Mark Mason

‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ So said Ford Madox Ford. Whether that applies to any of his own books I don’t know (my shelves seem to be a Ford-free zone — anyone?). But at least one blog applies the test to various tomes, so I thought I’d scan some of my past reading and see whether the rule holds true. Page 99 of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy is a conversation between the two main characters (adult Will and schoolboy Marcus), which features a brilliant example of Hornby getting you straight inside Marcus’s head:  ‘Do people give you a hard time?’  Marcus looked at him. How did he know that?

Quiz question: which famous 12-word quotation is followed by the phrase ‘for there is in London all that life can afford?’ Clue: two of the words are ‘tired’. If you need any more clues ... well, I might as well warn you now that this probably isn’t the blog post for you. Because it’s about London books. It’s struck me that our capital city is the perfect example of a gift that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to writers and their inspiration. It seems Dr Johnson was correct: 350 years on and there’s still all that life can afford in London. It’s fascinating the different ways authors find of slicing up that life and putting it between the covers of a book.

Hate to get all Peter Mandelson on you, but I’ve decided I’m a fighter not a quitter. When it comes to books, that is. I hate giving up on them. No matter how dense the prose, how teakish the characters, how convoluted the structure, I have to plough on to the bitter endpage. And sometime it is bitter; you finish the book as unimpressed as you were at page 20, thinking ‘there go a few hours of my life I’ll never get back’. But often you warm to the book, feeling glad you persisted. Those are the experiences that inspire, that make you a plougher. Is it the right way to be, though? A friend of mine has a ‘page 80’ rule. If the book hasn’t gripped him by then, off to Oxfam it goes.

‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour to tell tales of the human dramas the hotels hosted during the second world war. It’s surely the variety of people gathered together in one place that explains the fascination held by the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge’s et al. The good, the bad and the clinically barking all share the same address for a night, then tomorrow the cast-list changes.

When a man is tired of Johnson, he’s liable to vote for Livingstone. Boris has decided to head Londoners off at the pass by writing a book about them, or rather about 18 of their famed predecessors. From Boudica and Alfred the Great, through Shakespeare and Robert Hooke to Winston Churchill and Keith Richards, we meet people who shaped the city of their birth and/or residence. The stories of both the subjects and the city are brilliantly told. It just so happens that, in passing, we learn such facts as ‘London’s buses are carrying more people than at any time in history’. When Boris visits the Midland Grand Hotel he notes that the traffic outside is ‘flowing smoothly’.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury. A couple of thoughts about him, one related to reading, the other to writing. Reading first. I’ve just finished Lesley-Ann Jones’s brilliant biography of the singer (Freddie Mercury, The Definitive Biography), and have been thinking that it’s exactly the sort of tribute Mercury himself would have wanted. Gloriously populist, never taking itself too seriously, but nonetheless full of perceptive and moving insights into the contradictions and flaws of a truly charismatic star. Jones’s status as a showbiz journalist who knew Mercury means there are lots of fascinating details. The trademark mike stand came about when a normal one fell apart during a gig ...

Do you read at mealtimes? And if so, what? The fact you’re looking at this blog in the first place leads me to believe you may be a fan of books. And while there is the odd person around who doesn’t like food, they are just that – odd. Surely most of us would agree with CS Lewis that ‘eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.’ In fact for many, having something to read when you’re eating alone is a necessity. Nothing worse than the old torture of being stuck at breakfast with only the cereal packet separating you from boredom. You try and manufacture some interest in the fact that Rice Krispies offer 740 kilojoules per 30g serving, but it’s just not happening. Lewis was picky in his choice of mealtime reading.

Something truly incredible has happened in a village near me. A new bookshop has opened. I know – staggering, isn’t it? But I promise you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even been inside. It’s called the Open Road Bookshop, in Stoke by Nayland, close to the Suffolk/Essex border. Pretty little place (both the shop and the village). Sells secondhand books. That’s it – just books. No café, no multimedia community info-hub, no sideline in pottery or bric-a-brac. Admittedly the owner, Dave Charleston, has done things rather well. Plenty of books, covering just about every subject you could think of, and they’re beautifully displayed (cricket ball as a bookend for the cricket books, a pipe doing the same for those on smoking ...

What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is a ‘proper’ footnote, containing a juicy little fact or anecdote. Can’t risk missing those, can you?

Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: A Global History by Becky Sue Epstein. The Perignon tale is in there, along with many more lively and engaging stories from the history of sparkling wine (which, Epstein assures us, goes back much further than those three short centuries).