Christopher Fowler

Thank you very much for letting me be on the show, Kate.

This, it started really when I was very young that I would look at my parents' bookshelves and, you know, parents tend to have a sort of shelf you're not allowed to read as a child and they're forbidden fruit, aren't they?

And you want to reach the top shelf and get down the books your dad's been reading or your mum's been keeping to herself.

After a while, I noticed that those books slowly vanished, were given away or lent out or just got rid of.

And you couldn't get hold of them anymore.

And I was rather interested to wonder why so many authors who sold millions, popular authors who got paperbacks that sold into millions around the world, why they simply disappeared and are very hard to find now.

So I started tracking down some of those books and reading them.

I carried on doing that for a long time until I was working at a newspaper called The Independent on Sunday.

And the literary editor there was looking for a column.

And I said, well, you know, I'd love to continue looking for these authors in the form of a newspaper column.

And I did that for 10 years.

That's a very good question.

The first point is that I need to not have read them.

Secondly, I run the name past a small group of friends.

I pick up a book and I first of all see if the book is good and interesting.

Then I run their name past friends and if the friends more than 50% say, no, haven't heard of them or if they say, oh yeah, everybody knows that author and I say, well,

What have you read by them?

And then they can't name a book.

Then that's one that goes on my forgotten author pile.

That happens a lot because you think, I was very particularly interested in putting down the names that we've slightly become probably over familiar with and therefore haven't bothered reading.