What a brilliant save!
After dozens of my Beat and music books were accidentally skipped a kindly stranger and the receipt from a poetry legend conspired to create a happy reunion
I SPENT almost all my working life writing or talking, reading and teaching about popular music and, for the latter quarter century of that time, considering particularly the ways in which rock and folk, jazz and punk, country, hip hop and more, shared an association with the Beat Generation and their writings.
In the process, I gathered a vast body of printed and recorded materials and, when the time came in 2016 to leave teaching behind, I had a large office overflowing with books and journals, records and CDs, videos and DVDs, magazines and newspapers. One thing I quickly realised was that I would never have the home capacity to absorb all these items.
I began to think about ways in which this lifelong collection could have some kind of legacy, in an age where hard copies of anything appeared to have lost any commercial value. The digital era, as we all pretty well know, has left the printed word, the moving image text and various musical formats washed up on the shores of Lake Obsolescence.
So, short of taking out a small mortgage on a large storage space, I decided to redistribute my wealth – I smile, as I say it – in a number of fashions. Firstly, I offered all of my popular music titles to students and fellow staff members in a huge clear out. Even then, free product on this specialised area wasn’t so easy to give away.
Hundreds of books were passed on. Many hundreds that remained became a new and informal Leeds University School of Music library available to scholars of all kinds and levels to read, to borrow, to take even, if they so desired. Meanwhile, several thousand magazines covering 40 years of the Anglo-American rock media were re-purposed as a popular music media study resource at Chester University, where a music journalism degree had begun.
But I still had at least 300 volumes, hardback and paperback, which specifically dealt with that interface of the Beats – novels and poetry, essays and criticism – and music – rock, jazz and spoken word – and which I was keen to retain for future research projects. And it was then two good friends linked to the campus agreed to mind that collection into the middle future.
Five years on, at the end of last week, I had a curious out-of-the-blue email at my home some 15 miles from the city. A complete stranger to me, a man by the name of Bob Howe, was writing to let me know that he had recovered a couple of dozen items, almost a tenth of the remaining total, from a skip on the university site. When his attention was drawn to the discarded materials, he had no other inclination but to attempt to save the books in question.
Happily, Bob has been involved in the music business for years and in recent times become an active collector and dealer in the very vinyl recordings that now, of course, have a very real monetary value to generations, both young and old, who want their music on 12-inch albums and 7-inch singles. Furthermore, he had the nous and the knowledge to recognise the worth, rarity even, of the printed titles in the dumpster.
What was in there? A selection only: Ed Sanders’ Fug You, The Many Lives of Tom Waits by Patrick Humphries, Tate catalogue Centre Of the Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde, Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver, Jonathon Green’s Days in the Life, Jim Carroll’s Fear of Dreaming, Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties and many more beside.
Pictured above: A small selection of the books retrieved
Now, if Bob had, merely wanted to add a few worthwhile, if esoteric, gems to his own bookshelves, he could have done just that – and who would have blamed him? But instead, he looked through them, and found, in one of the books, a delivery receipt featuring not only the name of recently deceased British Beat poet Michael Horovitz but also me, myself, I!
It didn’t take long for this kindly, and thankfully informed, sleuth – visiting the university to pick up his wife who works there – to track down the real owner of the recovered throwaways. He wrote to me and now the books are heading back in my direction. Bob Howe, you are a star indeed!
What had happened, it transpired, was that one of my good custodian chums had been moving offices herself – the pandemic has prompted all sorts of changes in university administration arrangements – and the box she had left for collection and safekeeping had not reached its correct destination but had been emptied into the rubbish receptacle in error.
But, without that fortunate slip of paper inserted into the accidentally abandoned booty, I would not have seen them again. Michael Horovitz, one of the great, now late, guardians of British verse proved to be my guardian angel of sorts in this curious set of coincidences.
Note: Rock and the Beat Generation pays tribute to Michael Horovitz via an obituary and a collection of testimonials following his death in July. See ‘Farewell child of Albion’ (July 8th, 2021) and ‘Tributes to Michael Horovitz’ (July 16th, 2021)