Collector Nicholas Royle Retraces the Journeys of His Books

Book collector Nicholas Royle—whose trilogy on the subject will be complete when Finders, Keepers is published by Salt next spring—is not simply interested in the volumes he gathers. He’s also fascinated by the things he discovers inside them.

“The three books are linked by an endless curiosity for the things I find in secondhand books,” said the British novelist and book editor. “I call them ‘inclusions,’ the term used for insects in amber, and also for the past lives of these books, traces of which are revealed through other clues such as names, bookplates, or inscriptions.”

Finders, Keepers, with its focus on things found in books, follows naturally on from the hugely popular White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector (2021) and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf (2024). It features a chapter devoted to collecting books with train tickets left inside by previous owners. “I recreate the book’s journey by traveling from, for example, London King’s Cross to Newcastle while reading Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature,” said Royle of one of these books containing an East Coast rail ticket. There’s also a chapter on maps found in books. “Where possible, I walk the map while reading the book. I may not visit New Zealand to walk the hand-drawn map I found in a copy of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, but wandering around Crystal Palace while reading Edmund White’s States of Desire, which contained a photocopied page from the London A–Z, is eminently doable.”

Among other discoveries was a book with a card in it addressed to “Ben” that had previously belonged to actor Ben Whishaw. “But I’m more intrigued by the airmail love letter I found in the Penguin copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women I bought from Oxfam in Sheffield in November last year. [In the letter, its writer named Al] had gone skiing in Austria, leaving her man, John, without his woman. She loved him and missed him, she said, but was not short of male attention on and off the slopes.”

Royle started collecting books in the early 1980s, when he was a student living in London, visiting the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge and secondhand bookshops in Oxford. He now has multiple collections—the Rev. W. Awdry’s Railway Series, orange Penguins and green Penguins, books whose titles begin with “London”—but his main, perhaps unique, one is of white-spined Picadors from the list’s launch in 1972 to 1999/2000 (“when they rashly abandoned the uniform design”).

“It started either when I bought a copy of Anna Kavan’s Ice from Skoob Books in 1982, or when my parents gave me a copy of Alberto Manguel’s Black Water for Christmas the following year, depending on whether you believe a single book can represent the start of a collection, or whether you think you need to add a second book for your collection to really become a collection.”

Since 2009, Royle has also been running Nightjar Press, publishing original uncanny and experimental short stories by authors such as Alison Moore, Cynan Jones, and M. John Harrison. “Where possible, I deliver these by hand and on foot, following well-worn routes past favorite secondhand bookshops.” He calls this “Royle Mail.”