Driff Field

Driff Field, also known as drif field, driffield or dryfeld was a figure in the British book-dealing world.

He started as a booksearcher, obtaining titles to order for private customers, and in 1984 began producing a self-published guide to All The Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. Hugely successful, the guide was nonetheless idiosyncratic and often sarcastic, with entries such as: "the bks [books] are slowly transforming themselves back into rags"; "judging by body temp, shop seems to have expired in 1930"; "I could smell a bargain, pity was I had a cold that day"; "owner has been unwell recently with bad back (possibly caused by turning on the customers once too often)".

He appears as a character in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.

Driff also launched a periodical called Driffs: The Antiquarian and Secondhand Fortnightly, although the magazine was rarely published as frequently as that and folded after 22 issues.

Mercurial and enigmatic, Driff took part at some point in The Cardinal And The Corpse, an occult documentary made by Chris Petit for Channel 4 and also featuring Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, and although photos exist of the man (he fancied he resembled Raymond Carver) little is known about him or his current whereabouts, or even if he's still alive.

Source

Driffield, or The Man Who Thought He Looked Like Raymond Carver, an article by Iain Sinclair published in the UK Independent on Sunday Talk of the Town magazine, 17 August 2003.

See also

• Hay on Wye, a town of second hand bookshops

References

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