Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale ... an antiquarian bookseller, a painting, and Shakespeare

Charlie Lovett’s The Bookman’s Tale (2013) is one of the most satisfying and enjoyable bibliothrillers that I had read in recent times.  I had written about the bibliothrillers that I had already read in my 4-part series on the topic, and in the fourth part I had mentioned some novels whose names I had come across, but hadn’t read and The Bookman’s Tale was one of them.  I read some comments and descriptions of the novel and decided to buy it along with two other bibliothrillers that were on my list, Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things and Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club.

The Bookman’s Tale opens with Peter Byerly, an American antiquarian bookseller temporarily residing in England, opening a book on Shakespearean forgeries written in 1796 in a rare book shop at Hay-on-Wye, and finding a four-inches square painting of his wife Amanda.  The trouble was Amanda was dead and buried in America and the woman in the painting couldn’t have been his wife.  The painting had the initials B. B. and nothing much.  A rather dramatic opening and I was hooked.       

The story moves from this ‘present’ to the past where Peter is a shy and introverted freshman at Ridgefield University at North Carolina.  He feels at home in the Robert Ridgefield Library and secures a work-study position in the library and books become his refuge.  It is here that he becomes interested in rare books.  He meets Amanda at the University.  Charlie Lovett narrates their story of falling in love and their love for books at a leisurely pace and it is the most enchanting part of the novel.  There is an interesting back story to Amanda that shapes their future life among books – as rare book lovers and later as antiquarian booksellers.  The lookalike portrait of his wife makes Peter restless and he wants to find out who the woman in the portrait is and the identity of the painter.  This leads him to the ‘book’ and the chase. 

 

The book is Robert Greene’s Pandosto, whose plot inspired Shakespeare to write The Winter’s Tale.  The book in question is the actual copy given to Shakespeare and on which he wrote his comments and notes for his use.  This copy was later returned to the ‘bookseller’ who had given it to Shakespeare to make something out of an obscure book.  And we are taken back to Elizabethan England to see the literary scene there.  We see The Bard and the University Wits and the unscrupulous ‘booksellers’ and agents.  We also get to see lots of carousing and conversations among the Wits in taverns.  Old Bill is clearly not ‘one among them’ for the Wits.  This is the second bibliothriller that I have read after Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows that takes the reader back to Elizabethan England to meet The Bard.

The copy of Pandosto which Shakespeare used and marked has survived and its discovery in the 20^th century would put to rest all doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘his’ plays.  On the periphery are Stratfordians and Anti-Stratfordians, 20^th century literary agents, and literary historians who enliven Peter’s quest for Pandosto.  That copy of Pandosto would also provide a closure to Peter Byerly’s search for the identity of the face in the painting that unexpectedly floats down from a book on Shakespeare’s forgeries written in 1796.

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 4 - The absolute last part ...

This is a sort of a short round-up of some more bibliothrillers whose names I came across while doing a little bit of investigation myself.  This is the sort of ‘research,’ which I call ‘pogo-jumping sniffing research’ on the Internet, where you go from link-alley to link-alley and till you reach some dead-end-page where you lose the scent.  I haven’t read any of these books, but would like to read at least some of these.  All these snippets about these books are compiled from ‘here and there,’ so I wouldn’t call them recommendations, just a descriptive list of some books that are available in what I chose to call ‘bibliothrillers.’

Matthew Pearl, the author of The Poe Shadow (featured in Part 1 of this series!), is one writer who plays around a lot with this genre.  He has written three more books – The Dante Club, The Last Dickens, and The Bookaneers.  From what I read on the Internet, The Dante Club is Pearl’s first novel and here, we have a group of eminent writers in 1885, led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that includes Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.  This group is attempting the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.  A series of horrific murders of high profile people take place around that time and each murder is modelled on one of the punishments as described in Dante’s Inferno.  This Dante link persuades these writers to turn investigators and solve the murders. 

Charles Dickens is dead and this is 1870.  In The Last Dickens, A struggling publisher in the USA is waiting for the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which turns out to be Dicken’s last novel.  The publisher sends his clerk to get the manuscript, which remains unfinished, the publication of which would save the publishing house’s finances.  The clerk is found dead near the docks and the manuscript is missing.  This prompts a search for the missing last part across continents and all sorts of characters who do not want the last part to be revealed use all methods to stop this search.  Some kind of evil puppet-master is behind all this pulling strings.  In The Last Bookaneer, we see Robert Louis Stevenson, very ill, but struggling to complete his new novel.  The setting is somewhere in the island of Samoa.  The news of the soon-to-be-finished novel reaches ‘the bookaneers,’ literary pirates who steal manuscripts of well-known writers.  Two such literary pirates, adversaries too, fuelled by dreams of making a fortune, embark on a journey and a race to reach the island.    

           

Louis Bayard, who wrote The Pale Blue Eye (in Part 2), too travels around a bit in these parts.  Among the historical fiction that he has written, The School of Night is the one that can be called a bibliothriller.  The plot involves the ‘retrieval’ of a letter by Sir Walter Raleigh in present times that is linked to events that took place in Elizabethan England, almost four hundred years ago.  There is an elite secret group called ‘The School of Night,’ which includes Raleigh, Marlowe, George Chapman, and Thomas Harriot.  This group meets in secret and discusses issues that could not be discussed openly.  I haven’t read any of Bayard’s novels, but after reading about his books, I am definitely intrigued and want to pick up one soon, maybe both.

And a few days ago, I came across the name of Charlie Lovett.  Lovett has written two novels – The Bookman’s Tale and First Impressions.  The Bookman’s Tale is about an American antiquarian bookseller, who leaves his country and settles down in the English countryside after the death of his wife.  While looking at an 18^th century book on Shakespeare, he is intrigued to find a portrait of a woman, who looks remarkably like his wife and he goes digging and reaches the 18^th century and unearths a book that reveals some truths.  First Impressions is about a Jane Austen enthusiast who works in an antiquarian bookshop in London.  An obscure publication, which suddenly interests two different buyers, raises questions about the ‘true authorship’ of Pride and Prejudice.   

And so, here endeth, tentatively and temporarily, this series on bibliothrillers … and in case you, discerning readers of this enchanting blog of mine, have come across, or read, or seen, or heard, about more of the same kind of books, please do leave names of novels and authors at the bottom of this page in the comments section if you please …

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 3

After The Shadow in the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon wrote two more novels, The Angel’s Game, whose English translation came out in 2009, and The Prisoner of Heaven in 2011.  While The Angel’s Game is a prequel to The Shadow in the Wind, The Prisoner of Heaven is the sequel to The Shadow in the Wind.  I saw The Angel’s Game at Hyderabad Airport in 2010 and bought it with ‘great expectations.’  Here we have a young writer in an abandoned mansion in Barcelona churning out sensational novels.  While he uses a pseudonym for these lurid novels, he aspires to be a writer acknowledged for his literary skills.  The mansion has its own hidden secrets and Barcelona provides the backdrop.  The writer’s struggle continues until he receives an offer to write a book ‘with the power to change hearts and minds.’  Of course, you have books, booksellers, publishers, authors, paper, and ink pervading the novel.  While The Shadow of the Wind was fresh and luminous and haunting, this novel appears be doing too much.  It is quite possible that the shadow of The Shadow was too large for this novel to emerge from.  I haven’t read The Prisoner of Heaven yet.  Here, the young boy and girl in The Shadow grow up and get married here and all is well until … one day a mysterious man arrives at their bookshop looking for … a rare copy of a novel by Alexandre Dumas … and then things start moving … or so I read …

The bibliothriller that I read more recently was Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012).  In this book you not only have a curious sounding name of the bookstore, but also ‘familiar’ things like an old bookshop with dusty books on shelves, the enigmatic and laconic Mr Penumbra, who runs the store, and strange customers!  The customers are few and far between, but none of them seem to buy any books.  They do, however, borrow obscure books from the bookstore in consultation with Mr Penumbra.  An out-of-work web-designer takes up the night-shift job at the bookstore and is initially bored by the lack of activity in the bookstore.  As days go by he feels that everything is not as boring and bland as it appears in the bookstore and that something is going on.  He starts paying attention to the customers, the books they borrow, jots down the details, and puts together a sort of pattern.  He wants to know what is going on behind all this blandness.  Is the store a front for something else? He seeks help from his friends and uses their knowledge and skill in computers and software and discovers secrets that go beyond the quiet and dusty interiors of the bookstore!      

Robin Sloan went on to write a prequel to Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore in 2013 named Ajax Penumbra 1969.  I haven’t read this novel so far, but from what I read about it, the novel is the story of Mr Penumbra and how he came to head the 24-hour bookstore.  Again, there appears to be a lost book, which seems to have to power to bestow fortune as well as wreak havoc, and Mr Penumbra has to locate it.  And like the earlier Penumbra novel, there also appears to be elements of modern technology that help in the search for the lost book and maybe more … 

(One more small post on Bibliothrillers and I am done ... promise ... !!)

Lost manuscripts, hidden libraries, and antiquarian bookshops with dollops of mystery … Bibliothrillers anyone? PART 2

Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale proved to be different sort of thriller.  It is about a best-selling author Vita Winter, who has written a book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, but it has only twelve stories.  In later editions of the book, the title of the book was amended to just Tales of Change and Desperation, but a few copies of the first edition were printed and the missing tale becomes a tantalising mystery.  A number of biographies are written about her and no two biographies have anything in common about her life.  Winter doesn’t make things any easier by telling different stories about herself to journalists at different times.  Many had attempted to uncover the truth, but failed.  So, her life is a secret and she decides to reveal her secret to an antiquarian bookseller and bookish biographer, Margaret Lea.  Lea had read Winter’s first edition and is intrigued and she too wants to meet Winter to find out about the missing thirteenth tale. 

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber is a hunt for an unknown Shakespeare manuscript.  This novel moves between the 17^th century and contemporary times.  Some 17^th century letters, which hint at the existence of an undiscovered play, are discovered in an antiquarian bookshop in New York.  One of the workers makes off with the letters and sells them to a Shakespearean scholar.  Some encrypted letters are thrown into the mix, which when decrypted would help locate the play.  And these letters are held back by the worker.  An intellectual property lawyer joins the hunt when the scholar hands over the letters to him for safekeeping.  The hunt begins.  Of course, there are murders, chases, the mob, kidnappings, international conspiracy, et al.  The 17^th century letters take us back to an imagined Shakespearean world, where the bard himself makes an appearance, and the letters written in ‘Shakespearean’ English lends authenticity to the recreation of that era.      

I tried to locate the other two books for a long time, but I was not successful.  Even now, while The Secret of Lost Things is available (postage charges cancel out the discount!!), The Pale Blue Eye continues to tease with its very high price.  While The Secret of Lost Things is about the discovery of a handwritten lost book by Hermann Melville, in The Pale Blue Eye set in 1830, a cadet named Edgar Allen Poe, a moody poet, helps a police detective investigate a series of murders!  I have been waiting to read these, but sometimes the reading wave goes up and down, and it has been almost ten years now since I first heard of them, but I think I will bite the bullet and buy the anyway, or maybe I will wait out for a while longer while I hopefully scour the streets of Abids.