Christopher Fowler

You know, I didn't want to just present this wonderful rosy picture of this great pile of treasure waiting to be picked up because I do have an awful lot of books at home which I won't be reading again.

So I think it's quite a good idea to include a few of those.

Often they tend to be poets.

I mean, there are some shockingly bad poets.

I did include Oscar Wilde's son, Vivian, who wrote appalling dog rule poetry.

I've got one here.

I wish you may have better luck than to be bitten by a duck.

And though he looks so small and weak, he has a very powerful beak.

Well, my copy went into the bin fairly early on.

Edward Lear, he was in everybody's nursery.

I mean, he was one of those people, your nan probably had a copy of an Edward Lear book.

They've got nice illustrations in, but they're limericks.

Limericks, unless they're really dirty, aren't very funny necessarily.

They're not a particularly interesting form of writing anymore.

But Lear was ubiquitous, certainly in the UK, and I don't know how he fared in the rest of the world.

But also writers who became very popular with students.

So I think I did include Richard Bach for Jonathan Livingston Seagull, probably the only book written by M4 Seagulls.

which was made into a terrible movie as well, which just consisted of pictures of seagulls floating around to whiffly-waffly 70s music.

I would like to send people back to their bookcases and think a bit more about those books which have been there hiding in plain sight.

This isn't about rooting out the most obscure books you can find.