travel

By Bill Marsano. This literate and literary book is an eccentric pleasure filled with sly fun and effortless surprise. Paul Collins was born in Pennsylvania to British immigrants, and the greatest of his inheritances is rootlessness: He has changed addresses as often as underwear and only now that he and his wife, Jennifer, have an infant son does he think to settle permanently.

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.

I enjoyed 'Sixpence House' more than I thought I might. At first the general idea of the story seemed slight to me, but Paul Collins is a wonderful writer, self-deprecating but genuinely smart and very funny in an unexpected way. I laughed out loud a lot, which I don't often do when I read. His appreciation for the absurdities in antiquated writing was dead on, and the book quotes were particularly enjoyable to me. I also liked getting to know his son; his observances, so brief and sweet, reminded me a bit of Adam Gopnik's essays in 'Paris to the Moon'. I was wishing the book would go on and on, but then the end abruptly came and I felt deflated. Why did they decide to leave Hay-on-Wye, and with such little thought? Had they invested nothing in the place after all? And if not, then what was the point of the journey? The abrupt ending made me feel as if Collins gave up the ghost on the town, and on the book, too. He just sort of...quit. I'm waiting for part two.

"Sixpence House" is the name of an old house that was a pub once upon a time. It is some hundreds of years old and stands lopsidedly in the middle of the picturesque old village of Hay-on-Wye on the border between England and Wales . The Wye valley winds green and lush along foot of the brown hills known - with Welsh poetic license - as the Black Mountains. It sounded like an ideal place for a young writer and his artist wife and toddler son to settle down. And it almost was.

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.