Hello and welcome to Backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you

find us in the floral hall in the Yorkshire seaside town of Kiplington in the South

riding. It's a warm August evening in 1932 when we're here for a grand

gala evening organized by the redoubtable Madame Hubbard. The Kiplington Memorial

subscription band have just finished their classical overture. The stage is

suddenly filled with 50 young women where faces painted their hair waved or

frizzed or corkscrewed into ringlets are about to launch into the Song of

Welcome. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where

readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. Sorry, it's such a brilliant

introduction. Kick high ladies, kick high. I've been practising Lily of Laguna.

And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and we're joined

today by two guests, one new and one returning. Tanya Kirk, Anuda McCormack. Hello. Hello.

Our new guest is Tanya Kirk. Tanya is the lead curator of printed heritage

collections, 1601 to 1900 at the British Library. A specialist in literary

collections, she co-curated six major exhibitions including ones on science

fiction, Gothic literature, Shakespeare and the British landscape in

literature. She's also edited four collections of classic ghost stories taken

from books and periodicals in the British Library, for the serious tales of

the weird, the most recent of which is Sunless Solstice, strange Christmas tales

for the longest nights. Tanya, I reckon your job is one that loads of our

listeners would at least like to have a two-week turn at. What is the rarest or

most valuable book that you have held in your two hands? It's probably the first

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