This week we’ve been highlighting titles on the blog that we and independent booksellers across the country are particularly fond of (and there are quite a few selections, compiled neatly in this brilliant list, if you’d like to take a look.) Sharing our love of these titles is the best way we know how to say Thanks for Shopping Indie this holiday season, and all year long.
What if Queen Elizabeth decided to stroll out of Buckingham Palace and go looking for a bit of fun? That’s what author William Kuhn asked himself, and the result is the new novel, Mrs. Queen Takes the Train.
Kuhn recently wrote an essay about the process of researching and writing the novel for the Powell’s bookstore blog. They’ve graciously allowed us to repost an excerpt from that essay here:
Working in the Royal Archives and Dreaming Up a Novel
Post by William Kuhn
The question of how an ancient institution survived into the modern era, with all its absurdities and anachronisms but also with enduring appeals to service, continuity, and curiosity about the inside of palaces, makes for an intriguing historical problem. Having written about the history of the British monarchy in varieties of nonfiction, I wanted to see whether I could tell that story in a new way.
To write my previous books, I did months of research in the Royal Archives, in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle. There, I discovered a little bit of how the modern monarchy works behind the scenes. My first point of contact was through stationery: heavy paper with a grain and a royal crest engraved in red at the top telling me I couldn’t come to work on papers “belonging to Her Majesty The Queen” while I was still a graduate student. I waited a few years, finished my PhD, and wrote again. This time the response came back with a carefully phrased “maybe,” but only if I specified the papers I wanted to see, which was difficult as the Archives did not publish their holdings. More correspondence crossed the Atlantic before they reluctantly agreed that I could come and look at papers on Victorian ceremonial.
I approached Windsor Castle feeling a little wound up, as our letters to one another had not been, at least by American standards, very friendly. I was waved in by a policeman at the front gate, who had my name on a list, and sent to an interior desk where there was a man in a Windsor uniform, designed by George III and looking faintly preposterous, the colors mainly navy and scarlet. He telephoned the Archives and I was buzzed through a locked door to climb up several hundred stone steps to the Round Tower. Inside, there was thick blue carpet, paneled walls, and to my surprise, helpful archivists wearing skirts over the knee. They showed me to a 19th-century desk where papers were already laid out. The desk was in front of a thin window suitable for medieval warfare, but with a tremendous view of the towns of Windsor and Eton and the surrounding Berkshire countryside, and the terrifically loud noise of jets landing at nearby Heathrow airport. Is this sound what The Queen has to put up with every day? That was my first thought.
Read the rest of the piece over on Powell’s blog.
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