Enthusiasts are invariably perceived to be an odd bunch, outliers who tend to congregate among the safety of one another. There they stand on station platforms and near airport runways, in cagoules, jotting down numbers of trains and watching jets take off. Those who contain their obsessions indoors might treasure stamps or mount butterflies on pins. It passes the time.
The writer Nicholas Royle collects books. When he’s not reading them, he’s writing them (he’s the author of seven novels, two novellas and four short story collections), or editing and publishing them (his imprint Nightjar produces “limited edition single short-story chapbooks”).
And on the evidence of his new book, Shadow Lines, he seems to spend much of his downtime traversing the length of the nation – often on foot (“I like to walk”) – in search of charity shops, where he seeks out books he most likely already owns but will invariably buy again because – why not?
In his delightful 2021 memoir White Spines, he recounted how he couldn’t rest until he’d collected all the B-format Picadors published between 1972 and 2000, and now, in Shadow Lines, he focuses on hunting out, detectorist-style, those secondhand paperbacks within whose pages their erstwhile owners have left some inconsequential thing that, to him, is gold dust.
He’s not interested in anything quite so humdrum as bookmarks, though. Rather, he craves inscriptions or notes, such as the one inside a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho that reads: “I love you more than words can tell.” There’s the 1,000 lire note that falls out of an old Italo Calvino, while on page 87 of The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, he discovers a “torn-off part of a box that once contained a 30g tube of betamethasone valerate cream”, which, he helpfully elucidates, is a “topical corticosteroid”.
What he’s really looking for are names, telephone numbers and addresses, in order to contact the former owner and say: look what I found! Do you want it back? In many cases, the answer is naturally enough “no”, but Royle isn’t easily deterred (enthusiasts tend not to be). And when somebody does respond favourably, the warmth generated from that unexpected human connection is palpable.
Royle, who also teaches creative writing, reads as he goes. When he tackles Anna Burns’s 2018 Booker-winning novel Milkman and comes across some missing punctuation, he cannot help point it out. “I wish there were a comma before ‘therefore’ as well as after, but there isn’t,” he sighs.
Returning frequently to the aforementioned Auster novel, his favourite book, he notes how in one of the very many copies he has, there are at least three misspellings “and a mark on page 78 that looks like a rogue full stop”, then faithfully explains that these errors are corrected in later editions. Oh, blessed relief.
Elsewhere, there’s a chapter devoted to books that feature fleetingly in film scenes and how, if he can’t make out the title while pausing the DVD, he strives to identify it via its cover design (an endeavour that can take weeks of online research); and another on how he likes to walk and read at the same time. When a fellow pedestrian criticises him, Royle says: “I’m going to write about you in my next book”, to which they winningly respond: “Who’s gonna read it?”
There is strong argument to suggest that his is ultimately a niche concern and a fundamentally unnecessary one. But Royle invests more passion into his subject than EL James did in whips, and it’s all incredibly infectious. He leavens any perceived pedantry with droll self-deprecation and, personally, I haven’t laughed harder with a book for a long time.
His main motivation is to remind just how precious books can be, what they reveal of us and how we should keep them close. If the literary town of Hay-on-Wye hasn’t yet begun preparing a statue of him, it can only be a matter of time.
• Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf by Nicholas Royle is published by Salt (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
