As a writer of twenty or so published books and performed plays I experienced recently a baptism of showcase noise and dense crowd immersion by visiting the London Book Fair. Julian Friedmann, my agent, gave me an entrée to online enrolment so I duly submitted to the box-filling tedium,  messing up one attempt after another just as I do with my VAT return.  On arrival at Olympia, clutching an A 4 paper pass I dodged the laminating tag machine (what point more plastic waste in the universe?) and hit the huge sea of faces and stands.  I sought my publisher’s foreign rights specialist for my book about a German pope. What an overwhelming plethora of stalls, a bazaar for soul baring and trading, where cubic footage of space proclaimed power and publisher prestige, and thousands of earnest faces over tiny tables bobbed up and down in one-to-ones in their rare encounters in the flesh.

Soon I was light-headed and dazed in the Kasbah. At last  I found she whom I sought. My appointment over I went to find a coffee. Everywhere was too crowded. An acquaintance I hadn’t seen for many years caught up with me. I remembered his name, just about—and he mine. I knew he had been a book-seller in a highly respectable second-hand  book shop.

‘What do you do now? Why are you here?'  I asked. ‘I am a sample  buyer' he said, ‘A what?’ ‘ I buy samples, and we, the people I work with, sell them through Amazon?’ I couldn’t work this out. Oh, books laid out as samples on stalls! ‘How?’ We get up to 85% discount on the sale price just to cart them away. They can’t be bothered to crate them up and take them back:  you’d  be surprised how expensive too some of the big publishers’, like Chatto, wares are.’ ‘ Oh, so you’re a buyer?’

‘ I carry cash usually and arrange  for them to be packaged and taken off at the end of the fair. We have a warehouse.’

I was staggered. Here was a highly privileged –ex-public schoolboy,  a BA or MA, dressed to fit the right book fair image, working, I daresay lucratively, as a scavenger: buying up the orts and greasy relics of the fair, and handsomely profiting from them. An eye-opener to the ways of the giant Amazon—and no profit or royalty for the humble scribe!

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds Ad infinitum."  Jonathan Swift

I came to write The Book That Kills because I found an anonymous  erotic volume in French in my garage loft here on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, when we moved into this sixteenth century courthouse in 1995. I have no idea how it came to be here, and it remains a complete mystery. It provided the start of The Book that Kills, by giving me the idea of a lost work with dangerous content, some of which, translated, I have included.  The 24 engravings are explicitly sexual, beautifully executed, and I toyed for a long while as to whether I should use them as illustrations, even writing captions for inclusion at suitable points in the text. Finally I decide against, but there is a case to be made that they should be included in a future edition, and I have kept the illustrations on disc.
      I found only a leading Dutch antiquarian bookseller who has a later edition of the same work, more in demand for its rarity, in his sale list for € 17,000. The British Library has only a mutilated edition, with three of the twenty-four illustrations in my copy. Recently I put my copy up for sale by auction at Christie’s, and received rather less.

Here is an essay DE  SADE AND HIS PRESENT DAY FOLLOWERS— by the narrator Patrice Léon of  The Book That Kills.