Sixpence House [Paperback]

What the author and his wife did not expect from this picturesque community was the possibility that when buying a house they would have to face arcane events such as gazumping and gazunding, and as buyers having no representation while sellers have no obligation to share the defects of their home. (How to say caveat emptor in Welsh?) A 500-year-old house is likely to have some faults as they imagine and find to their dismay. Even when in the 16th century apartment they are faced with rooms that are painfully small, where natural light is simply an idea, and events like a shower with water pressure are no more than a memory left some 3000 miles away.

In the midst of myriad daily adjustments the couple is attempting to raise their young child and the author is gallantly trying to finish his first book. Paul Collins gives readers a new view on the effort required to get published as well as the tasks of finding a title that is hopefully unfamiliar to readers, combating editors who wish to amend his writing, and even a paper shortage caused by the printing of 800 pages 5 million times. The latter represents the first edition of JK Rowlings's fourth book in the United States.

The village and the idea of making a new home amongst the residents gradually, yet steadily, changes from the romanticized idea many of us would create in our own minds, to encompass many of the same grinding realities creating a new home would present anywhere. One of the books charms is the historical arcanum that the author includes rather effortlessly during the tale. A walk past a cemetery invokes a short history of the watch, the early shapes associated with death that they took, and the rather prescient shapes of watch that Mary Queen Of Scot wore during her abbreviated life. The author also tells the story of an unusual explorer of London's sewers, and the time he took while underneath the royal household to break in to song, and the odd circumstance this may have presented to those living in the royal household.

Mr. Collins has written a book that is well worth your time, and likely to be several degrees different from many of the books you have read.

Collins is a writer and also a lover of books. For him abandoning San Francisco is an easy choice because it's too expensive and because his neighbors, in their painstakingly restored Victorian houses, apparently never read. "All those beautiful built-in bookshelves?" Collins says. "They don't hold any books." Indeed his real-estate agent tells him "You have too many books in here. Home buyers don't like books . . . . Really. You should hide them."

So off they go to Wales, to the famous "book town" of Hay-on-Wye, to buy a house. Collins and wife investigate numerous houses in numerous neighborhoods (my favorite is Cusop Dingle), learn some scary things about British real-estate practices, and commence knitting themselves into the fabric of the community. Collins threads together many incidents and a few adventures; truth to tell, some are but flimsily connected to his narrative. On the other hand, he tells them so well, in such witty and inventive prose, that it hardly matters. It is a delight to hear Collins' explain that you CAN tell a book by its cover; his discussions of some of the wondrously strange forgotten books he's collected ("Hunting Indians in a Taxicab" is one of the best titles; I wonder how he missed "By Horse and Sledge to Outcast Siberian Lepers"?); and listen in on his new career as the "American expert" for Richard Booth, the reelingly eccentric anarchist-genius who made sleepy Hay a used-book capital (and also declared himself king of a secessionist republic and began issuing passports).

I say "hear" because you don't merely read this book: You hear it; it's as if Collins is talking to you directly, because there is that rare quality called "voice" in his writing. If you love real writing or know someone who does, buy this book right away.--Bill Marsano is a professional writer and editor.

Several years ago, Paul Collins was living in San Francisco with a first book ready for publication and a certainty that he and his family needed to move somewhere cheaper and safer. Hay, which he had visited before, sounded ideal. As it famously advertises, it has 40 bookstores serving its 1500 residents, and it considers itself the world's antiquarian book centre. The Hay Festival in early summer attracts visitors from every English-speaking country.

With more modesty than accuracy, Collins claims that he was offered a job sorting out the mounds of books in the American literature section of a rambling bookstore in Wye based purely on his American accent. But Collins obviously knows his books. He has filled "Sixpence House" with snippets from obscure volumes that are by turns bizarre and hilarious. He has also developed a Theory of Dust Jackets:

"There is an implicit code that customers rely on. If a book cover has raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering, then it is telling the reader: 'Hello. I am an easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, a celebrity, and/or murder.' To readers who do not care for such things, this lettering tells them: 'Hello. I am crap.' Such books can use only glossy paper for the jacket; Serious Books can use glossy finish as well, but it is only Serious Books that are allowed to use matte finish.

Diminutively sized paperbacks, like serial romances or westerns or dieting or astrology guides, are aimed at the uneducated. But diminutively sized hardcover books are aimed at the educated - except those that are very diminutive, which are religious books aimed at the uneducated - and unless they are in a highly rectangular format, in which case they are point-of-purchase books aimed at the somewhat-but-not-entirely educated....."

This book, by the way, has a "matte" cover in a "muted, tea-stained" colour. That means that it is Serious Literature. Oh, surely not that serious, Mr Collins.

The author's theory of house prices was less successful. Assuming that anywhere as far from paid employment as Hay was bound to be a cheap place to live, he went in search of a quaint old home with stone walls, massive beams and a huge garden for his son to play in. This would have been fair enough when Britain's economy really was "sad", but it has developed something of a smirk in recent years. All those affluent townies buying second homes for the weekend have sent house prices in rural England and Wales rocketing out of reach of young families in the countryside. The only houses that are "quaint", but still within the price range of an aspiring writer, come encumbered with entailed land or six inches of water in the basement. Successful writers, as Collins deserves to be based on this book, may find a wider choice.