Inspiring Older Readers
Browse: The World in Bookshops, ed. Henry Hitchings
Anyone who knows me will no doubt be casting their eyes to the heavens when they see this and will almost certainly be muttering ‘Well, surprise, surprise! Terry’s done another review of a book that’s all about books.’ And, yes, I will admit that I’m a total sucker for books about books and, especially, books about bookshops.
For many years I’ve harboured the insane desire to have a bookshop of my own but just recently I’ve come to realise that actually I’m not a natural bookseller – I care too much about them as books rather than as objects to be traded – and that actually my real vocation is as a collector, a book buyer or an habitué of bookshops. If I were to have unlimited funds I’d no longer immediately invest them in opening a bookshop but in travelling from bookshop to bookshop to build a collection and to experience the ambience of these different emporiums. This seems an increasingly important vocation as the economics of the book trade seem to be driving the shops from the high street at an alarming rate.
But you’d be making a mistake to think that Browse: The World in Bookshops, which has been edited by the author and lexicographer, Henry Hutchings is just another twee, escapist or myth-making collection of nostalgic essays about bookshops. What this collection does is to bring together the thoughts of 16 authors on the significance to them and their communities (sometimes even the influence on global politics), of a favourite bookshop – a few of which, it has to be said, are no longer in existence.
In my experience, it’s unusual for books about bookshops to break the bounds of the bibliophile world and plonk themselves fairly and squarely in the public and political realm but this is one that does. Here we travel from the Ukraine to China to Egypt, on to Nairobi, India and Turkey; and, of course, we also dally for a while in the UK and the USA. At each stop the role of the bookshop and its relationship with the authors that provide their books is both significant and utterly different. Bookshops don’t exist in a bubble outside the cut and thrust of politics but are actually often at the heart of the debate and represent some pretty fundamental liberal or progressive values.
Michelle Johnson reviewing the book for World Literature Today neatly captures the diversity of the endeavour:
“writers witness the beginning of a revolution (Alaa Al Aswany), recount “how the bookshops of the former Soviet Union became European-style second-hand bookshops and Ukraine itself became a second-hand country” (Andrey Kurkov; trans. Amanda Love Darragh), and take refuge from an India “whose priority of economic growth and individual aggrandizement did not include, and possibly deliberately excluded, an intellectual and literary culture” (Pankaj Mishra).
Dorthe Nors ends her essay rescuing Kristin Lavrandsdatter from a box where she’d “buried it alive,” finally reading the book that a bookseller who “understood that he served as literature’s outstretched hand” placed in her grandmother’s hands decades earlier (trans. Misha Hoekstra). In other essays, booksellers are a dealer providing a fix (Saša Stanišić) and the poet Roberto Roversi, who only sold a book if he liked the customer (Stefano Benni)."
Not all the essays are as successful as each other and not all of them convey the same level of love and intensity – there’s room here for a lighter touch too and there is humour, experimentation and non-conformity as well. There’s even a place here for Iain Sinclair’s almost hallucinogenic memories of Bohemia Road:
“The stock in Bookmans Halt (no apostrophe please) is organic; a colony of contented lifers. Armpit tomes mature in the perpetual twilight like mushrooms in a damp cellar. The critical mass of paper sustains the integrity of the building. It smells, in the best way, of suspended morality. This library of ex-library rescues and boot-fair probationers is proudly posthumous. The books passed away, honourably, with their previous owners: retirees, hoarding eccentrics and charity cases for whom charity has run out. The stock is buried on open shelves, to be devoured……”
As is always the case with these collections of essays, I end up looking for the writer who might be my soul-mate and the bookshop that is the place I’d be happy to spend eternity in. In this case, Michael Dirda’s contribution entitled Snow Day fills that role to perfection.
Home alone in Washington with a disruptive heavy snow-fall forecast, no domestic responsibilities and no work appointments, Dirda has a brief window before the weather closes in to visit Second Story Books – a second-hand book warehouse:
“The cement floor of the Second Story warehouse stands roughly three feet off the ground and there are loading bays for trucks on either side of the entrance. On that Friday morning, as Snowzilla was preparing to stomp Washington, I parked in almost empty lot…No matter how often I’ve gone to the warehouse I can never quite scout it all in one visit.”
He’s certainly a man after my own heart when it comes to looking for the books he wants:
“ A truly responsible collector would carry a list of his wants or even a tablet computer containing a bibliographical database of everything he owns. I disdain such librarianship. I know, more or less, what books I possess, with a fairly accurate idea of their condition.”
Having taken on the incoming storm, made his purchases and headed home he settles down in his chair. And tell me anyone who doesn’t want the day to end something like this (your choice of food is optional):
“When I got home from Second Story that wintery Friday, the snowstorm had begun in earnest. I ate some of the home-made chicken soup my wife had left me, then sat back in a chair with a glass of wine and watched the thickly falling flakes. I felt serene, wonderfully at peace.”
Ah, joy.........
Browse was published in 2016 by Puskin Press and copies are pretty easy to get your hands on and are available to order from their website.
Terry Potter
September 2018