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Xavier Driffield (1948 - 2023), [1] also known as Driff Field, drif field, driffield, dryfeld or simply Drif, was a figure in the British bookdealing world during the 1980s and 1990s and published several editions of the acerbic Driff's Guide to secondhand and antiquarian bookshops in Britain.
Driffield started as a booksearcher, obtaining titles to order for private customers, and in 1984 began producing a self-published guide to All The Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain [2] (also titled In Quest of the Perfect Book : The Antiquarian Bookshop Catalogue & Directory). [3] Hugely successful for its wit and wide coverage of the field, the guide was nonetheless idiosyncratic and often sarcastic, [4] with entries such as: "the b[oo]ks are slowly transforming themselves back into rags"; "judging by body temp, shop seems to have expired in 1930"; "I could smell a bargain, pity was I had a cold that day"; "owner has been unwell recently with bad back (possibly caused by turning on the customers once too often)".
His Guide introduced a number of widely-quoted acronyms, including "ETGOW (easy to get on with), "NSOC (not strong on condition)", "FARTS (follows around recommending the stock)" and "WYLAH (watches you like a hawk)". [5] Among the entries in the Guides's Terminology chapter was "book fairy" describing people who sell books at book fairs.
Driffield also launched a periodical called Driffs: The Antiquarian & Second Hand Book Fortnightly, although the magazine was rarely published as frequently as that and folded after 22 issues. [6]
The Guide went through at least five editions, dated 1984, 1987, 1991, 1992, and 1995. In the third he seemed to refer to a spell of mental illness after the publication of the second, though Francis Wheen thought this an intentionally misleading reference. [2]
Although photos existed of Driffield [7] (he fancied he resembled Raymond Carver), for a long time little was known about him or his current whereabouts, or even if he was still alive, until 2014, when he was the defendant in a trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court, accused of indecent assault, indecency with a child and rape. [8] [1] [4] [9] In November 2014 Driffield was found not guilty on all the charges. [10]
He stood trial under the name Xavier Driffield, although previously some sources had cited his name (seemingly erroneously) as "B.C.M. Driffield", others as "Colin Driffield" and yet others as "David Richard Ian Frederick Field". [2] He claimed to have been brought up in Newbury, England. In 1991, Francis Wheen considered that he "seems to be in his forties". [2]
Drif appears as a character in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. He appeared in the 1992 documentary The Cardinal And The Corpse, made by Chris Petit for Channel 4 and also featuring Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair. [11]
Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus, which then merges into Tottenham Court Road. It leads from the north in the direction of Charing Cross at the south side of Trafalgar Square. It connects via St Martin's Place and the motorised east side of the square.
Larry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975), which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations. He was also a prominent book collector and bookseller.
Francis James Baird Wheen is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
Montolieu is a commune in the Aude department in southern France.
Iain Sinclair FRSL is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Original Sin is a 1994 detective novel by English writer P. D. James, part of her Adam Dalgliesh series. It is set in London, mainly in Wapping in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, and centers on the city's oldest publishing house, Peverell Press, headquartered in a mock-Venetian palace on the River Thames.
Chris Petit is an English novelist and filmmaker. During the 1970s he was Film Editor for Time Out and wrote in Melody Maker. His first film was the cult British road movie Radio On, while his 1982 film An Unsuitable Job for a Woman was entered into the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival. His films often have a strong element of psychogeography, and he has worked frequently with the writer Iain Sinclair. He has also written a number of novels, including Robinson (1993).
Martin Stone was an English guitarist and rare book dealer. He was a longtime resident of Fingest in Buckinghamshire and, latterly, Paris.
Brian Hinton, MBE is an English poet and musicologist. In June 2006 he was honoured in H. M. the Queen's Birthday Honours List with an MBE for services to the Arts.
Andrew Annandale Sinclair FRSL FRSA was a British novelist, historian, biographer, critic, filmmaker, and a publisher of classic and modern film scripts. He has been described as a "writer of extraordinary fluency and copiousness, whether in fiction or in American social history".
David Seabrook was a British crime writer and journalist.
Compendium Books was an independent bookstore in London specialising in experimental literary and theoretical publications, from 1968 until its closure in 2000. The Guardian's John Williams described it as "Britain's pre-eminent radical bookstore. Whether you wanted books on anarchism, drugs, poststructuralism, feminism or Buddhism, Compendium was the place to go."
The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.
Rumour at Nightfall is the third novel by Graham Greene, published in 1931. Like his second novel, The Name of Action, it failed to repeat the success of his first novel, The Man Within; Greene was to suppress both his second and third novels.
Scorpion and Felix, A Humoristic Novel is the only comedic fictional story to have been written by Karl Marx. Written in 1837 when he was 19 years old, it has remained unpublished. It was likely written under the influence of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.
Ronald Vere Tooley was an English map dealer, an authority on early maps and cartographers, a noted compiler of catalogues on maps, cartography and antiquarian books, author of Maps and Map-makers, and founder of the Map Collectors' Circle which published a series of monographs on historical cartography in the period 1963-1975. He is considered the founder of the antiquarian map trade.
The Monkey's Paw is an independent used bookstore in Toronto, Ontario, Canada known for its eclectic, arcane, and absurd books, and for the Biblio-Mat, a random book vending machine.
Kevin Jackson was an English writer, broadcaster, filmmaker and pataphysician.
Eva Collet Reckitt was the founder of the left-wing bookshop Collet's on Charing Cross Road, London, in 1933.
Deighton, Bell, & Company was a British firm of booksellers and publishers located in Cambridge, England. It enjoyed a long and close association with the University of Cambridge. In 1978 it celebrated two centuries in the book business and, along with two other booksellers Heffers and Bowes & Bowes, the firm contributed to "making Cambridge a prestigious centre of bookselling".
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