Total value: $0.01
Last weekend our friend Dr Billy Smart circulated by e-mail to a handful of colleagues a touching tale of a second-hand book. Billy was Research Officer for the excellent and just-completed research project The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK at Royal Holloway University of London. I liked the story so much that I asked if I could feature it on the blog, and Billy kindly agreed.
Dr Billy Smart writes: An unremarkable envelope comes through my door this morning, but one that sets off a chain of reflections about publishing, posterity and the value of a play as a commodity.
The envelope contains a book, Michael Wilcox’s play Green Fingers, published by Methuen in 1991, bought by me off Amazon for £2.81, £2.80 of which was for its postage and packing.
Wilcox’s play had taken a long and circuitous path to publication. It was originally written as a case for the final series of Granada’s daytime Crown Court courtroom dramas in 1984. ITV, however, had declined to transmit the episodes, presumably on the grounds that they were too gay and too politicised for the time slot. Given a commission from LIVE Theatre in Newcastle in 1989, Wilcox reworked the script into a full-length stage play performed in February 1990, revived in December for a short run at the King’s Head in London, and published as a Methuen Modern Play in January 1991. Since which the play has fallen into unrevived obscurity.
That someone at the library of The University of Waterloo, Ontario in 1991 should have thought to order a copy of this play about Northumbrian burglars is unexpected. My guess would be that their decision was made either on the basis of Michael Wilcox’s tenuous position within the pantheon of World Gay Playwrights at the time, or the small amount of automatic prestige bestowed upon anything published as a Methuen Modern Play.
Having purchased the book, the University Library then put some care into preparing it for availability. Speaking from a position of many years experience as library assistant, clerk to a wholesaler of books for library lending, scholar and book collector, I can report that this is one of the best-bound library books that I’ve ever seen.
Normally when I buy an ex-library bound-into-hardback book I think, ‘It’s a shame that this couldn’t have just been kept as originally was’, but this edition has retained all of its original paperback features in mint condition, encased in a sturdy embossed cover that is actively pleasurable to handle. Hard-wearing, too – I could throw this thing out of the window and it wouldn’t get damaged.
After being put on the Ontario library shelf on 9 August 1991, there the book remained for the next twenty years, never borrowed and quite possibly never even opened. After being withdrawn from stock in 2011, it found its way to what I imagine as a vast and anonymous industrial warehouse holding the stock of ‘Better World Books’ in Mishawaka, Indiana. From whence it eventually found its way to me.
This book has had quite a life over the last 25 years, having crossed the Atlantic twice, attained the height of care and prestige that can be bestowed upon a book (bound and marked out for scholarly posterity) only to then fall into the lowliest ignominy (the wrapper includes the humiliating evaluation “Total value: $0.01”). It has been to three countries, which is more than I’ve done since 1991. What it has never been before is read, so it has now probably found its true home in my hands today.
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