IT IS A VERY ODD feeling signing a pile of one’s own books, not least because it is sometimes hard to believe you wrote it in the first place. Your name’s on it, your photograph is on an inside flap, there’s a bio somewhere which reduces your life to a few short lines, but did you write it? The short answer is: no you didn’t, someone else did. That previous you, or one of them, the one that got left behind the day you delivered the final corrections to the manuscript and kissed goodbye to months and years of thought, effort, occasional grief, moments of (as you briefly thought at the time) genius, longer moments of (as you also thought at the time) believing it’s all rubbish, total knackerdom, indescribable frustration and all the many other angsts that go with a long term creative project.

So when you find yourself months, sometimes years later, with the finished book in your hand, or a whole pile of them, it’s no surprise that you feel a little disengaged from the book into which you’re putting your signature. It feels like the marriage is over and you’ve yet to find a way to be just good friends.

I have never spoken to another author about how they feel about their books, which is also odd since I’ve had just about every other conversation possible with my fellow authors: the problems of research, writing blocks, the best routine, displacement activities, guilt for important things left undone and people ignored, and so on. But their relationship to their own printed books? No, not that conversation.

My relationship with my own was brought into focus this week when I signed a whole lot of copies of Hyddenworld: Spring at Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court off the Charing Cross Road, a shop and a location that all lovers of books should visit from time to time. The shop is very well known among lovers and collectors of signed first editions because it’s co-owner (with Daniel) and managing director, David Headley, is a very good bookseller. Bookselling is a competitive field with narrow margins (as the recent collapse of Borders demonstrates) under electronic threat, so anyone who succeeds at it is doing something very right. What that is, apart from having the right systems in place, starts, continues and ends with one thing: a genuine love of books and story they are able to communicate to others.

The signing takes place in the shop’s tiny basement. We talk, we have a laugh, my pen runs out, he can’t really decide what his favourite book is and nor can I and so many authors’ names trip off his tongue with affection that I begin to realize that he’s met more authors than I’ve eaten chips. He takes a photo of me, and a short video too and we go back upstairs into the light of day. I ask for a card with the address of the shop on and it turns out it’s illustrated with part of a painting that’s hanging right there behind the counter. It turns out that the painting, by Nicola Budd, is of the shop’s 10th Birthday Party, as it spilled out onto the pavement of Cecil Court. David tells that it has everybody else’s image in it but his own.

So here he is, a genuine bookseller, the real thing, a performer of that final magic that needs to take place in the whole shebang of writing books: bringing writer and buyer together… and he’s not in the picture! I take one of him with it and he smiles and another tiny bit of magic takes place. Quite inexplicable really. He’s so warm and full of affection for books that he makes me suddenly feel that maybe I did write my book after all – and that I’m very glad indeed he’s the guy who’s selling it. You’ll find  details of David and Daniel’s shop at http://www.goldsborobooks.com