The Albion Beatnik Bookstore website (or how to change a light bulb in a tight space on a ladder)

The web page of the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, based once in Oxford, then Sibiu, always neo-bankrupt, now closed for business: atavistic and very analogue, its musings and misspells on books and stuff.

Colin MacInnes & London’s Jazz Age

Colin MacInnes, who died in 1976, is a fascinating novelist. He identified both the rise of the rebel teenage generation and an emergent multicultural London. He was openly gay at a time when to be so was an illegal and social taboo; he wrote about the urban decay, racial conflict, drugs, bisexuality and anarchy that permeated Notting Hill in the 1950s, the scene of race riots in 1958. This melting pot of youth and black immigrant culture is the backdrop to his early classics – City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr Love and Justice (1960) – all here in stock. Each is a vibrant read of a London when Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes were yet to give way to a 1960s rock culture.

A documentary film on Ronnie Scott’s Soho jazz club, a quotation from Colin MacInnes is used to set the tone early in…

cityspades absolutebeginners lovejustice

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This entry was posted on 1st December 2016 by in books, Colin MacInnes, Uncategorised and tagged , , .

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