Starting in August 2008, the Independent has been publishing a series of short pieces by Christopher Fowler, thriller writer and dramatist, devoted to the subject of “forgotten authors.” As Fowler himself admits, “Nobody wants to be thought of as vanished, but shelf-life is fleeting. With stock in chain stores governed by computers, the only way of finding certain books is to head for independents or to search online.”
Looking through his articles, I’m surprised, as a veteran browser of shelves of used books, to find names like Mazo de la Roche, Mary Renault, Georgette Heyer, and John Dickson Carr. But on reflection, that probably says more about my age than the awareness of today’s readers.
Unfortunately, The Independent has not made it easier to go through the archives of this series, so I have included the full set (thus far) here.
Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff, who found out himself from Mike Orthofer’s note at the Complete Review, for passing this along.
My pleasure. It’s a series I plan to keep following.
Thank you for collecting all of Fowler’s columns. I had just started to piece them together myself and like you said, it wasn’t easy.
Well, it’s an excellent initiative and Neglected Books fans are glad to know the Independent will keep it going. Let us know when the book is going to be published. And thanks for the good work!
It’s confusing because the Indie stopped the column while it was going through financial turmoil, but now that things are steadier it’s back every Sunday. I make it nearly 70 columns so far, and I’ll be producing a book at the end called ‘Invisible Ink: A Guide to Forgotten Authors’.
One of my rules of thumb is seeing how many of an author’s books are currently available, and it comes as a shock to find that someone who has written, say, 150 books in a lifetime is now represented by just one or two books.