Inscription

Among my books are no more than a dozen signed by their authors. Of those only a couple have more elaborate inscriptions, one by Rhys Davies (who seems to have been a prolific signer & inscriber), and the other by Gene Wolfe, as shown above: “To Andy Richards, perhaps the only man in England to own a copy of this very American book” – i.e. his debut novel Peace. I acquired the volume from Mr. Richards, the proprietor of Cold Tonnage books. As I recall it was part of a barter exchange in which no money changed hands.

I bought my first copy of Peace second-hand for a pound in 1989. It’s a strange and slippery sort of novel that I started but failed to finish a couple of times until one weekend in early ‘97 while in the throes of a migraine. On that occasion, just after picking up where I’d left off a few years earlier, I came upon a phrase saying something to the effect that we can never know, as readers, how long may have elapsed between the writing of one sentence in a story and the next. In the circumstances, I couldn’t help thinking that writers, likewise, can’t know how long a reader might pause between sentences, and how much might change for them in that interval.