An article in American Vogue that identifies book collecting as fashionable, not to say sexy, is the best news for book sellers like myself since I read in the Observer in the early 1990s that the wearing of corduroy made one pretty irresistible. For as Natalie Wheen, introducing a Radio 3 live relay of Opera North’s 1997 production of Martinu’s opera, ‘Julietta’, said, describing the appearance of the bookseller protagonist,‘he is wearing a corduroy jacket like all sellers of secondhand books all over the world.’
Unfortunately my wife explained gently that the Observer feature did not apply to my sort of corduroy. I can’t remember why - something about the width of the cord I think.
Walking across a bridge in Salzburg in 1983 I became aware of two approaching female cyclists, one gesticulating at me and shrieking in heavily accented English to her companion,‘Englishman. Englishman!’
I felt sure that this presumption of national identity was occasioned by the corduroy trousers that I was wearing at the time. But if I am right and corduroy is inextricably associated with Englishness might I not have been an anglophile Austrian?
I used to have a customer, a Rouen lawyer, who spent a part at least of his annual holiday staying, on his own, at a Lewes Bed and Breakfast. Every year, visiting my shop, he sported Malvolio-yellow corduroy trousers; every year he talked to me of his passion for the novels of J.B. Priestley.
My composite picture of this Anglophile-par excellence-at ease was completed when he revealed the reason for his continued patronage of the Bed and Breakfast he favoured with his custom. A beatific expression passed across his face as he murmured, ‘Ah, Madame’s apple crumble.’