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Post by dem bones on Apr 17, 2017 21:57:00 GMT
Ted Ball and Dave Gibson - Eric Arthur's predecessor - make a brief cameo appearance in Ramsey's Ancient Images ( P.58 of the Legend 1989 paperback). Sandy Allen pays the Fantasy Centre a visit in her quest for a copy of F. K. Faversham's impossibly rare Victorian Ghost Story, The Lofty Place. Neither can be of assistance on this occasion. Anyway, confessions of a bookaholic, part Zzzzzzzz. The North London excursion. Would catch bus home from school directly outside Conrich Bookshop for four-five years, but voluntary reading was restricted to Wealdstone FC programmes/ Foul: the Alternative football paper/ NME in those days so never ventured within. By time the horror & ghost fiction bug got me, had quit N. London, but it was worth tedious tube journey to finally take advantage of this wonderful all-genre, mostly paperback emporium. My copies of Slugs, Michel's 2nd Mayflower Book Of Black Magic, and Anthony Masters' Cries Of Terror anthology came from there for sure, can't remember what else though definitely some Wheatley. Such a shame but I don't think the shop long survived its milestone Golden jubilee in 1988. Last time I went back Conrich and the other local landmark - 'Burnt Oak Boot Boys' graffiti on station wall - were gone. One station further along the Northern Line, Two Jays of Edgware, nominated by no less than Driff as the best second hand bookshop in England, and, from personal experience, most likely good value for the accolade. Another I stupidly failed to take advantage of when right on top of it (at one point briefly lived two minutes walk away in Mead Road, and thereafter in the bus garage at Edgware Station and - on a strictly unofficial basis - the programme hut at Edgware Town FC's old White Lion. Oh sweet misspent youth, etc.) Only became properly acquainted with Two Jays during the Conrich expeditions. I'd defy even the least obsessive book-lover to leave that place empty handed. A family concern - Mum, Dad, son - each of them charming, helpful and patience itself. Very reasonably priced, too. It was a rare pleasure and privilege to shop there. Have Two Jays to thank for copies of the Peter Haining Great British Tales Of Terror hardcover, Anne Ridler's Best Ghost Stories, Century Of Creepy Stories, various Bodysnatcher/ Resurrection Men non-fiction titles, much else besides. When his parents retired, Mark opened a smaller, equally ace pre-loved paperback orientated shop on the Broadway, just along from the then biker pub The Mason's Arms. Post book hunt visits to The Beehive, albeit in a slightly less intimidating incarnation than it's early eighties heyday, were very much part and parcel of the Conrich/Two Jays experience. While in celebratory mood, the supremely ramshackle Comics & Books in Westbourne is easily the most loveable bookshop I've visited since Milan's mighty shared premises at Type went under. I think you've suffered enough now so will shut up.
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Post by cromagnonman on May 31, 2017 20:44:19 GMT
Really enjoyed sharing these reminiscences of yours, Dem. For all the advantages of progress I very much doubt any visit to Forbidden Planet today is likely to instill a comparable sense of nostalgia in the years ahead. I certainly wouldn't trade my own experience of various spit-and-sawdust venues for the sterility of the modern corporate enterprise. In stark contrast with its roots Forbidden Planet today has all the charm and character of Tescos and it remains a wonder to me that they dont line up trollies at the door.
I never did experience the pleasures of Heroes, much to my regret (Canonbury Lane wasn't it?) although I did use their mail order service once or twice. My own first and formative experience of the collecting culture was furnished by the Popular Book Centre in Ladywell. How well I remember the congregations of raincoated old geezers clossetted around the porn in the back, the stacks of Mysteron-ringed paperbacks in the middle and comics in the front. Therein I experienced the character building terror of handing over fourteen one pound notes for a copy of Fantastic Four # 48.
And speaking of comics: I've recently taken receipt of some cheap issues of Jack Katz's First Kingdom series. And one copy still boasted a bag bestickered with the details of The Comic Shack, High Road, Leytonstone. This isn't a name that's ever crossed my radar before. Wondered if you had any recollections of it.
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Post by pulphack on Jun 1, 2017 6:51:06 GMT
The Comic Shack only existed for a couple of years - three, maybe? - at the end of the 80's and start of the '90's. I was living in Leytonstone at the time, and it suddenly popped up in a deserted shop space. A box of tatty paperbacks out front for a quid each, and rows and rows of boxed comics inside, with the previous dingy brown decor still in situ. It was run by a slightly odd bloke called Darren, probably about the same age as me, who had invested his redundancy money into this. It was always empty the few times I went in, so I wasn't surprised when it finally disappeared. I saw him again a few years after, flogging comics out of boxes at the carboot in Hackney Wick, at the speedway stadium. That was over twenty years ago, now.
He had a great stock, was fair in his pricing, and knew his stuff. He was also one of those very overbearing and over enthusiastic types who had some social skill issues, and wouldn't leave you alone while you were looking. Conversation became forced and awkward. That's why I stopped going. I wonder if that's why it closed - he drove his customers away by being too keen? That would be sad, but highly possible. His mum was always in there with him, and his dad a lot of the time. Dad was a friendly sort of bloke (mum never said a word), and had been a comic collector since he was a kid - his big regret was over the comics taken off him for salvage during the war, when he was a kid. He had early Superman and Detective Comics titles that, if he had been able to save them then (and he looked like would have if he had a big enough club to fend them all off) would have set him and the family up for life at the time of telling. I know everyone who has ever collected says that, but even so there was something about the wistful tone...
It was up the end of the High Road near the Green Man roundabout that is away from the main shopping area and has always struggled to keep shops open for long. It was probably cheap to rent, but for a good reason. And this was when Leytonstone was being decimated for the M11 link, which didn't help Darren's prospects.
You know, I hadn't even thought about it for years until you mentioned it.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 1, 2017 12:01:26 GMT
Thanks for that wonderful memoir, Mr. Hack. I have only been to London once in my life and haven't a clue where Leytonstone is--you brought it all vividly to life for me.
Heartbreaking about the books Darren lost to the salvage drive. I hadn't realized until I read a short article last year just how many books in the UK were pulped as a result of that campaign. The link showed up here in a discussion of one of our obscure authors. The book in question became very scarce after the War because most of the stock in the publisher's warehouse--the books had been printed in the mid 1930s, I think--were taken away for salvage.
cheers, H.
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Post by pulphack on Jun 1, 2017 17:22:56 GMT
oops, double posted...
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Post by pulphack on Jun 1, 2017 17:24:46 GMT
Well, not just salvage: when the Blitz hit London full on, one of the worst hit areas other than the docks was around St Pauls (which is frankly not far from where the docks began, as well as being a good propaganda target to hit). Paternoster Row and the surrounding streets were ancient buildings that housed most of London's publishing houses. Fleet Street is only a short trot away down Fetter Lane. The publishers' offices were mostly wiped out, with a lot of records and publisher copies of books disappearing. The warehouses where remaining stocks - not yet sold and not yet gathered as salvage came mostly from the public - were stored also went up in flames. Libraries in the City - which were invaluable resources - were also hit badly. I went to a lecture a few years back, with my chum and fellow bibliphile Ian, where a historian detailed the damage done in the area, along with some slides that really brought it home: no roof, tattered and burnt shelves, a forlorn librarian trying to take stock. Of course people are more important, but it was as though the idea was to wipe out culture as well as commerce. That's how to kill a community.
Anyway, enough of that. One upshot of all this is that it has made research for any but the most well-known and remembered of pre-war authors extremely difficult in the UK as very few records exist outside of pieceing together things from the ephemera of the times - ads, reviews, the backs of books (hello 'The Herbert Jenkins Wireless'!) - that has survived. There are some records, of course, but as James will attest, there are always huge gaps, particularly for some publishers that did not survive (and that's without the random throwing away of records that happened post-war in takeovers!).
My first job was in a library as an assistant. I didn't stay. I should have, really, and become a qualified librarian. I would have been happy in that line...
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Post by helrunar on Jun 1, 2017 19:40:16 GMT
Hi Mr. Hack,
I'm what might be called an assistant librarian--I do the grunt work on the collections here rather than the more exalted levels of policy and curatorial decision-making. And in the current era, it's essential IMO to have private citizens taking an interest in book collection and conservation. There is a long list of reasons why this is so--I imagine you are aware of most, if not all of them.
As I go on, I'm amazed, really, that anything at all has survived from the past. But we carry on.
I didn't know that so many publishers and libraries were targeted, by intent or default, in the Blitz. It's mindnumbing to think of how much was lost then.
H.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jun 1, 2017 21:36:37 GMT
I heartily second H's thanks and appreciation for these postings Pulphack. These are precisely the kind of insightful anecdotes - poignant parable is probably nearer the mark in this case - that I was looking to elicit when I inaugurated this thread.
Its probably impossible to quantify the number of collections that began in such unprepossessing outlets as The Comic Shack. If not yet quite extinct they do now appear to be beasts of the critically endangered variety. But I guess that's an unavoidable consequence of the modern shift in emphasis away from the collecting of monthly issues to trades. Anyway, I've rebagged the comic but have retained the sticker as a sort of monument to odd but honest Darren and his Fate deprived father. Its actually a wonder that any comics from that period survive considering the patriotic zest with which the comics themselves urged their young readers to sacrifice them for the war effort.
The Nazis had a mania for book burning certainly but surely the devastating of London's publishing landscape was more an accident of proximity in the context of wider Baedeker Raid policies than a specifically targeted intent.
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Post by pulphack on Jun 2, 2017 6:42:36 GMT
Oh, the book burning was undoubtedly an incidental, due to the proximity to the docks and to St Pauls - that would have been an excellent piece of propganda, and a real blow to morale, to see that burn: instead, the pictures of it standing alone amongst the flames possibly had the opposite effect.
Bombing the docks was the major objective: one unexpected bonus to watching the documentary about the Cockney Rejects was seeing Mick Geggus walk across the river explaining to the viewer why the docks were such a target - knock them out, and you don't just paralyse the UK, you also knock out the major lines to all the connected Empire-cum-Commonwealth countries that were in the fight with Britain at that time (regardless of whether or not they wanted to be, which is a whole other discussion). Going off topic a bit, I know, but it helped explain why the East End post-war was even more run down than pre-war (rebuilding?? Ha!)and also showed that the Rejects weren't quite the cartoon people made them (I've got a soft spot for the lads, alright?).
The irony is that the emphasis on bombing, which came from post WWI theories on air warfare shared by all sides, probably cost Germany the chance to invade. If a bit more attention had been paid to Sealion - the invasion plans - and less to trying to just obliterate industrial targets, then England was actually in no position to defend itself. It was only the stubbornly individual mind of Hugh Dowding that allowed him to formulate the battle plans for the Battle Of Britain and turn the tide with a minimal resource (despite the fact that the rest of High Command subscribed to the idiot Bader's theories that would have allowed the Luftwaffe to gain an edge - fortunately, they didn't depose Dowding until the job was virtually done, and it was too late for Bader to screw it up)*. Stopping the Nazi momentum allowed a regrouping and showed the USA it was worth backing the UK and not the Nazis. One hell of a cost though, thanks to Goering's pig-headedness with bombers.
I read up on this stuff last year as research, and it hit me how close we really were to being at the mercy of the Nazi war machine.
* I've read Len Deighton, y'know...
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Post by cromagnonman on Jun 2, 2017 13:52:12 GMT
The Battle of Britain was a close run thing all right. Perhaps not Wellington's "nearest run thing you ever saw" but not far off it.
I guess the majority of people today would find it hard to appreciate just what a frenetic hive of activity the docklands area once was. It was, to all intents and purposes, a self contained maritimopolis. My dad was born and brought up in the area just behind London Bridge and the docks were his childhood playground. He had vivid memories of there being so many ships tied up in the Pool of London that it seemed scarcely impossible to walk from one side of the river to the other. Fortunately he and his family were rehoused south just prior to the outbreak of war otherwise I doubtless wouldn't be here.
London wasn't alone in having its docks targeted of course. There can't be a reachable port in Britain that wasn't bombed at some point. The object being - in concert with the wolf pack attacks on the Atlantic convoys - to starve the country into submission. None of which would have been necessary if the German army had simply followed the Dunkirk evacuation flotilla over in 1940. We were in no position to stop them. But Goring was blinkered by his own rigid obsession about obtaining air superiority first. Again, if he had persevered with his policy of targeting the air fields instead of switching to nocturnal bombing of cities then he might well have been vindicated. Doesn't matter how superior the Spitfire is or how many you've got of them if you've no one to fly them and nowhere to fly them from either. But the heavy losses sustained on September 15 broke his nerve. Even so there was still nothing to stop them from coming back and trying again the next summer but for the catastrophic decision to invade the Soviet Union instead. On the fulcrum of such choices does history itself balance. And as my dad always used to say, thank God for the judgement of madmen.
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Post by pulphack on Jun 2, 2017 14:42:05 GMT
Your dad was dead right. If Adolf had been less concerned with Stalin and more with Sealion... And it was a good job Dowding was a stubborn bugger who was prepared to sacrifice his career for the greater good. I have a bit of thing about him, considering how he was treated. Neglected by history.
All the docks got it, as you say. Liverpool was particularly bad, though they all suffered. The obsession with bombing as the best and possibly only means of aerial warfare seems to have stemmed from the idea that you could simply hit further with a plane than with a gun, with little thought that a well developed fighter plane could out-fly and shoot down a bomber, given a fighting chance. Hence, it suggests, so many being tied up with escort duties...
Anyway, the Comic Shack... I feel bad thinking about it that I stopped going just because I felt awkward with Darren. I have always been bad with people who have iffy social skills, perhaps because my own are at times questionable. He was a decent bloke looking for a break. I hope he hung on to the internet age, it would suit him better.
There was also a guy called Gary who had a comic stall about that time down Walthamstow Market. He did mostly comics, but also a few second hand books. About a decade later, he finally landed a shop in Tottenham, near Seven Sisters station and on the High Road. He was a more amenable geezer type. The shop was there until a few years ago, then I went one day and it was gone. I hope he just moved or went ebay happy to avoid the business rates. He always struck me as a better businessman.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jun 4, 2017 10:17:58 GMT
Don't beat yourself up belatedly for eschewing The Comic Shack Pulphack. When you consider that even centrally located outlets like Comic Showcase and Mighty World of Comicana are now long defunct Darren's dream was never likely to be a protracted one. He got to live it for a couple of years at least and all credit to him for it.
Even though my own nostalgia is for the time when you took your chances upon finding the same US title two months running at the railway station or the newsagent I still think its a shame that there isn't a more permanent record of the once extensive string of suburban and provincial pulp parlours like Darren and Gary's. So many collections had their origins in such places that a remembrance of some kind seems the very least they warrant. A faded polaroid or two would provide an elegiac avenue into a disappeared past.
I guess its for this reason that I now make a habit of collecting the business cards of all the second-hand bookdealers and comics vendors I use, whilst they're still there. Not all of them still go to the trouble of having them printed up which I consider a worrying trend. One day I may even make good on the vague intent to arrange them into a collage of some kind. A paper and card cenotaph to a fast vanishing way of trade.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 28, 2017 13:24:01 GMT
I never did experience the pleasures of Heroes, much to my regret (Canonbury Lane wasn't it?) although I did use their mail order service once or twice. Canonbury Lane it was, too. All I could recall was that it was around the corner from Highbury & Islington station. Was amazed to find a catalogue among zine collection. Think I must have held onto every tiny sample of ephemera came my way in those days. Think they were (are?) a mail order outlet? Regardless, this is one of my all-time favourite ads.
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Post by cromagnonman on Jul 28, 2017 15:26:00 GMT
That Heroes catalogue is an amazing relic to disinter Dem. Can't imagine many other souvenirs of the place survive. Any idea when it closed exactly?
This seems as apt an opportunity as any to correct a misapprehension I promulgated in the first post. DTW&GE actually started out in a shop on Bedfordbury, just off of William IV Street behind the Strand. A tiny little venue it was too, as I can confirm having poked my nose around the door the other week. Heaven alone knows how much stock they were ever able to cram into the place, let alone customers.
Its a shoe repairers now. Once it dealt in Lin Carter paperbacks. Now its a place for cobblers of a different kind.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 28, 2017 18:41:41 GMT
That Heroes catalogue is an amazing relic to disinter Dem. Can't imagine many other souvenirs of the place survive. Any idea when it closed exactly? I'm afraid I haven't. Don't think it was around for more than a year or two. I "worked" - very briefly - in a super-grotty unnamed bookshop along Cheshire Street off Brick Lane at the time and the proprietor, Dave, knew the owner: think his name was Allen. Fair to say Dave didn't think Heroes was a realistic business proposition due to rents, competition from the very established Fantasy Centre just around the corner, and, sadly, that's the way it seems to have turned out, although if anyone knows differently I'd be happy to be proved wrong. Owner was a pleasant guy and it was a tidy little shop while it lasted.
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