Tucked away in a small apartment while house-hunting for more permanent digs, such as a 16th century “experienced” house, Collins no sooner is getting acclimated to his book heaven than he finds himself in a little retail hell, working in the bookstore owned by one of Hay’s more eccentric residents, one of two living who’s-who listed in The World’s Greatest Cranks and Crackpots.
Not that Collins minds all that much - the author is the kind of obsessive book lover who knows the value of happy accidents waiting to happen, and bookstore work just means more opportunity knocking upside his enquiring mind: “To look for a specific book in Hay is a hopeless task; you can only find the books that are looking for you, the ones you didn’t know to ask for in the first place.” Luckily for us, Collins is willing to generously share his findings, ruminations and observations as he tells his whopping fish-out-of-water tale, which includes his efforts to become a Lord.
And while Sixpence House meanders along to an anticlimactic and puzzling end in the recounting of the days in the life of the husband, father, house hunter, citizen and writer Collins, he does let us in on the book collector Collins. It is in these eclipsing and enticing bits and pieces of bookish minutiae, the directing of your attention to a grab-bag variety of books you didn‘t know existed — the kind that we readers of Sixpence “didn’t know to ask for in the first place” — that really comprises a considerable significance for Collins, and that constitutes the heart of his book.
So what kind of tidbits — whether of substance or of no consequence, old or newly unearthed, isolated or accumulated, of such facets as buying and selling, binding and titling — can we glean from Sixpence? Dr. William Hammond’s 1883 book A Treatise on Insanity in its Medical Relations is a good place to start. Personally, I am struck by the case of a plumber who received messages from “The Boss Plumber of Eternity,” who informed him that by mixing shark blood and shark urine he could create an unbreakable steampipe solder. But Collins is more taken with the circumstances surrounding an otherwise rational man desperately protecting his frail hand, who “conceived that his right hand was made of glass, and therefore kept it carefully enclosed in a stout case, made to fit it accurately.”
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