Tyrone and the Book Bank pt. 1

Tyrone is in his 30s/40s, dresses like an old punk squatter, and sells books off the pavement on Stroud Green Road, North London. He runs what is possibly the best, and definitely the smallest bookstall in London. This blog is going to contain a lot of random yet undeniably Londoncentric bookstuff, and there isn't a better person to promote than Tyrone. This man is, or at least embodies, the reason I do what I do, and why I want to have my own bookstore. All books are £1.

My first meeting with Tyrone about a month ago yielded the following:

Skinhead, Richard Allen (NEL 5th Printing)
Suedehead, Richard Allen (NEL First Edition)
Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima (Battered Old Penguin)
Forbidden Colours, Yukio Mishima (Ditto)
Thirst for Love, Yukio Mishima (Ditto)
The City And The Pillar, Gore Vidal (First UK Pbk)
Hustling: a Gentleman's Guide to the Fine Art of Homosexual Prostitution, John Preston

I first heard about Allen in the writings of Stewart Home, neoist extraordinaire. As Codex has it:

"Richard Allen" is the best-known pseudonym of pulp fiction guru James Moffat, an archetypal hack who measured writing time in bottles. Despite Moffatt's moralistic condemnation of journalists who "encourage" juvenile delinquency, his Richard Allen books, such as Skinhead, Suedehead and Boot Boys, were all violent exploitation novels. They fed the Skinhead movement which in turn fed the author's ego, an almost preternatural feedback loop that literature did its best to forget, until Codex author Stewart Home revisited these "classics" and gave decent society its biggest kick up the ass since Pa Ubu went to Poland.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised at the (low) quality of the writing - which I'm sure Home would denounce as bourgeois adherence to established modes of writing, or something - but they deserve their reputation as underground hack classics.

I've been meaning to read Mishima for ages, but haven't got round to them yet.

I've read Vidal, but at least I can give my boyfriend his copy of City back now. As long as I've got one about the house... John Preston wrote a really good essay entitled 'How Dare You Even Think These Things?' about his life as a pornographer in High Risk, which I read last year. I've been looking for other stuff by him ever since - and this doesn't disappoint. It does exactly what it says on the cover, from guidance on hustler phone etiquette, to what you should keep about the house if you claim to be into 'heavy play', and the linguistic complexities of the term 'versatile'. Essential.