Shadows

A Library-Friday book blip. ‘A Cage of Shadows’ by Archie Hill. I was going to blip the inside flyleaf showing this particular volume’s interesting life in libraries – one which somewhat mirrors its authors life in literature in that it had a fairly steady degree of popularity through the second half of the seventies, only got read a few times in the eighties and nineties and ended up in the Reserve basement about twelve years ago. I think I may be the first person to have read it since 2005. It’s a really good, if somewhat bleak memoir about growing up in the Black Country in the thirties and the author’s subsequent problems with alcoholism, prison, mental hospital and rough-living. Plus it’s the only book I’ve read recently that references my own birthplace of Bloxwich:
“The Black Country is no part of Birmingham, never has been. Draw a line from Stourbridge to West Bromwich, over to Walsall and Bloxwich, on to Wolverhampton and back into Stourbridge – then all the land enclosed inside that boundary is the Black Country. An area filled with deep cultures and rare craftsmanship…”

Decsribed as a “lost classic” the original version of the novel was pulped shortly after its publication after a libel case brought by the author’s mother (all references to her were apparently excised in reprints.) Luckily no-one thought to mention it to Nottinghamshire Libraries, and this is a first edition. It’s just been republished by the Tangerine Press in its original form, which is how I came to hear of it (Rough Trade are stocking the new edition), and hopefully it’ll have an upsurge in interest as a result – too late for Archie, I’m afraid, who committed suicide in the late eighties…