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- - - - Copyright 2003 The Onion
- - - - Paul Collins
An old-world curiosity seeker with a fetish for moldy antique books and terms like "fad-addled," Paul Collins has created a rich cottage industry for himself. After charting a history of forgotten luminaries in Banvard's Folly, he started McSweeney's Books' Collins Library imprint, which has so far reprinted a bizarre old Portuguese-to-English phrasebook and a travelogue by "a mad genius who persuaded FDR and Churchill to build giant aircraft carriers out of ice." Such wowed and wide-eyed scholarship stands at the center of Sixpence House, a winsome memoir of a quixotic book lover's affairs. Stretched thin on a writer's pittance, Collins, his wife, and his young son fled San Francisco for Hay-on-Wye, an English countryside town whose antiquarian book trade works both as a tourist lure and as a way of life. Sixpence House starts with the move, then stretches into a scattershot memoir of Collins' short, bemusing stint in old Britannia. Hay abounds with a cast of small-town eccentrics, including a self-appointed "King Of Hay" who runs a central bookstore overrun with trash and treasures. Collins gets a job sorting through the store's teetering piles of American literature--ranging from 19th-century issues of Popular Science Monthly to an overlooked volume containing F. Scott Fitzgerald's first published work. His family settles in an apartment so old that its address is simply "The Apartment"; from there, they tour 400-year-old abodes unfit for buying and sift through loads of weird old books they can't get enough of. Not much happens in Hay, but Collins' charmed storytelling wraps his random digressions into an engaging whole. Above all, Sixpence House amounts to a breezy meditation on books and the human foibles they chronicle and amplify. The story doesn't reach any grand conclusions, but it shows how, with the weights adjusted right, humble ends can play on a grand scale. —Andy Battaglia Copyright The Onion - - - -
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