Books are built on books and other mediums, be they art, music, film, or TV. That is both an obvious and, apparently, not-so obvious thing to say. We’ve known many newly-hatched writers who so feared someone might ‘steal’ their original idea they were reluctant to get their work critiqued so they might become better writers. What they had forgotten is that their book, even their oh so original idea, was built upon the half-forgotten memories, joy, fearfulness, and accumulated tilth of every book they had read.

Before we started writing this piece we thought of titling it Foundation Books, but that would be a mistake. Great buildings often have a foundation stone, perhaps bearing the name of a notable who laid it and a date, but a foundation stone is a misnomer. It isn’t the origin and the building isn’t built upon it. The load is shared among many stones and before the foundation stone there was the hardcore, and the trench and the shovel that dug the trench and the hand that held the shovel. But we can talk about cornerstones: the stones that mark out the plan of the building. And by no means all those stones were books.

As for the first book that ever existed, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are contenders, as is the Jewish Torah and The Epic of Gilgamesh. The first novel in English is said to be Robinson Crusoe, but Cervantes, writing in Spanish, wrote Don Quixote a hundred years earlier, and isn’t Beowulf a novel in all but rhyme? But all of those titles had a pre-existence as oral accounts, whether Daniel Defoe sitting in the Llandoger Trow in Bristol (supposedly, and it’s a pub, not a boat) as Alexander Selkirk recalled his years castaway on Más a Tierra in the Pacific, or in the minds of the Ancient Greek orators performing tales of Achilles and Odysseus seven or eight centuries before the birth of Christ.

The origin of books may lie as long ago as 200,000 years when humans first developed language. Or even in the 20 million year old dance of a bee. First things are hard to find.

It’s easier to adopt Sir Terry Pratchett’s attitude to what lies beneath The Great A’Tuin, the giant star turtle supporting four elephants and Discworld on its back. Under A’Tuin is said to be another turtle and under that another turtle, and then it’s turtles all the way down. So it is with books. Sir Terry based the cosmology of Discworld on Chinese, Hindu, and Native American mythology: under a book is always another book.

But we can identify the cornerstones beneath Avebury Press. Or we can try to for no doubt those we remember are like the nunataks of the far north: isolated mountain peaks projected through an icecap of  murmurs and whispers left by much we have forgotten.

For the moment, the following is simply a list. Like memory, it’s not neatly ordered and it’s subject to change. In the world of Avebury Press each work provokes memories and associations and its influence on our work lives on.

The Cornerstones

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916 is the novel that turned me into a writer: made me, at age seventeen, want to write something for myself and not at the behest of a teacher. What I wrote isn’t important; what matters is that I wanted to write. It was the first novel I read where the main character, the hero, was someone I recognised as being like me. Uncertain, bemused, misunderstood, failing to comprehend the whys and wherefores of the world in which I was expected to function, economically and socially, but also aware that I was in an unknowable way, different. With hindsight, that unknowable difference was that I, like Stephen Dedalus saw the world differently to those who expected me to join in with them.

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Arnold Böcklin’s painting, Isle of the Dead, inspired Sergei Rachmaninoff to compose his wonderful tone poem of the same name and the fickle nature of inspiration is my subject, as, I suspect, it will be in many of these Cornerstone pieces. Rachmaninoff composed ‘Isle of the Dead’ after seeing a black and white reproduction of Böcklin’s painting in Paris in 1907 but subsequently, on seeing the original painting, he was unimpressed and remarked that it would probably not have inspired him to compose. Such is fate.

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I must have known of T S Eliot ‘s ‘The Waste Land’, (1922) and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), for why else would I have tuned in to Sir Alec Guinness reading the poems on BBC Radio 4? Nevertheless, it is Sir Alec’s rendition that I remember. It was my introduction to Eliot’s poetry and to the art of reading aloud. It was an art I had been listening to as long as I could remember, perhaps beginning with BBC’s Jackanory in the early 60s, but had never fully appreciated until I heard Sir Alec reading ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’. What year I heard it escapes me, though I know I was in my flat in Shropshire which places it to the mid-80s to early 90s. The internet is no help on this, other that telling me Sir Alec recorded it in the 1950s and Eliot approved of his reading. Two facts I did not know until now.

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Conventional wisdom, of the kind routinely and crushingly delivered to newbie writers attempting something different, tells you that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s wonderful 2004 debut novel, should not exist. Well, it does, and she got a £1million advance and it was a bestseller and then a TV series. It’s also my favourite novel.

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J. K. Rowling is a hot-topic for all the wrong reasons, but I owe The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third novel (or to be exact the film version from 2004) in her Harry Potter series a huge favour. Quite simply, it had such a glaring fault in the narrative it inspired me to do something better and that something became This Iron Race. There, I said it. I’m better than JK Rowling. Bite me, see if I care.

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Folklore of the kind revealed in Faeries, by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, 1978, is the place where mythology enters real life. It becomes concrete instead of abstract, something you must bargain with, perhaps for your life. Its denizens are not in a book, but are waiting behind every tree, under every stone, in every river and stream. Today Alan Lee is known by all fans of Lord of the Rings, both in literature and film, but back in the 1980 when I bought my copy of Faeries from a shop on London’s Faringdon Road while skiving off lectures on insurance law, he, and Brian Froud, were completely unknown to me. Quite simply, this book opened my mind to the existence of another world.

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Pogles’ Wood, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, Smallfilms, 1965

Ah… the lasting allure of childhood television. I don’t think we – men especially and writers most of all – ever quite leave their childhood behind. It follows us, or perhaps it leads us like the Pied Piper playing a pretty tune and our imaginations are forever guided by it. Few British children’s TV makers had the lasting influence of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin and ‘Pogles’ Wood’ is the first of their works I saw. Faeries opened my adult mind to another world, but that world was already there in ‘Pogles’ Wood’.

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Robin of Sherwood, Richard Carpenter, Harlech Television, 1984

What Pogles’ Wood did for childhood me Robin of Sherwood did for twenty-something me. It was, among other things, sexier, darker, a more sinister blend of myth and history with figures like Herne interacting with the human dwellers of Sherwood Forest. It’s that blending, that unsettling mix of real and fantastical that lingers, and that it was a very popular series only reinforced its appeal.

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Unlike almost all the works and titles here, I have not read Luke Rhinehart’s 1971 novel The Dice Man. It sat on my parent’s bookshelves throughout my childhood and while it wasn’t out-of-bounds (my parents were lenient in my reading choices) I sort of knew it was strange territory. So why is it in this list? Partly because it had the whiff of strangeness about it and partly because the central idea of someone giving up their life to the roll of the dice appeals, both to my writing and to my sense of what life really is.

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Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis, 1952

C. S. Lewis troubles me. In my childhood I hugely enjoyed the Narnia series but rereading them as an adult was a hard task. I cannot see through the stilted prose and cannot forgive his manipulation and cruelty towards his characters, or the racism of some of the books. But the ideas… Oh yes, his ideas are wonderful and one or two of them have crept into my own books.

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The Outsider, Albert Camus, 1942

A very recent addition to my Cornerstones as I only read it last year. Like all the great novels I’ve read, it redefined for me what a novel can be made from and what it can do and seemed to rewrite the rules of writing in the process. We are told the heroes in our books should be people of agency and action: characters who make the story around them. But Meursault, the hero of The Outsider, is not like that. He seems to be as inert as a man in a coma, but Camus makes both his lack of engagement with the world and his plight enthralling and believable. It would be a strange man, dare I say it, who did not recognise at least part of himself in Meursault.

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My mother didn’t appreciate it when I recited Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem ‘This Be The Verse’ to her. Doesn’t stop it being true.

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The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Jean Paul Carriere and Pierre Reynal, Franco London Films, 1964

I have tried and twice failed to read Defoe’s novel. For all its place as the first novel in English, Defoe’s Crusoe is a whingeing God-botherer forever bemoaning his plight. At least, that’s my reading of it: yours may differ. So, this sixty-year old TV series is my Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe did give me one good idea: in the first edition of Robinson Crusoe and in all the editions of Moll Flanders printed in Defoe’s lifetime he is not acknowledged as the author with both works supposedly written by the titular character.

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Children of the Stones, Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, Harlech Television, 1977

Perhaps it’s the mysticism of the Welsh, but Harlech television was responsible for quite a lot of my youthful inspiration. Children of the Stones dates from a decade before Robin of Sherwood and was much more children’s TV than the adult/adolescent audience of ‘Robin’, but nevertheless it again blended the real with the ancient and paranormal. I first visited Avebury on a family holiday in 1975 (aged 14) and would not call there again for a decade, so Children of the Stones was my introduction to Avebury as a place of mystery. A role it serves in This Iron Race and Nevil’s Reluctant Ascent and from which this website takes its name.

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Sapphire and Steel, Peter J. Hammond, ATV/Central Television, 1979-82

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

Ah, yes. You’re either the sort of person who is drawn in by that or you’re not. My father was not. He said I only watched Sapphire and Steel to ogle Joanna Lumley. He was wrong then and wrong many other times. Sapphire and Steel was the flipside to series like ‘Robin of Sherwood’ and ‘Children of the Stones’. Like them it melded the paranormal with the everyday but with a science fiction rather than fantasy twist. It was also cryptic, mysterious, eschewing action for a creeping unease often bordering on horror. It was brilliant. Just ignore that most of those ‘medium atomic weights’ aren’t actually elements.

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In The Looking Glass, John Fortune, John Wells, John Bird, BBC2, 1978

A surreal blend of adventure, fantasy, comedy, and song that utterly enchanted me in and probably mystified everyone else. Alas, it’s one of those series that has completely vanished with no repeats and the tapes erased so its brilliance is something you will have to take my word for.

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Still to come on Cornerstones.