Books & Poetry

Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers occupies a plum site on the Bloomsbury tourist trail, just opposite the British Museum. With its wood panelling, working fireplace and mass of shelves groaning with rare old first editions, it more than lives up to its Dickensian name. Three flights up, in a tiny kitchen at the back, the twenty-first century intrudes in the form of writer Russell Ash poised before a microwave: ‘Do you want a Krispy Kreme doughnut? You give them eight seconds on full power, apparently.’

With Jarndyce’s proprietor Brian Lake, Ash is co-compiler of ‘Fish Who Answer the Telephone and Other Bizarre Books’ – easily the year’s funniest toilet tome. The pair have been collecting oddly titled or themed books for over 25 years, and although it has a different name, ‘Fish…’ is effectively the third edition of a compendium first published in 1985 (by Macmillan) and again in 1992 (by Pavilion). But it’s been updated and expanded for the new century. And as Ash explains, the advent of the online library database made their job much easier this time round: ‘Back in the ’80s we did it all on index cards.’

The double-entendre titles (‘Drummer Dick’s Discharge’, ‘Games You Can Play With Your Pussy’, ‘Penetrating Wagner’s Ring’) probably yield the most pleasure, but there are also wonderful examples of nominative determinism (‘Motorcycling for Beginners’ by Geoff Carless, ‘Sexual Desire and Love’ by Eric Fuchs) as well as random delights like ‘Correctly English in Hundred Days’, a ’30s language primer ‘prepared for the Chinese young man who wishes to served [sic] for the foreign firms’.

‘Basically, we’re overgrown schoolboys,’ admits Lake, ‘so something like “Men Who Have Risen: A Book for Boys” or – one of my favourites – “Cock Tugs: A Short History of the Liverpool Screw Towing Company” makes us very happy.’ Likewise ‘Invisible Dick’ (1926) and ‘Scouts in Bondage’ (1930), which chronicles the ‘stirring’ adventures enjoyed by a troop of ‘jolly, good-natured, determined boys’.

Ash, whose favourite is one Barry Humphries recommended, ‘The Romance of Leprosy’, remembers being ‘rather taken to task when the first edition came out for being politically incorrect and including too many titles which depended entirely for their humour on the words “queer” and “organ” ’. They’ve toned it down slightly for this edition, but really, the book would be immeasurably poorer for the exclusion of ‘Queer Doings in the Navy’ and ‘Organ Building for Amateurs’, in which we learn that ‘the perseverance devoted to building even a small organ at home must necessarily afford most valuable training to young men’.

The only cut demanded by their editor at John Murray was of a book about blind, one-armed canoeists whose cover showed them paddling (with some difficulty, one imagines) up the Thames. ‘We had visions of them going round in circles,’ Lake chuckles. ‘Anyway, our editor wrote on the proof, “This is not funny in any way.” So we took it out as we didn’t want to offend one-armed blind people. But curiously they let us include “Big Dick: The King of the Negroes” and “Fighting the Fuzzy-Wuzzy”, which ironically they [John Murray] published themselves.’

A director at Weidenfeld in the 1980s, Ash still finds it hard to believe that these books made it to publication. ‘I’ve sat in on far too many tedious meetings where people discussed the virtues or otherwise of publishing something – and every single one of these slipped through the net without anybody saying, “Hang on a minute, that’s a damn silly title…”’ Ash never intentionally published a silly-named book – but he did write one. ‘It came out several years ago. It was called “Dear Cats: The Post Office Letters”. It was a complete history of the cats who were employed by the Post Office to stop mice eating the letters.’

It sounds brilliant, I say, truthfully. Did anyone buy it?

‘Not really. I’ve still got quite a few copies at home, so…’

‘Here’s a good one,’ Lake interrupts. ‘“Cancer: Is the Dog the Cause?” Now, I did actually read some of this and I can tell you that the answer is basically “No”.’

‘We don’t generally read the books,’ points out Ash. ‘That way madness lies.’

Jarndyce has devoted a window display to bizarre books since Lake took it over eight years ago. ‘At first we did it as a stop-gap, but it’s become a sort of meeting place.’ Passers-by regularly pop in to make offers for featured titles, but none is for sale.

‘The most demanded book is probably “Make Your Own Stradivarius”,’ says Ash, shaking his head sadly. ‘Every single enquiry is serious. What we no longer put in the window is anything to do with martial arts. Janet, who works here, was once physically threatened when she refused to sell someone “Chinese Leg Manoeuvres”.’

‘Fish Who Answer the Telephone and Other Bizarre Books’ is published by John Murray at £9.99