Paratextual Activity

by Nicholas Royle

In 1991 I attended a launch event in London for a debut novel, A Matter of Life and Sex. The book was a handsome hardback with Gilbert & George jacket illustrations, the author an even more handsome young man going by the name Alec F Moran, and the publisher a tiny Brixton-based press called Paper Drum Publishing. Regarding the name of the author, I suspected nothing – indeed, I had read extracts from the novel in The Fred magazine, all credited to Alec F Moran – and it was Paper Drum’s publisher Ken McDonald who pointed out to me that Alec F Moran was an anagram, of roman à clef, and a pseudonym.

The author signed my copy of the novel, at the launch, with his pen name. Did I already know then, or find out later, that his real name was Oscar Moore? I can’t remember, but what I do remember is reading the novel with my eyes, and my mind – and my heart, for that matter – wide open. It tells the story of Hugo Harvey’s relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure, from the cottages of north London to the Piccadilly meat rack to the clubs and bath houses of New York and Paris. Intercutting chapters devoted to Hugo’s libidinous progress with sobering accounts of life – and death – on an AIDS ward ensures we’re clear eyed about where all this is heading – which, of course, Hugo and many others, at the time, were not.

If Oscar Moore’s name is familiar to you, but A Matter of Life and Sex is not, it may be that you followed his column ‘PWA’, which ran in the Guardian from 1994 to 1996, the year of his death from an AIDS-related illness. His columns were collected in PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face, published by Picador, also in 1996.

I got myself another signed copy of A Matter of Life and Sex – the 1992 Penguin reissue with photographic cover illustration by Amy Guip – from Oxfam Bookshop Bloomsbury Street on Friday 6 December 2019, and this one was signed Oscar Moore and dated 2/9/92. On the flyleaf, in red pen, a former owner has left her name, Emma Hindley, and another date, ‘Dec ’92’, perhaps the month she read it. Is Emma Hindley the documentary film editor Emma Hindley, lead commissioning editor of the BBC’s Storyville strand from 2023 to 2025? Quite possibly. In fact, I’d say it’s likely.

On Sunday 29 September 2024, in Crisis in Dalston, east London, I found another copy of the Penguin edition. It, too, contained the name of a former owner. The name was hard to decipher. It could have been Paul Crake. But it could also have been Paul Wake, and I knew a Paul Wake, author of Conrad’s Marlow: Narrative and Death in ‘Youth’, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance (Manchester University Press) and a former colleague in the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University, so I packaged it up and sent it to him. If you have gone to the trouble of donating a book to a charity shop, rather than, say, leaving it on the pavement outside your house to get rained on, the last thing you want, probably, is for that book to stage a surprise reappearance in your life as it drops through your letter box. But maybe there were two Paul Wakes. I recalled that Paul Wake knows Nicholas Royle – the other Nicholas Royle – so I thought it would tickle him to receive a book previously owned by another Paul Wake. But, even if it had been Paul Wake’s, my Paul Wake’s, might it not be fun to discover that it had been found, out in the world, by someone who knew him? A nice coincidence, if you believe in coincidences.

Paul Wake sent me a thank-you card. ‘Now we’re even,’ it said, humorously, on the front of the card, from Deadpan Cards. Inside, Paul Wake had written, gratifyingly, at some length. ‘Dear Nick,’ he begins, striking a vaguely formal tone. ‘I am Paul Wake and my name is written inside the book A Matter of Life and Sex by Oscar Moore. In answer to your question, it is now my book, but it was not before. I haven’t read it and didn’t write in it. I like it a lot and it is now a prized possession. Did you know that I have written on paratexts?’

Not only did I not know that, but I had to look up ‘paratext’. I’d explain here what I found, but nobody wants to be told what they already know, and I’m sure you already know what paratexts are.

‘I’m a huge fan,’ Paul Wake goes on, ‘of Gérard Genette’s book of the same name and so I’m immediately thinking of that, and wanting, in full knowledge that I may sound like a (predictable) bore, to ask you if it isn’t Oscar Moore’s book rather than mine? And now, I’m thinking that it is his work and my book.’

I feel about literary theory the same way I feel about astrophysics: it should be fascinating, but is actually incomprehensible. In the subset of authors called Nicholas Royle, it’s the other one who is your man for an affinity with Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and, no doubt, Maurice Blanchot. The extent of my familiarity with Roland Barthes is measured by my having read the English translation of Camera Lucida in a day and understood not a single word of it. The truth is I bought it – the Black Swan paperback edition – for the Magrittean illustration on the cover by the late, great John Holmes.

‘If footnotes were permitted in cards,’ Paul Wake continues, ‘here I’d reference Blanchot—’ aha! – ‘who I also like but fear I do not fully understand.’

You understand him a lot better than I do, Paul.

‘Is this a game?’ asks Paul Wake. ‘Yes. I’m playing. Today I decided it was time (high time) that I took my turn. This card was purchased, appropriately and deliberately, from High Street Books and Records in New Mills.’

I don’t know if Paul Wake has read either of my books White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector or Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf, both of which mention High Street Books and Records, and he can’t have read Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books, which also mentions it, but he knows that I would know Adam Morris’s excellent shop and would no doubt have been there.

‘I dug out my fountain pen as I’d inferred the rules entailed that much effort at least. If it is a game, is it cooperative? I think it is. As a game, it also seems to have rules and I am not sure you asked if I wanted to play, which I think makes it more complex. I am enjoying playing against my will. On the back of the card I’m going to play counterfeit signature.’

Sure enough, on the back of the card, Paul Wake, now Professor of Game Studies in the English Department at MMU, has four attempts at reproducing the signature – either Paul Wake’s or Paul Crake’s – from inside A Matter of Life and Sex. He concludes: ‘It is harder than I thought.’

On Friday 18 July 2025, I came across yet another copy of the Penguin edition of A Matter of Life and Sex in the RSPCA shop in Didsbury. It was signed to Helena in Manchester in 1994. I don’t know anyone of that name who might reasonably have been the intended recipient, so I sent it to a former student called Helena, whom I taught in Manchester in the late 2000s and who is now herself teaching at the University of Suffolk.

Finally, on Monday 26 January 2026, I walked down to Bethnal Green and in Oxfam found another copy of A Matter of Life and Sex. This one contained a business card in the name of P———, with an address in Dolphin Square, at page 69. Dolphin Square is a landmark development of 1234 private flats in Pimlico, central London, built between 1935 and 1937 and home over the years to numerous MPs, peers, prominent creative professionals, even royalty. Len Deighton, whose death was announced while I was writing this piece, featured it in his alternate history novel SS-GB, and Kate Atkinson’s 2018 spy novel Transcription has a counter-espionage operation running out of Nelson House. P——— lived in the same Dolphin Square block. The phone number on the business card has an 01 prefix; these went out of use in 1990. I’m not suggesting any impropriety, Dolphin Square having known more than its fair share of controversy, but nor am I including P———’s full name and further details in case any is inferred.

In Finders, Keepers, I send books that I find with business cards in to the individuals named on the cards, but I’m not doing that in this case as it seems unlikely P——— would still be living in Nelson House. It’s possible, but, I would say, improbable. A search for P———’s name produces only red herrings and false trails. It’s possible, of course, that the book was P———’s and he used an old business card as a bookmark – this, I have found, is not uncommon – but equally possible that the book was donated to Oxfam by an unknown Bethnal Green-based reader who knew or once met P——— and was given his card. I’d love to know, but I also kind of like not knowing.

Nicholas Royle’s latest collection of short stories is Paris Fantastique (Confingo). Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books will be published on 14 April.