Comment Available to Purchase

SOME twenty five years ago, in my late teens, poking about in a very dirty second hand bookshop of the sort which seem virtually to have disappeared nowadays, I came across a volume which had been very lovingly, and very clumsily rebound by hand in orange and brown morocco. It stood out from the nineteenth century sermons and the early twentieth century adventures in the Raj like some exotic tropical fruit. I took the book from the shelves and found that the front cover had on it a rather roughly executed plant design in blind. The raised bands of the spine were finished off with a small leaf design, and at the top of the spine on a dark brown and heavy label which I discovered later covered a messy attempt at tooling was the title of the book, The roadmender, in gilt. The title was also in blind on the front cover at the top and slightly askew. It was a dull day outside, and in the gloom of the shop, lit by one measly unshaded bulb, the book actually did seem to take on a luminous quality, but it was the fact that someone had clearly spent so much loving time on rebinding that made me buy it. I reasoned that if someone cared so much for what the contents had to say, either to rebind the book specially, or have to rebind it because of wear and tear, it might be worth reading. It was priced at one shilling—more than I was used to forking out in that type of shop where twopence (d) was the sort of money I anticipated paying in the days before inflated book prices. The title of the book meant nothing to me, and the name of the author—Michael Fairless—rang no literary bell in my head. But I bought it, and took it home.