Inspiring Older Readers
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner by Bill Rees
There’s no denying that this is an odd little book and I might not really have noticed it were it not for the fact that, like me, the author is a graduate of Bangor University in North Wales, and, like me a book obsessive for who the thrill of the chase is the magical part of collecting. Rees however has taken his love of books a step further than I ever have in that he’s tried to open and sustain (unsuccessfully as it turns out) a bookshop in Bangor and he’s spread his book trawling onto the Continent as well. He describes himself now as living ‘between Bangor and Montpellier’ making a ‘precarious’ living with bits of translation ‘as well as selling the occasional book’.
The book is structured rather like a series of diary entries that slip across time periods – so we can jump from 1995 to 1987 to 2007 without any obvious sequence – it’s a book more structured around memory than around sequential time. Book hunting and book selling is the main preoccupation but there’s also a wider element of memoir here that involves social situations and friendships that are always tinged by the fact that in almost any environment he’s got one eye open for books.
So we get lots of very enjoyable ( and for me at least) very recognisable descriptions of visits to junk shops, car boot sales, auction house, charity shops and other book dealers and he’s engagingly straightforward and detailed about what he finds and how much he pays – then of course there’s the profits and losses from the things he sells on. He even gives us the inventory from some of his sorties:
(Distance travelled: 100-mile return trip. Profit (projected): £295. Fact learned: Thomas the Tank Engine is alive and well and tooting in mid-Wales)
I like the way he gives us an insight into the origins of his bibliomania (if that’s a fair description of his state of mind) which he traces back to 1987:
It was in Anthony Hall’s that I became truly infected……It is in front of the small bookcase, crammed full with Penguin Modern Classics, that I am waylaid. For a lifetime as it happens…At unshackled moments, I sneak into Anthony Hall’s…I find myself making lists of books obtained and books wanted. I am lost.
He has his encounters with established authors too – Ian McEwan and Alan Silliotoe – and it’s from the later meeting he’s constructed the title for the book:
Outside Alan Sillitoe’s holiday home, I am loading my trusty Renault Express van with the author’s donation of books and papers…..It turns out I’ve inadvertently removed the wrong pile of books from the hallway. We check the boxes together to find that they contain precious first editions and personal manuscripts. I lug the boxes back and retrieve the items that were destined for me: obscure pamphlets by self-published poets and arcane miscellany.
In many ways this opening anecdote sets the tone of mild cynicism and the tinge of disappointment that characterises much of the book. On the unending search for the ‘perfect’ find, the most amazing books, he’s doomed to always be disappointed.
There’s part of me that truly admires his dogged determination to keep going and to keep trying to make a Bangor bookshop work. I’m sure that the North Wales city is a very different place now to when I was there in the mid-1970s but I really do struggle to imagine how the place could sustain such a shop. It’s a university city but it’s a small university city and – I’ve learned to my own cost – students don’t buy books; at least not in the numbers required to keep a second hand bookshop open.
This isn’t a great book but it’s a charming one and if you love book collecting and book hunting you’ll be delighted by the rapid fire succession of anecdotes that make up the majority of the content. It’s cheap and easy to find on line and it will give you a pleasant afternoon’s reading.
Terry Potter
February 2018