set of which would cost around £2,500), some try to amass a set of the shortlisted titles as well. The shortlist, which is usually announced in September, has contained some gems over the years with the most valuable shortlisted titles being Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (which lost out to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac in 1984 and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (both of which are worth between £150 and £200).

The Costa Book Awards

The Costa Book Awards (which started life in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards) are a more populist competitor to the Booker Prize. Awards are given in five categories – best novel, best first novel, children’s book, poetry and biography.

The inaugural novel of the year award was won by Gerda Charles for her fifth and final novel The Destiny Waltz. In 1985 an overall Book of the Year award was introduced, and recent winners of this accolade include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (in 2003) and Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2001).

The Orange Prize for Fiction

A relatively new addition to the plethora of literary prizes is the Orange Prize for Fiction, which was launched in 1996. The prize differs from the others considered here in that it is only open to female authors. Although the author can be of any nationality, their work must have been published in English in the United Kingdom within the preceding year. The award was a response to the view amongst some women writers that their work was being overlooked by the other major literary awards, a belief that was prompted in part by the all-male shortlist for the 1991 Booker Prize. However, the rationale for the prize has not been without its critics.  The 1990 Booker winner AS Byatt has described it as a “sexist prize” whilst Germaine Greer complained that soon there would be a prize for writers with red hair. Nevertheless, the prize can have a significant impact upon a book’s sales. Sales of Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter quadrupled after winning the inaugural prize whilst Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which won in 2004, sold over 1 million copies, outstripping the Booker Prize winner that year (Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty). Small Island was also named the “Orange of Oranges” in 2005, as being the best novel of the first decade of the prize and, with it having formed the basis of a BBC drama in 2009, copies in fine condition are now worth upwards of £50.

The Pulitzer Prize

The leading American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, was established by Joseph Pulitzer the Hungarian émigré journalist and publisher of The St Louis Post Dispatch and New York World newspapers. Following his death in 1911, Pulitzer left $2 million in his will to Columbia University and part of this was used to set up the prize fund, which the university administers. Whilst the majority of prizes are awarded for excellence in newspaper journalism, the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948) is awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.

The prize was first awarded in 1918 to His Family by Ernest Poole. The following year the winner was The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, which is probably better known today as the basis for Orson Welles’ 1942 film. Tarkington was to win the prize a second time in 1922 for Alice Adams, which is a distinction he shares with William Faulkner (a winner in 1955 for A Fable and in 1963 for his final novel The Reivers) and John Updike (for the third and fourth novels in his Rabbit series Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest). Other well-known winners include Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in 1921 and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in 1937.

National Book Award

Another leading American literary prize is the National Book Award, which was established in 1950 by a consortium of book publishing groups with the aims of enhancing the public’s awareness of exceptional books written by American authors and increasing the popularity of reading in general. Awards are given in four categories – fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s fiction. The inaugural winner of the fiction award was Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (which formed the basis of the 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra). Saul Bellow has won the award an unrivalled three times in three different decades in 1954 (The Adventures of Augie March), 1965 (Herzog) and 1971 (Mr Sammler’s Planet).

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are Britain’s oldest literary prizes, dating back to 1919. They were founded in memory of James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house A&C Black, and are administered by the University of Edinburgh. Unlike other prizes, which tend to have a sponsor and a panel of celebrity judges, the winners are chosen by the university’s Professor of English Literature, who is assisted in the shortlisting stage by PhD students. This method seems to have proved a successful formula over the years with the list of previous winners containing classics of English literature such as EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms rubbing shoulders with popular genre works such as CS Foresters’ second Hornblower novel A Ship of the Line and John le Carré’s George Smiley novel The Honourable Schoolboy and edgier recent works such as David Peace’s GB84.

The CWA Gold Dagger

Whilst the awards we have considered so far are primarily given to works of literary fiction, some leading prizes are reserved for genre works. For example, the Crime Writers’ Association bestows its Gold Dagger Award on the best crime novel of the year. This award was launched in 1955, two years after the CWA was founded by John Creasey, and for the first five years of its existence the prize rejoiced under the title of the Crossed Red Herring Award. The first winner was Winston Graham’s The Little Walls. Some notable winners over the years have included Colin Dexter (for The Wench is Dead in 1989 and The Way Through the Woods in 1992), Dick Francis (for Whip Hand in 1979) and John le Carré (for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963 and The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977).

Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards, named after the founder of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories Hugo Gernsback, are presented for the best science fiction or fantasy work of the previous year. The awards have been presented in a number of categories since 1953 with the results being decided by a vote of members of the World Science Fiction Society. The winner of the inaugural Hugo for best novel was The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Robert A Heinlein has received the most Hugos for best novel with five wins (which included Starship Troopers in 1960) whilst other winners which may be familiar to the wider reading public include  Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle in 1963 (an alternate history envisaging a world where the Axis forces have won the Second World War), William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1985 and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2001.

Part 8: Spy Fiction