At the end of Fahrenheit 451, the hero finds – in a world of destroyed books – a group of people who have become the vanished books by memorising them: a perfect embodiment for the knot of mysteries presented to young Ray by Mr Electrico.
Paul Buck is delightful on the vanishing book trade of Charing Cross Road; Alan Wall is brilliant on the legend of Grub Street; Marina Warner is eloquent on the hag-like names of North London pubs.
That she is a wonderful writer herself is clear but it is ironic – if inevitable – that once the fatherly obstacle had vanished, the book she should find herself writing would be about him.
Jeffrey Toobin, whose book on the 2000 election, like many other books, vanished into the book-buying black hole after 9/11, praised her for standing by him, reassuring him that the sales disaster was unavoidable under the circumstances.
Percy Fawcett's experiences in the Amazon were said to have partly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, but Fawcett's disappearance did not, contrary to a suggestion in the original article - he vanished after the book was published.
His book vanished without trace in his lifetime; resurfaced in the 1920s when it was reappraised by Virginia Woolf, WH Auden and Lawrence as a work of modernism before modernism was invented; became seen as a critique of imperialism and the evil that men do; foresaw the destruction of the natural environment; and ends up supplying the world with a chain of coffee bars.
Vanishing into books, I felt held.
It is easier to vanish into books and the countryside.
Instead, back matter is starting to vanish from books, the one place where it's still very much needed.
The protagonist of the novel discovers that the Voynich, which dates from the same time, is in fact the long-vanished "Book M," whose secrets will, if discovered … well, you know the plot.
