Nostalgia – it wasn't what it is

The almost mythical Top Cat book, from a recent ebay listing.

Sometime around 1974, I started collecting books. Not proper books, mind. The books I was interested in all owed their existence to various television series and films stretching back over the last decade or so, and I was soon surprised to discover how many TV programmes had spawned their own literary spin-offs (I use the word ‘literary’ in its broadest possible sense).

I’d been given annuals as christmas presents since the age of two: the Daily Mirror ‘Baby’s Own’ being the first of these, with a printing date of 1962. This was a simple picture book and ABC, but more sophisticated fare was just around the corner. At Christmas 1963, I was given the first Fireball XL5 Annual, and despite the fact that I could do no more than look at the pictures, this quickly became a favourite. It lost its covers and many pages over the next couple of years – I have an idea I may have wanted to read it in the bath – but even in its ruinous condition, I hung onto it.

About four years later – a lifetime, at that age – I experienced a Proustian rush of nostaglia at the sight of a clean, complete copy on the bookstall at a school jumble sale. My mum, for perverse reasons, would not countenance allowing a secondhand book in the house, and I can still remember how I felt watching someone else waltz off with it. I can even remember his name: now there’s a childhood trauma you don’t often hear about.

Around the same time, I was also seeking a replacement for another book from early childhood: one of the Golden Books series from the USA, handsomely-illustrated small softback reprints, many of which featured characters licensed from Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. The book in question was Top Cat, and like Fireball XL5, had lost its covers. When I saw someone at school with a complete copy, it set me off on a quest to find one. By this stage, although other ‘Little Golden Books’ were still available, their Top Cat editon had gone out of print. In one of my earliest school work books, from around the end of 1966, the story was spelled out in simple, laconic childhood language (in response to a request to write about what we’d done at the weekend): ‘We went to get a Top Cat book, but they hadn’t got one.’

Fast forward (slightly) to circa 1971. I had literally no idea where I might look for a replacement Fireball XL5 Annual. Frustratingly, all three of the subsequent editions were still relatively intact, making the spineless number one look decidedly out of place on the shelf. The only secondhand book store that I was aware of looked fearsomely fuddy duddy and academic, and no one had the nerve to enquire within. A Shakespeare folio or Dr. Johnson, maybe, but a kiddie’s annual from a couple of years ago. You wouldn’t ask, would you?

Then, via a school friend, my brother managed to borrow a copy. Borrow, mark you – the owner wanted it back. Nevertheless, I had access to a complete copy and so, insanely, I set out on the ludicrous task of ‘faking’ the missing cover and pages – something I had already attempted to do from memory. This work, which one might liken to a juvenile, felt-tip pen version of monastic illumination, dragged on into 1972, when – my first attempts being deemed unsatisfactory (by myself, always my own severest critic) – I was doing it all over again, as evidenced by my diary entry for Sunday, April 23 of that year: ‘Continue re-faking Fireball XL5 Annual. Finish front cover and inside cover…’

On the basis of this, I contend that not only did I invent pop culture nostalgia, I also invented the concept of remastering and restoring time-worn artefacts... probably.

It wasn’t until nearly ten years later that I finally acquired my own copy of this ‘literary’ holy grail. As for Top Cat, the hunt having drawn a blank, I forgot all about it until one day, about twelve years ago, when an ebay search located a complete copy in America. It wasn’t exactly the same as the copy I’d had, which was a softback reprint in the ‘Happy Time’ series, but it was the long-lost Top Cat book, and closure at last to a quest that started way back in 1966.