From Neil Bell’s more-than-passingly strange Life Comes to Seathorpe (1946), an indispensible dissident paradigm for literary canonisation.

……….

“A pretty expensive one.”

“Oh, not that sort. Come over here.” Presently, when they stood beside a shelf on which were ranged about a dozen volumes, Ferris took one out, opened it, and said, “This is the sort of rare book I mean. It’s Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. I first read it during the War. Found it in a dug-out. A Jerry dug-out at that. I was a great reader of Wells. Had read everything he’d written so I thought; but I’d never read that, and wondered for a moment if it were his latest. But only for a moment, for it was a Nelson’s Sevenpenny, and I knew enough about books to know it wasn’t a new publication. Later, I discovered it had been written many years earlier, and I was puzzled how I’d missed it. I read it and was fascinated by it. But it wasn’t like anything else of Wells’s. It stood by itself, not only among his other books ,but, I thought, among all books. It was in a way unique. That is what I mean by a rare book. And reading it started me off on my hobby: looking for similar rare books. They may be the one rare book of an author with a long list of what I call ordinary books to his credit: or they may be the one rare book of the very few an author produced; but they all have this in common; their authors never before or afterwards did anything like them; nor any other author either.”

“You’ve certainly hit on an interesting hobby,” Mark said; “at the moment I can think of only one of that unique sort of book. It’s The End of the World, by Geoffrey Dennis.”

“There it is,” smiled Ferris, pointing to a small volume at the end of the row: “it’s my latest find; a magnificent book.”

Mark nodded. “if all your others are as good you’ve got a marvellous collection.”

“Not all,” Ferris said; “one or two are pinchbeck stuff compared with the rest; but most of them, I believe, are not only this rare sort of book, but first rate as literature.” He ran his fingers slowly along the backs of the books. “Listen to these: Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; Beckford’s Vathek; the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody; Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon; Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son; Canton’s The Invisible Playmate; Baron Corvo’s Hadrian the Seventh; Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man; Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company; Helen Beauclerc’s Love of the Foolish Angel; Donn Byrne’s Messer Marco Polo; Ollivant’s Owd Bob; Lamb’s Rosamund Gray; Paltock’s Peter Wilkins; Melville’s Moby Dick; Williamson’s Tarka the Otter; and Grahame’s The Golden Age. That’s the tally so far, and I’ve been nearly twenty years making it. That averages one a year. But I’ve gone years without finding one. Of course it’s a purely personal choice. It entails a lot of reading. But then I do a lot.”

……….

It is ‘in a way unique’. This is the differentia specifica of the new canon and each of its components: its stood-by-itselfness, be it however pinchbeck, among all books.

Two projects are immediately indicated. 

1. The rigorous investigation of every one of Bell’s 21 rare books. 
2. The rigorous consideration of what books each reader’s own rare-books shelf demands to bear. Because the new canon comprises several - it is to be hoped, indeed, a growing number of - microcanons (one for each convert to the paradigm), each of 21 volumes. (Overlap is inevitable & unproblematic.) 

A start can be made on both projects.

1. On the Seathorpe list: There is no more breathtaking perspicacity on that ‘atrocious miracle’ (Borges), The Island of Dr Moreau. Of course it was found lying in the war’s baleful burrows. Where else could that text, Fabianism’s incomparable obituary, more rigorous & terrible a presentiment of the crisis by far than anything its cantankerously bureaucratic utopian author could consciously have formulated, be more appropriately found? There in that fissure - lying surely amid mud-like remnants of its reader - like a bad thing fallen out of the sky of Paschendale, a book-shaped rebuke.
2. On an alternative post-Seathorpe list: 20 will follow, but the inaugural title of a collection inspired by Bell’s hermetic rumination is clear. Quite obvious, in fact: but there are no rarer books, and the choice is not mere simpering nor trite indulgence in metatext. The book, of course, is Neil Bell’s Life Comes to Seathorpe.