Books Out of Print

Half way between a scrap-yard and an open-air museum, this section of the site will be dedicated, in the first instance, to books of mine that can no longer be readily found in the first-hand book-shops, although sometimes my publisher magically manages to supply, for a literary festival, a crisp stack of some title that I had thought to be exhausted. But mainly those books are dealt with in the Current Books section. The books dealt with here are no longer commercially current, although I would like to think, of course, that they have a life apart from the market place. They are here represented, and sometimes entirely reproduced, by means of supplying a succession of links to the separate pieces from which they were first compiled. This, at any rate, is true of the essay collections and the books of television criticism. In the sub-section marked “Other Non-Fiction”, Fame in the 20th Century  was written in one piece in the first place, and is reprinted that way here, but chapter by chapter, so that it, too, can be read in fragments. Against what is held to be the usual rule of the web, however, the fragments are rather substantial. The idea that the web is essentially for the reader with a short attention span has never appealed to me enough to finish reading it when it is expressed.