White Spines

is the author of six short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which continues to publish original short stories in the form of limited-edition chapbooks. He lives in Manchester and London.

With apologies to other classics publishers, the truth is I’ve been a bit obsessed with this book since I saw novelist and short story writer Royle tweeting the ultimate in chic shelfies: a photo of his Picador fiction collection, which forms an array of 1,000 white spines spanning the 1970s–90s, and encompassing authors from Chinua Achebe to Fritz Zorn. In this blend of memoir and narrative non-fiction, he explores the bookshops and charity shops where he bought them, the books themselves, and how his collection grew to the point of literary obsession.