OF course it was Morrissey – back in the days when he was still a godlike genius rather than wearing his current guise of Daily Mail reader – who once noted that “there’s more to life than books you know, but not much more”.
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged these days. The book as a delivery system has survived surprisingly well into the 21st century. In an age when vinyl is a hipster affectation and cinema has gone digital, the bookiness of books is still a thing.
For proof just pick up a copy of Daniel Gray’s new book, Scribbles In The Margins, a collection of mini essays that cheer on the small pleasures of book reading. The chapter titles will give you a taste of what to expect: Escaping Into An Atlas; Author Dedications; Reading In A Pub; and (my own personal favourite) Smells Of Books, Old And New.
Scribbles In The Margins is also a lovely thing in and of itself. In short, it is, that dread phrase, a gift book. Gray is okay with that. “I’m fine with it being a gift book,” he tells me. “I’m fine with the term ‘toilet read’ because a lot of the reading I get time to do is on the toilet as well.”
We are sitting in a pub in Edinburgh. Gray was born on Teeside and grew up to a village outside York. But this is where he lives now. He still goes down to watch Middlesbrough FC once a month, but he’s been resident in Scotland since 2004.
“I came up here on a night out on a pilgrimage to watch Phil Stamp, a Boro legend, playing for Hearts, and met my wife at 2am at an indie night in the Citrus Club and have never really gone home from that night.”
A pub is an appropriate setting for a chat with Gray because it was in a pub where he first came up with the idea of writing a book about the small pleasures of something he loved in the first place.
“It was one of these Wetherspoons pubs where they buy in hundreds of old hardbacks to make it look scholarly,” he explains. “I was entertaining my then five-year-old daughter – because there’s a lot of good parenting to be done in such places – asking her things like: ‘Fetch daddy a blue book. Fetch daddy a red book.’”
One of the books his daughter Kaitlyn brought him was Delight by JB Priestley. “It was quite an incredible coincidence because JB Priestley’s been one of my favourite writers for years and years. I’m trying to read all of his many novels. I’m about 12 in.”
Delight, though, was a new one to him, a collection of short essays about the things Priestley liked about post-war Britain. “Things like ‘smoking a pipe in bed’ and ‘annoying a civil servant’,” says Gray. “One of those is still commonly enjoyable.
“It seemed such a beautiful format of trying to bring about a bit of happiness again.”
His first attempt, Saturday, 3pm, subtitled 50 Eternal Delights Of Modern Football, was published last year and has become something of a cult item. Now Scribbles In The Margins does the same thing for books. He would like to do one on music too and then he will have covered most of his obsessions.
In person Gray is a mixture of full-on sideburns and full-throttle enthusiasm. He is a full-time writer, broadcaster, Middlesbrough fan, husband to Marisa and father (Kaitlyn is now seven). He is 35 years of age and there are times when he can sound like a character straight out of a Nick Hornby novel.
“There are so many moments where Marisa thinks I’m being really deep and gets concerned about me,” he tells me at one point, “but it’s because someone’s out injured. I find myself lying and saying: ‘Oh, it’s Trump.’ But, really, it’s George Friend’s calf. I’m quite glad it’s not left me though.”
Well, indeed. That obsession explains why Scribbles In The Margins and Saturday, 3pm exist. But it would be wrong to suggest they are nothing more than escapist fare. Look at them in a mirror and you might see them as political with a small P too. Just by speaking up for smallness they are in a way oppositional.
“I feel disillusioned with an awful lot of the world,” Gray admits. “I suppose you either fight it and become quite political about everything
– which I keep to myself – or you react and celebrate what is joyous to you still.
“And football remains joyous to me and books do. And I think books and football have a real importance. In these times of flux things that you can belong to, like a football club and like your collection of books by
your favourite author, are quite important.”
That said, there are moments when the politics rises to the surface. Praising libraries – as he does in one chapter – in a time of austerity is a political act, after all. “I worry massively about libraries and I worry about what doesn’t get counted by the bean counters – the social use. I go every Wednesday and often Thursday to one of my two local libraries to work, to write, but that means I’m not in the head count because I just walk in and say hello and sit there all afternoon.
“There are other people sitting reading the papers that aren’t counted, there are people in there keeping warm. That’s important. It’s sad that that’s important. But it’s the same reason they’ve got food banks.
I fear massively for libraries in cuts. They’re a bit easier to get rid of than a lot of things, but I would rather we saw the importance.”
There speaks a former librarian at the National Library of Scotland perhaps.
These days Gray lives in a colony house in Leith with wife, daughter, eight Ikea Billy bookcases and somewhere in the region of a thousand books (possibly a conservative estimate). “It’s only been in the last
10 years I’ve had that extra bit of cash to buy things that probably won’t get read. That’s when your collection really starts to build.”
How does he organise them? “By genre and alphabetically. I was a librarian and an archivist.” By colour? “No, but that’s a beautiful thing. If I had enough Penguin Classics …”
Do you break spines, dog-ear pages? “Yes. I’ve changed a lot. The librarian in me would have really balked at me now dog-earing. I wouldn’t intentionally break a spine, but I no longer cry if it happens.”
Gray is probably best known these days to STV viewers as the People’s Historian. Appearing on TV after Coronation Street will get you noticed. “I was getting my Boots meal deal the other day and a man started talking to me about Robert Owen.”
A long-term interest in the Spanish Civil War (prompted by his teenage heroes the Manic Street Preachers) inspired his first book proper, Homage To Caledonia, about Scotland’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War (he co-wrote a dictionary of Marxism just after graduating from Newcastle University).
The term “people’s historian” has connotations, hasn’t it? It’s
a political statement too. We live in an age when so much television and publishing is obsessed with the same narrow historical interests. You’re
never far away from a book or a television series about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria, after all.
So here’s the question, Daniel. As viewers or readers do we get fed an essentially conservative version of history?
“Definitely. What I’m trying to do is the history that gets left out,” Gray explains, “whether that’s a big event from someone else’s point of view or a little event that’s forgotten or a small town’s history.
“I think it’s important to return history to its locality. It really bonds a person to their place, which I think is a very important place in these times of flux.
“All these beacons can really help us. We don’t have these great industries to identify with any more. Fewer people go to church, fewer people engage with the trade unions, so if we can have these little pockets of identity, like books like football and like history, yeah, I think it’s important.”
In short, take solace in who and what you love. Daniel Gray has.

Scribbles In The Margins by Daniel Gray is published by Bloomsbury on Thursday, priced £9.99.