Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 12 Mar 2018

Cast adrift in a bookless wilderness

Weekends are special to me because they are the time I ring-fence for finding books and we try to get out as widely as we can to rummage through any bookshops, charity shops or even antique centres in order to scoop up anything that looks interesting. It’s not just a distraction or a hobby – we went past that a while ago; it’s probably best described as a compulsion. It’s rare indeed for us to miss a weekend trawl and it’s also rare for us to come back with nothing. We tend to find that even the smallest market towns can come up with a charity shop or two with a decent spread of books and so when we had an invitation to take part in the Tamworth literary weekend (Karen, the Letterpress’ Director, was reading stories in the library) I tagged along to do the book hunt.

Having never been to Tamworth before and having just a couple of hours to look around, I figured that the sensible thing would be to head straight for the tourist centre, get a street map and ask them if they could tell me whether the town had any bookshops. The two very helpful women who handed me the map I wanted looked at me as if I’d just asked them if they knew the way to Shangri-la and broke into a broad smile. No, they said, no bookshops in Tamworth. The Tamworth people, it seems are not the bookish type. There is a branch of The Works one of the staff said as I was leaving – but -  she added, that’s not really a bookshop is it?

Ah, well, I thought to myself, at least there are the charity shops. But, to my dismay, in shop after shop ( and Tamworth certainly has its share of charity shops) books didn’t seem to have much of a part to play. A few paperbacks stuffed into baskets, a sparse shelf of straggling hardback cookery books or popular celebrity drivel. Nothing. Not even a maybe.

I trailed around forlornly looking for anything that might fill the ever widening gap in my heart. A town without any books. How could it be? What terrible fate has condemned the people of Tamworth to a bookless town centre? The street market was doing a roaring trade in delicious cheap cakes, astonishingly horrible socks and dog treats but nowhere was there the most modest bookseller.

Eventually I was forced to wander into the generic undercover shopping centre that town and city councils across the country seem to have commissioned en bloc and find The Works – I can sometimes convince myself that they may have something remaindered that’s worth having. I am nearly always wrong to be optimistic and so I was on this occasion.

Collecting Karen from the library when her two hour stint was over, I headed back to the railway station as quickly as I could. Somehow I felt compelled to get as far away as quickly as possible in case I became infected by the whatever it was that had turned this place into a bookless wilderness.

When I got home I got onto Google and had a look at what came up when I searched for bookshops in Tamworth. It seems that the closest bookshop can be found in a place called Polesworth which is about 5 miles away and actually closer to Atherstone than Tamworth. I know there were plans some time ago to make Atherstone the centre of another ‘book town’ similar to Hay or Wigtown but which ultimately came to nothing. Maybe this should be the signal that this is a part of the world booklovers should only travel across once they’ve been given the book collectors equivalent of a health warning.

Terry Potter

March 2018