Like their high-street equivalents, these idiosyncratic adornments to local shopping are a disappearing species.
Photograph: Corbis/Aliaksandr Ilyukevich
Survivor ... the Quinto bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road.
For some 17 years, until November 2009, my associate Peter Grogan and I kept a bookshop (of sorts) in Pied Bull Yard in Bloomsbury, which some of you may recognize as the back entrance to the London Review bookshop. We had beautiful modern premises, previously designed as an art gallery, in which our small stock of rather good books was discreetly displayed in a glass-fronted breakfront bookcase and a vitrine with a few notable things – plus a safe with a few even better ones, and a 17th-century carved chest full of literary manuscripts. Looking in through the wraparound windows, you would see us sitting at our desks in a comfortable environment, with almost enough books to fill a bookcase in an average sitting room.
We didn't get much passing trade – Pied Bull Yard is an end destination – but now and again someone would pop their head through the door inquisitively.
"Is this a bookshop?" they would ask. Sometimes the tone was disinterestedly curious ("If it is, can I come in?") but occasionally it had an odd hostility to it. "Is this a bookshop?"
"No," one or the other of us would say, "not exactly."
"What is it then?"
"Well," we would explain, "it's a sort of book gallery. We have good things, unique material, and we do not have all that much of it because it is expensive and hard to find. And sometimes it even sells."
One American visitor listened to this incredulously.
"You guys actually make a living at this?"
We acknowledged that we made a modest profit now and again. He seemed genuinely relieved to hear it.
"Good luck!" he said, departing without looking at the expensive books.
That was years ago. Today, though, he might have asked if we were a bookshop because he had hardly ever seen such a thing. Secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are undoubtedly an endangered species. It used to be the case that, travelling round the country, most market towns and villages would have a used bookshop, where a grumpy and omniscient proprietor would hold court, and it might be fun to browse or to hunt for bargains. You'll remember the sort of place: bit cramped and dusty, with shelves categorised by type of book: old sets, antiquarian books in tired leather bindings, separate sections for poetry, travel books, art books and catalogues for long-forgotten shows, perhaps a (locked) glass case with some "rare" books in it, usually a back room in which the dealer kept his uncatalogued books, recent acquisitions, and a handful of the most expensive items, which he guarded as if it were Fort Knox. Dealers were admitted on receipt of a business card, but "the London boys" were mistrusted and made to feel as if they were casing the joint.
They were. In those days, dealers went on "scouting" trips, and might spend weeks on the road, driving from one such shop and village to the next, building up their inventory, taking advantage of knowing that little bit more than the local proprietors did. In the 1970s and 80s, when my family went on holiday to Cornwall or the Lake District, a tour of the local shops would almost always cover our expenses. On trips to America I would count it as a failure if I couldn't pay my way within the first two days. It was genuinely fun, and I regarded it then – I was still a full-time academic and only a part-time dealer – as a free holiday.
I still feel this way, which is amateurish of me. Except that scouting no longer works. The internet has killed it. Sites like abebooks.com list more than 100m used books, of varying desirability and price. Every dealer now knows how much the other dealers are asking for their wares, with a resulting homogenisation of prices. The result is that books previously regarded as genuinely rare – the first editions of Catcher in the Rye or On the Road, say, turn out to be remarkably common, though still – in apparent disregard of the law of supply and demand – expensive. As I write there are 26 first editions with dust wrappers of Catcher on abebooks, and 28 of On the Road, most of which have been there for many months. At an average US rare book fair, you will see enough of these books to suppose them common. They never seem to sell. Maybe ubiquitous is the wrong word. Perhaps they are immortal.
There is another factor affecting sales of secondhand books, and it has hugely ironic overtones. Because, if my pop-in collector had ever seen an English secondhand bookshop, it would probably have had Oxfam written over the doorway. Good thing, right? I have often used Oxfam bookshops both to buy secondhand paperbacks, and to get rid of the extraneous books that seem to clog the arteries of my reading life, happy in the knowledge that somewhere in the world a dispossessed and hungry person is likely to be a beneficiary. Indeed, I still do this, but with some hesitation. Not merely because their range of stock is limited and the benevolent volunteers frequently know little about books, but because for every Oxfam bookshop that opens, an established secondhand shop in the same area will be under threat. Dozens of such shops, many of longstanding service to their communities, have closed under this pressure, their generally unemployable proprietors released into the community like ex-psychiatric patients.
How can they compete with a shop that has access to free stock and labour, that prices books at lower levels, and is registered as a charity? It's not a level playing field. In my local town of Salisbury, an excellent and well-run local bookshop recently closed for just this reason.
The internet has also changed the nature of buying new books, as online sites increasingly swipe sales from the major chains. Why go to your local Waterstone's or Borders (RIP), much less your excellent local independent? I still try to use local bookshops, and you may too, but a generation is rising for whom shopping involves browsing online, and to whom the very idea of a bookshop has a faintly anachronistic odour.
It's hard to figure out what to do. I know what I want, and what seems desirable. I love cities and towns and villages with good independent booksellers, both new and secondhand. It adds to the richness and texture of life as surely as supporting your local greengrocers rather than going to a supermarket on the outskirts of town. But Waitrose, let's be fair, is in most respects better than your corner shop. It is cheaper, has better and more interesting goods and produce, and allows you to do all your shopping in one go. In the same way, Amazon provides a great service at a great price, and Oxfam bookshops tend to be cheaper and morally more uplifting than the disappearing local secondhand dealers.
What to decide? As with many perplexing moral issues: a bit of this, and a bit of that. Use the corner greengrocer for urgent necessities, and the supermarket for the weekly shop. Use Amazon when you need to, but get down to the LRB when you can. Donate your unwanted books to Oxfam, but buy from the local dealer. Salves your conscience a little. But it doesn't work. In 20 years' time, I suspect, there will be neither corner shops nor local secondhand bookshops and independent new booksellers. I won't be here to miss them, and my children will hardly remember what they looked like.
©guardian.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.