The Secret Joy of Reading
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About this ebook
Richard Herley's introduction: Here are ten short pieces of non-fiction, some about reading and writing; most have already appeared on my blog. I hope you enjoy them.
Richard Herley
I was born in England in 1950 and educated at Watford Boys' Grammar School and Sussex University, where my interest in natural history led me to read biology.My first successful novel was "The Stone Arrow", which was published to critical acclaim in 1978. It subsequently won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, administered by the Royal Society of Literature in London, and was the first in a trilogy. This was followed by "The Penal Colony" (1987), a futuristic thriller that formed the basis of the 1994 movie "No Escape", starring Ray Liotta.The main difficulty for the author is making his voice heard in the roar of self-promotion. I believe that the work I am producing now is of higher quality than my prize-winning first, and ask you, the reader, to help spread the word by telling your friends if you have enjoyed one of my books.
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The Secret Joy of Reading - Richard Herley
The Secret Joy of Reading
Richard Herley
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Richard Herley
Discover other titles by Richard Herley at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover image: An etching of Joseph O. Eaton’s portrait of Herman Melville
Here are ten short pieces of non-fiction, some about reading and writing; most have already appeared on my blog. I hope you enjoy them.
R H
Table of Contents
My First Fountain Pen
Kathleen
The Subconscious in Fiction
Nausea
The Good and Great Reader
Feminism
Politics and Fiction
The Super Panther
Fuzzy Computing
The Secret Joy of Reading
My First Fountain Pen
Writers are obsessed with stationery. The lure of a stationer’s – or even the stationery shelves at some soulless hypermarket – is hard for the scribbler to resist. And for the real addicts among us, the ultimate fix is the fountain pen.
Such pens have gone the way of vinyl records (a bit cultish, or favoured by fogeys who can’t get on with technology) and more’s the pity, because when I were a nipper the range on offer was wide and wondrous.
My very first, a pearlescent Osmiroid, was given to me on my seventh birthday. By then I was practising joined-up letters, making the prescribed loops and curlicues and keeping within the dotted lines: for at that stage I knew no better, more or less, than to comply. My classmates and I were issued with wooden pen-holders into which fitted steel nibs, which in turn were dipped in small, white, porcelain inkwells set in the top right-hand corners of our bijou folding-top desks. The caretaker filled these with blue-black ink. In his store-room (which doubled as a dungeon where criminals were sometimes banished for half an hour), he kept a carboy of the stuff, provided no doubt by the County Council, and my memory of his ink is entwined with that of his grey, smelly mop in its galvanized, perforated squeeze-bucket near by.
Thus we began our writing adventure with official nibs and official ink. The inkwells, besides being decidedly handist, or whatever the term is for something that discriminates against the sinistral, were prone to collect detritus – paper fibres mostly, and dust, I should think, but also other matter exuded by small, ingenious and malevolent boys (the girls in my class were all angels, especially Her Serene Highness Catherine Williams, are you reading this, my agony, my woe, and my heart’s delight?) In dipping one’s pen it was essential to stop short of the squidgy mess at the bottom. A sixteenth of an inch too far, a moment’s inattention, and the copybook was ruined.
The primary school was populated by middle-class children. Many of us were able, typically at Christmas or birthdays, to graduate from the statist to the free-market solution and embrace the fruits of capitalism. I remember that my Osmiroid cost 7/6d (37.5p), which I considered a huge sum, since my weekly pocket-money had that day been raised to 7d (2.9p), one penny for every year of my age. I also remember my pen’s first proper outing.
I had admired the Osmiroid minutely at home, of course. Its plastic barrel was lined by a black rubber reservoir. A lever operated a metal bar to compress the rubber. When the nib was dipped in ink, this compression and decompression effected a filling. The received wisdom was to operate the lever seven times. After that one held the top surface of the nib for a moment against the edge of a sheet of blotting paper, made a few test squiggles and, if all was in order, screwed the lid back on the bottle of Quink (Royal Blue, Washable, Suitable for School and Home Use, Available in 1, 2 or 20 oz Sizes, Made in