Patrick Leigh Fermor Writes On

I’ve been collecting slightly rare books, things like signed hardbacks and proof editions, for a few years. I started with spy fiction and moved to crime this year. Although websites lower the bar in terms of physical effort — no longer any need to travel to book fairs, although I am sure the best stock is kept back for such events and auctions — it is still fun comparing condition and price, and getting to know the dealers you can trust, and gradually accumulating a collection. But nonfiction articles, letters and diaries are just a little more difficult to pin down. And all the more satisfying for that.

Imagine my astonishment in the recent London Review of Books, to read a ‘new’ article by a long-dead favourite of mine, Patrick Leigh Fermor. He died almost exactly ten years ago, and I was sure the LRB had made an error including his name in the list of contributors for 29 July 2021. Yet here is is with a piece called Swish! Swish! Swish! that was originally written for the Greek edition (and, yes, in Greek) of his famous book Mani about that part of Greece which he and wife Joan had come to call home.

I have spent the last few weeks collecting some of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s letters to Lawrence Durrell, after hunting them down in an archive in the USA. Illinois, I believe. The Morris Library in Carbondale. It was gripping to see the original letters, or their full-colour scans anyway, first-hand. The handwriting, the picture postcards, the typewriter and the telegram. Each a little slice of history, and unpublished, at least in that format, which made the hunt even more rewarding.

Novels, books, are so much easier to track in the age of the ISBN. But that coding system was only introduced in 1970 so there are plenty of books older than that which are a little harder to track. The internet has made it so much easier, perhaps a little too easy. But hunting down letters, extracts from diaries, serialisations in journals and newspapers, and especially if the writer knows more than one language… this is all still fair game. Still sufficiently time-consuming to reward the patient hunter. You read once a month or more of some lost poem, letter or insight found in a long-neglected archive. Edward Lear is the most recent one I remember.

If you are tiring of the hunt for rare books, or finding that you can’t find them rare enough, do consider looking for lost short stories and articles from long-forgotten periodicals. Even in my other stomping ground, crime and spy fiction, the famous journals used to print short stories by household names who were just starting to find their feet, or their fingers. Just imagine how much more thrilling it would be to find a rare handwritten draft of such a story! All it would cost, if the items have already been digitised, is time. And if you find that too easy, buy a return ticket to the archive of your choice and get down there in the basement. You might find something newsworthy, a real treasure lost decades earlier, just waiting for you to unearth it. Happy hunting!