All the books are the same and all the books are good.

I have always had a particular weakness for the utilitarian beauty of a well-made mass-produced object. Hanging on my kitchen wall there is a three-ply stainless steel Le Creuset sauté pan, which, of an occasion, I am wont to hold in my hand and marvel at like I’m Ruskin contemplating the transept at Rouen Cathedral. I am particularly taken by its satisfyingly chunky joints, its balance of solidity and aesthetic grace. More than anything else, though, I am attracted to its inherent democracy. It isn’t a cheap pan as they go, but at a hundred quid or so it isn’t a big outlay, really, for something so luxurious and enduring, something so obviously best in class. I have similar reveries about Anglepoise lamps.

        These sentiments, though, are mere passing fancies compared to my feelings about books. Few other pieces of technology achieve such a perfect synthesis of unimprovable functionality and formal grace that can be bought by anyone for less than a tenner. You want to be able to say of them:

        ‘A book is a book and no amount of money can get you a better book than the one the bum on the corner is reading. All the books are the same and all the books are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.’

        Because this is true of the reading experience. Whichever copy you read all unhappy families will always be unhappy in their own way; Emma will always be handsome, clever and rich; Gatsby will always believe in the green light.

        But it also isn’t true. There is a difference between a numbered leather-bound collector’s edition and a battered second hand paperback, between a signed first edition and a Kindle download. Looking up at my bookshelves, my eye is drawn first to my brilliant yellow boxed edition of Nell Zink’s first two novels. And then to an all-silver paperback version of Catcher in the Rye that I pinched off my mum. And after that to my Quentin Blake-illustrated three-and-six Lucky Jim with its brown pages, orange spine, scribbled marginalia.

        Because that’s the thing about books. They’re not like a piece of fine art – Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or whatever – where any reproduction is always going to be a poor facsimile of the original. But they’re not like cans of Coke, either. They sit enticingly somewhere in the middle, simultaneously the most egalitarian of mediums, and also something that can be particular, covetable, unique.

        Which is a thing to get your head around when it comes to publishing your own book. You have to assume, of course, that it will run to just one printing, that, like the vast majority of books, it will flare up briefly and hopefully brightly, before fading, like almost all publications do, out of print and into obscurity. There’s likely to be just one hardback design, one paperback design. It won’t get endlessly reissued, passed around publishers, reprinted with a new cover each time. Which means to make it particular you need to stage an intervention, which is what I’ve done, hopefully one that feels like a natural expression of the narrative.

        In no small part Peterdown is about fandom, the obsessiveness of it, but also the way that it can be active state of being, something quite different from the passive role of a spectator. Real fans don’t just sit there, watching. They engage. They pay tribute. Sing songs. Write fanzines. They remix and rework. They search out rarities, obsess over curios. More than anything else they collect. For football fans – and they are the fans most obviously represented in Peterdown – this means shirts and scarves, fanzines and match-day programmes, and, to a worldwide army of trapped adolescents, Panini stickers.

        There is no pursuit so gloriously pointless and yet so appealing to the completist’s sense of order and wholeness than the filling of a Panini sticker album. The sight of a recently finished page – all the players present and correct, the team photo stuck neatly in its box, the foil gleaming gorgeously in the corner – is a satisfaction akin to the click of Yeats’ well-made box; everything in the universe feels momentarily as it should be.

        But this is only the case, as anyone who has ever embarked upon the process will attest, because getting there is such an emotional rollercoaster. No other form of collecting is so freighted with drama and suspense. Art collectors, for example, are not asked to buy paintings blind in bundles of six only to discover they’ve just bought themselves a ninth Manet print of Stuart Pearce (there is always in these matters an overabundance of Stuart Pearces), when all they wanted was a Delacroix of Gary Stevens.

        The emotion of Panini stickers – all that longing and nostalgia, the agony, the ecstasy – made them perfect for my plan to create a series of bespoke bookplates, each one numbered and unique, each one – hopefully – covetable and collectable. The marketing team at Little, Brown offered to create me the template, all I had to do was find some stickers. Old ones. Funny ones. Foils and famous players.

        I tried to enter into a couple of open auctions on eBay, not realising that they all move like a ponderous sloth until the last minute of the eleventh hour when a frenzy of bidding leaves the dilletantes in the dust. Dejected, I thought fleetingly about going to a newsagent and buying some contemporary stickers. But the problem with Trent Alexander-Arnold and Mason Mount – with their meticulously calibrated diets, biometric training regimes and superlative personal grooming – is that they’re so obviously elite athletes. Which is just not something that could be said about Steve Archibald or Terry Yorath circa 1980. I’m not saying that Trent and Mason lack charm, simply that they are charming in a different way to Phil Thompson back when he had a full-blown perm and Pat Nevin at the height of his new romantic phase.

        Then I found Simon. My dream supplier with all his abundant riches. The England foil. Brian Clough in his heyday. The Italian Workerists’ favourite Luther Blissett. Glenn Hoddle with a moustache. An astonishingly handsome Sam Allardyce. Socrates at the 82 World Cup.

        Simon’s supply line means I get to have it both ways. Peterdown will exist in the most democratic of forms, cheap and universal. But there will also be a few of them that are particular and I will have the Dion Dublin copy, which no one else will have.