Manchester, Part Two

I BOUGHT A KOBO E-READER for this trip and promised to buy no books. We have made trips to England in the past where I ended up shipping home a couple of cartons of acquisitions at great expense, but this was before you could easily find such things on an e-site. But then I bought Eric Schlosser’s “Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market” at the Hidcote bookshop and Moz passed along three books – two of them by mystery writer Andrea Camilleri, featuring his eccentric Inspector Salvo Montalbano (but what literary detective isn’t eccentirc these days?), alongside Alastair Cooke’s “Letters from America,” so I figured what the hell and walked to Paramount Books our second day in Manchester while Susan lay immobilized in our hotel room, felled by a hookah-adjacent headache.

Lobby of the Manchester Indigo

Paramount is what a shop of used books should be, with organized sections in each of the rooms alongside cascades of the yet-to-be-shelved. During the height of my bookshop-browsing days, when Manhattan’s South Fourth Avenue sported a zigzag of worthy emporia, I was collecting fiction. Now I’m more interested in vintage theater and music books, with nothing particular in mind. I hoped that this would be an occasion to engage a bookseller in conversation, bridging our divergent origins with a shared interest, but nothing doing. The elderly fellow working the sales counter offered not even a greeting, never mind some chat.

Sir Charles Cochran was a British theatrical producer, best know for presenting a number of Noël Coward’s best-known plays as well as musicals by Cole Porter and jerome Kern; he also managed the Albert Hall for a dozen years. On the shelf was his 1941 reminiscence titled “Cock-a-Doodle-Do.” I weighed it in my hands. I riffled through it. It was tempting. Had the shop felt friendlier, I would have bought it. I recall a price of £15. As with any appealing book left behind and any uneated dessert, the thought of it haunted me. Back home, I found a copy online for under ten dollars, with the un-noticed bonus that it was autographed by Cochran. It proved to be a dull recitation of dates and name-drops.

Moz had cooked up a full day of touring, but sympathetically postponed it to the following day. This allowed a semi-recovered Susan the opportunity to take a mid-afternoon tour of Chetham’s Library, which boasts of being the oldest public reference library in the English-speaking world, open since 1653. It was a very short walk from the hotel, but I’d already worn out what was left of my legs stumbling to the Paramount and back, so I devoted that portion of the afternoon to coffee and the Schlosser book.

Susan awaits the return of Marx
and Engels to their table.

The library building dates to the 15th century, and went through a number of religious iterations before Humphrey Chethan acquired it and put it on its current path. Susan reports that, as the tour group gathered outside the library building, a fellow tourist introduced himself as a visitor from China, excited to see the famous room wherein Marx and Engels hung out, publishing “The Condition of the Working Class in England” in 1845, inspired, in part by the view from the window beside the table they favored. As the tour guide explained when the table was reached, there were encampments of the terribly poor just outside, which moved those observers to create a more favorable approach to society. In 1848 they followed this book with “The Communist Manifesto,” and Engels helped finance Marx’s work on “Das Kapital.”

That table sports a small pile of books, reproductions of the volumes favored by the famed revolutionists. The rest of the books in the library are protected by gates in front of the shelves, reminding us that socialism always has its limits. Some of those gates are tagged withg small white cards, the result of a recent project to call attention to the number of vintage books that were written by women. And, while people are welcome, rodents are not. Which is why some of the heavy doors that lead elsewhere sport small holes at floor level, holes large enough to admit tha cats that were used for mouse control. The library notes that this system was used at least through the 1960s, but coyly refrains from admitting whether it’s still used today.

Shambles Square

Which I can understand. I worked in a restaurant kitchen in the 1970s, and we had a resident cat who made short work of rats and mice. But we had to hide the beast whenever the health inspector paid a call. We believed it was more ecologically sound than toxic chemicals.

The history tour continued when we met Moz and Mohammed late that afternoon for a visit to Shambles Square. At its core is a 16th-century building that became a pub in 1862, eventually named the Old Wellington Inn, and what’s left of it is one of the only remaining Tudor buildings in the city. Its neighbor, Sinclair’s Oyster bar, is a relative youngster, dating merely to the late 17th century. The collective moniker for these and other nearby buildings was Shambles, itself once denoting a street of butchers but eventually gaining the usage we know now. Thanks to intrusive building development – and a bombing in 1996 – the Shambles array was moved about 300 metres north to become Shambles Square.

Baccala mantecato

We had our round of beers at Sinclair’s Oyster House, which was packed. One of the patrons yielded her seat to me, which is the final ingredient to once and for all signifiy that I am irreversibly elderly, but I ended up beside a pleasant young fellow named Andrew, a Manchester resident whose recent visit to New York assured him that it’s not a bad city to visit at all. But he’s still loyal to his home turf.

Had we been mere tourists here, we’d never have found Cibus Pizza in nearby Levenshulme. But that’s not far from where Moz lives, and he was eager to introduce us to this restaurant. He’s known to the chef there, a man who joined us at our table later in the evening. While Moz and Mohammed explored the pizza side of the menu, Susan opted for a starter of arugula salad (known there as rocket) topped with parmesan shavings, and I chose baccala mantecato, which tops slices of sourdough with whipped salt cod. There’s enough of an acquired-taste aspect to baccala that I’m safe from my wife’s usual food theft. (She calls it “sharing.” I’m too obsessive about eating to succumb to such generosity.) Susan’s ravioli al sugo presented the pasta squares filled with ricotta and topped with a toothsome pork ragu, while my risotto all’asparago featured carnaroli rice, a stubbier grain than arborio that produces a creamier risotto, topped with white asparagus and flavored with Marsala wine and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. There’s an add- sausage option. I took it. Delicious.

Tomorrow would be our tour of the Peak District, but I’ll save that for Manchester, Part Three.