The View from the Cheap Seats Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind of books that would be read. Nothing that would be controversial or confiscated (the first book of mine that was confiscated was a copy of And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game, because it had an artistically naked female body on the cover. I got it back from the headmaster by claiming that it was my father’s book, which I’m pretty certain wasn’t true). Horror was fine though—like most of my year I was a ten-year-old Dennis Wheatley addict, and loved (although rarely bought) the Pan Books of Horror Stories . More Bradbury—much more, in the wonderful Pan covers—and Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.
    It didn’t last for long. A year or so, no more—perhaps too many parents read their school bills and complained. But I didn’t mind. I had moved on.
    II
    IN 1971, THE United Kingdom went over to decimal currency. The familiar sixpences and shillings that I’d grown up with suddenly became new pence. An old shilling was now five newpence. And although we were assured it would make no real difference to the cost of things, it soon became obvious, even to a ten-going-on-eleven-year-old, that it had. Prices went up, and they went up fast. Books which had been two shillings and sixpence (er, twelve and a half new pence) were soon thirty new pence, or forty new pence.
    I wanted books. But, on my pocket money, I could barely afford them. Still, there was a bookshop . . .
    The Wilmington Bookshop was not a long walk from my house. They did not have the best selection of books, being also an art supply shop and even, for a while, a post office, but what they did have, I learned soon, were a lot of paperbacks that were waiting to sell. Not, in those days, the cavalier tearing-off of covers for easy returns. I’d simply browse the shelves looking for anything with the prices listed in both old and new money, and would stock up on cool books for 20p and 25p. Tom Disch’s Echo Round His Bones was the first of these I found, which attracted the attention of the young bookseller. His name was John Banks, and he died a few months ago, in his fifties. His parents owned the shop. He had hippy-long hair and a beard, and was, I suspect, amused by a twelve-year-old buying a Tom Disch book. He’d steer me to things I might like, and we’d talk books, and SF.
    The Golden Age of SF is when you are twelve, they say, and it was pretty damn golden, as golden ages go. It seemed like everything was available in quantity—Moorcock and Zelazny and Delany, Ellison and Le Guin and Lafferty. (I’d make people going to America find me R. A. Lafferty books, convinced that he must be a famous, bestselling author in America. What was strange in retrospect was, they would bring me back the books.) I found James Branch Cabell there, in the James Blish–introduced editions—and in fact, took my first book back (it was Jurgen, and the final signature was missing. I had to go to the library to find out how it ended).
    When I was twenty and I told John Banks I was writing a book, he introduced me to the Penguin rep, who told me who to send it to at Kestrel. (The editor wrote back an encouraging no, and having reread the book recently, for the first time in twenty years, I’m terribly grateful that she did.)
    There’s a brotherhood of people who read and who care about books. The best thing about John Banks was that when I was eleven or twelve he noticed I was a member of the brotherhood, and would share his likes and dislikes, even solicit my opinion.
    III
    THE MAN WHO owned Plus Books in Thornton Heath, on the other hand, was not of that brotherhood, or if he was, he never let on.
    The shop was a long bus ride from the school I was at between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, so we didn’t go there often. The man who ran it would glower at us when we went in, suspicious of us in case we were going to steal something (we weren’t),