From the spring of 1977 I started collecting books about cricket and I've never stopped, though when we moved from Manchester to Cambridge I had to shed a part of the collection, for space reasons. But, anyway, during the first 15 years of this marvellous activity I was also a member of the New Left Review editorial committee, attending meetings in London either fortnightly or monthly, until 1992 when I resigned. What do these two things have to do with one another? This, that the NLR offices were in Carlisle Street and then Meard Street, both of which are just a stone's throw from the Charing Cross Road; and before the NLR meetings - even though I always made sure to arrive punctually whereas many of the London-based comrades did not, so that a meeting supposed to begin at 2.00 pm would typically get going at 3.30 or sometimes later than that - I used, generally, to give myself an hour or two to breeze through the bookshops of Charing Cross Road. Happy hunting that was, and many an item for my collection was acquired there. One of the books I remember finding was John Arlott's The Ashes 1972, and why I particularly remember this is that when I arrived at the NLR offices I was browsing through it and happened to have it open at 'The one-day internationals', the final chapter; 'Not the workers' internationals, I'll warrant,' remarked one of the other members of the committee, who probably wouldn't have taken the book off me if I'd offered it to him for nothing.
Apropos: J.W. Mckenzie, pre-eminent among cricket book dealers, and whom I wrote about many moons ago here, has just issued his Catalogue 174, to mark the firm's 40th anniversary.
