Last night I went on a Lungbarrow hunt. Before you start conjuring images of me with a spear, chasing small yellow fluffy creatures much prized for the sweetness of their meat through the undergrowth of Hampstead Heath, Lungbarrow is a Doctor Who spinoff novel from the 90s that for various reasons, has aquired such a status that aquiring a copy usually requires you to sell one of your children or morgage your house.
Not that a copy of Lungbarrow is my ultimate aim - you can read it for free on the BBC website, and I never have because I think the content would wind me up. Though buying it for 70p in a second hand bookshop would be the equivalent of coming across a £100 at the side of the road. No exaggeration. I wonder what the ettiquette is there - discovering an item you know to be worth a small fortune, for sale at nowhere near its value in a charity bookshop...do you just buy it quietly? Do you tell the shop assistant, and risk them bumping the price or putting it on eBay instead? Do you offer them a guilty tenner instead, or is this even worst?
Anyway, if I had discovered a copy of Lungbarrow, I'd be far too busy choosing a pacific island to buy with the proceeds to be blogging here. I just use the word to mean "something unremarkable, of immense value to a small cabal of people" - indeed, me. Actually, my ultimate aim of these hunts shifts, but this week's was:
- A copy of the Picture of Dorian Gray that I don't yet have.
- And anything else Oscar Wilde related. Biographies, other books, anything pretty
- A replacement beret. You never know...
- The Guns of Navarone novel - for what is basically an airport paperback, you see this in second hand book shops very rarely. I loved the film, loved the book sequel Force 10 from Navarone, and this is a bit of must buy literature.
- And yes, some Doctor Who related stuff. Videos are always great - jackpot would be Cold Fusion, Dying Days, Just War (or Lungbarrow, so I can flog it for megabucks), or anything with the words "third", "fifth" or "sixth" on the back cover...
It's a defence mechanism, really. Going into a second hand bookshop with some specific aims in mind lessens the chance of buying anything else. Like the collected Green Arrow/Green Lantern crossover comics collection, which I almost gave in to. Or the Blake's 7 video which I really did give into (I'm suffering from a lack of bad 60s sci fi since my Pertwee video broke, y'see...)
It's having the travelcard that does it - the ability to just pick a bus and go anywhere, basically for free. They're £64 for a month, which is more or less equivalent to taking two £2 tube journeys for 31 days. What the travelcard does cover is the guilty trips - the "I'm going to get a bus from the campus to the tube station", and leaves a glorious margin for error. Wrong destination? Just get off, try again. This gave me the luxury to experiment with a new bus, which heads to Camden then Hampstead Heath instead of straight up to Finchley. And as soon as I hit Camden, I hopped on and off the same bus route for the next two hours, stopping at areas which had lots of charity shops or just looked interesting. Didn't find anything, but it was fun - Camden has some great shops, including a great vintage clothing store (just keep repeating: Jon Pertwee is not, and never will be a fashion icon...) and a shop filled with wonderful instruments, which Dorian's chapter 11 would have died for.
The tour culminated at one of the more remote branches of Hampstead Library, which I've had my eye on since week one for two reasons. One of them is called Deep Blue by Mark Morris, and involves Tegan, Turlough, Mike Yates, the Brigadier and the Fifth Doctor. Nuff said. The other is The Dictionary of the Khzars, and I have been longing to read it ever since it was in Oxfam back home. Every time I was in town, I'd get closer to buying it on a whim. Then one week, I discovered it was on the 1001 book list - rushed back to get it, and...well, you can guess how the story ends. It's proving to be worthy of my fanatical devotion, and I recommend it to everyone. This library is situated in Keats' house, aptly enough, and is one of the scummiest buildings you could ever visit. It's even got a cat which prowls around, and looks disapprovingly at whatever you're reading like the world's pickiest English teacher. But do not be decieved! Of the three I've visited so far, its Doctor Who collection is by far the widest.
So no purchases, tho perhaps that's a good thing - I did still walk away with two books I wanted to read. Deep Blue turned out to be pretty good, but too violent. Yes, Doctor Who books have the freedom to show things they couldn't on TV, but there's still a point that if you dish out too much blood, it becomes hard to imagine the characters in the situation, because (in TV terms) its so unlikely.
And it was more useful than the Lungbarrow hunt I conducted earlier in the week. Every day, the bus passes a shop called "Park Video" - books, videos, dvds, all in a shabby window that just screams "we've got Planet of the Daleks!" before turning onto Baker Street, home of the London Beatles store. So I went in earlier than necessary and hopped off to take a peep. Turns out it's a Muslim bookshop. I hate subject-specific bookshops - the Christian bookshop on Mill Street, Karnac Books on Finchley Road which only sells self-help, and all the Law bookshops on Chancery Lane. I still get that "ooooh, books!" rush, but in a disappointing collection of things I could never be interested, and the sure knowledge that a battered Dorian Gray will not be there, no matter how hard I look. The worst thing is, I've been in expectation of discovering something wonderful there for so long that I still get a flush of curiosity when I pass, even though I know nothing's there. The Beatles Shop (next door to the Elvis shop; across the road from the Rock and Roll shop) was also pretty neat - the musical equivalent of my own little shop on the Strand, that demands my attention every time I pass, and has prior claim to most of my loan...
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