The Hero of Hacks

Amidst the economic gloom, Tim Martin in the Telegraph reminds us to look to some of the glories of our literary past as we celebrate the anniversaries of some major authors in 2009, including Charles Darwin, Robert Burns, and Malcolm Lowry (whose Under the Volcano is one of my all time favourite books - though it's three decades and some since I read it!).

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent warmed the cockles of my heart by writing about another author he calls

... the hero of hacks ...

whose 300th we celebrate in September. This man holds a very special place in my heart and I always stop to have a chat with his ghost with when I'm back in London :

A sickly child is born in a small Midlands city, his father an obscure bookseller who soon falls into poverty. Somehow, the boy survives, but with lifelong scarring from a skin disease. Ungainly and uncomely, he suffers so badly from nervous tics that they make him a social pariah. Modern specialists have diagnosed Tourette's Syndrome. On top of physical ailments, he will never escape savage bouts of depression that plague him for the rest of his days. In spite of a disrupted schooling, his prodigious gifts, and a friend's financial help, take him to Oxford. The money gone, he has to leave the university – in shame and debt – after 13 months. The drop-out finds even the humblest schoolteaching jobs closed to him. When he opens a school, three pupils enrol. A lonely hack in London, he hangs out with a bohemian poet, the pair so poor they walk all night for want of cash for a room. To family hostility, this gauche nobody marries a woman 20 years his senior. His works – poems, plays, essays – earn little except the mockery of critics and the scorn of potential patrons in the aristocracy. At length, a group of backers hire this lowliest of scribblers to undertake a mammoth and thankless editing job that will exhaust his energies for almost a decade. Worn out by toil, forever on the verge of ruin, this middle-aged failure who has endured half a lifetime of contempt still finds room in his household for a freed slave from Jamaica – who will become his heir – and a near-blind woman poet. Finally, the mad project reaches its long-delayed terminus. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language appears in 1755.

Not Daunted by Squidginess

If we can invoke all the bookshops in the world and hold them up to test for squidginess then let me slip in my favourite, Daunts, on Marylebone High Street, London, specialising in travel books.

In the main room, books are arranged not by author or publisher or type, but by geographical region: Low Countries, Oceania, The Balkans, Central Europe. Travel guides jostle cookbooks wrestle maps cavort with novels nudge photography collections elbow phrasebooks for shelf space.


Other more general works are laid out temptingly on the tables screaming to be picked up and poured over. The windows are of stained glass, there's a second tier of books along a wooden balcony and a skylight runs the length of the gallery, so that the shop appears nothing less than a chapel of books. Amen. Amen.

There are no sofas, no in-store-coffee-corner, but down the road is Patisserie Valerie. Books can be devoured with grilled goast cheese crostini and red pepper salad in a room decorated with chandeliers, gilt mirrors and pale green and yellow murals of flowery bowers and dhows sailing between mythical islands. And I can never resist a fruit-laden tart from the window display of cakes and gateaux and marzipan animals.

I also nurse with joy the knowledge that in the C18th, this shop belonged to a bookseller called Davies. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first comprehensive English dictionary, met Boswell (who became his friend and later biographer) on this very spot in May 1763.

The past happens in the same spaces as the present in London and the dust of history settles on your clothes.

I will be back there in a couple of weeks. I may even brave the cold to explore some of the other London bookshops listed here.

Johnson's Dictionary

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was published 250 years ago this month. Beryl Bainbridge here describes how a failed teacher and celebrated 'hack' worked for nine years in a London garret to redefine the English language - and his reputation. His working methods for compiling the dictionary are described here in some detail. Just imagine what he could have done with a computer at his disposal!

I think dictionaries are sexy, and in a parallel universe I'm a lexicographer for sure - a job that combines a love of words with a love of research. (I seem fated to have a lot to do with dictionaries - writing reviews on them for The Star and promoting them for Oxford.) And I'm a great fan of Johnson's - if I had the chance to go back in history and have dinner with just one famous writer, it might well be him. I loved both Boswell's Life of and Beryl Bainbridge's novel about him: According to Queeney.

There's a lovely little cafe on Marylebone High Street in London called Patisserie Valerie where I love to hang out when I'm back home. Everywhere in London you get a buzz from stepping on history. But this place is special to me - quite apart from the fact the cakes are heavenly! The upstairs rooms used to accommodate a bookshop ... and it was here than Boswell met Johnson for the first time.