The Artless Flat-Hunter by Joanna Jones – #ABookADayInMay – Day 8

One of my favourite tropes in a book is house-hunting – particularly when it is done for comic effect. There is something so delightfully funny about the contrast between an estate agent’s exaggerated, mendacious positivity and some melancholy would-be homeowners looking at mouldy wallpaper and subsidence. Glorious. So I didn’t know anything about Joanna Jones when I stumbled across The Artless Flat-Hunter (1963) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago, but this title and this cover meant I couldn’t resist. Having recently enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Finders, Keepers, it feels relevant to report that it had a penned dedication (‘November 1963. To Jill, all my love, Peter’) and, curiously, a clipped photo of John F. Kenndy from a newspaper article – possibly in the wake of his assassination, in the same month? It’s one of those faux instructional guides that were all the rage in the 1930s, so it’s nice to see it continuing into the 1960s – and basically satirises the whole process of finding,…