He had spent the last week searching for evidence of Dancy’s Music Hall, and in that time he had met Dickensian-visaged gentlemen who kept obscure bookstores in curious little pockets of London and who wore fingerless gloves like Uriah Heep; earnest librarians who offered specialist search services; bright-voiced girls who clearly had no idea of the stock they were selling and wanted him to go on our mailing list, it’s really good; and several sharp-eyed salesmen who attempted to talk him into attending pseudo-sounding auctions for dubious-looking belles lettres and questionable first editions. He had hunted through what felt like hundreds of boxes of old theatre programmes, drawers-full of sepia postcard prints of actors and actresses from the Naughty Nineties and the Roaring Twenties and all the years between, and had sifted innumerable stacks of old and extremely dusty playbills. And then, just when he had been on the verge of giving the whole thing up—you could only take quests so far, for pity’s sake!—in a little narrow street near to St Martin’s Lane he had found the rather grimy bookshop with its ‘All books £1’ table hopefully positioned outside its squeezed-up façade.
