posted on 03 Oct 2020

The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham

I picked this book up fully expecting it to be another of those sardonic, tongue-in-cheek memoirs by a hoary old hand in the bookselling business. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean – lots of anecdotes about how tough it is to be a bookseller, how barmy all the customers are and, if you’re lucky, some information about books and finding them in peculiar and unlikely places.

However, I was, on whole, wrong about it and maybe the potted biography of the author on the back inside jacket flap should have given me a bit of a clue:

“Martin Latham has been a bookseller for thirty-five years. He has a PhD in Indian history, and taught at Hertfordshire University before turning to bookselling.”

So although he is indeed a ‘hoary old bookseller’, he’s also an academic of some standing and that combination makes for a quite different kind of bookseller memoir – hold the anecdotes meant to make us chuckle knowingly and wheel on the thoughtful, historical overviews of the bookselling business and the growth of readership. It makes for an interesting combination.

You’ll find here a very interesting section on the way in which working class readers and book buyers have been air-brushed from history and some trenchant thoughts on women and books. The history of public and private libraries and the motivations of the collector also provide separate sections that are bristling with fascinating information.

I think that on balance my favourite sections are those dealing with the booksellers of the Seine embankment and the denizens of the lamentably lost New York Book Row. I have always been attracted to the romance of the Paris open air booksellers but, not speaking French, I’ve never personally visited them – I rather assumed that they would be unlikely to have much by way of English language titles. Nonetheless, as Latham quite rightly says,:

“Picking up unexpected serendipitous discoveries in the open air lends itself to enchantment, to little fizzes of destiny..”

Even today despite the ingress of tacky souvenir venders these street vendors of books survive - in lesser numbers than before but still a venue for the unexpected find or as a place of salvation for those who want to spend their time in endless casual book browsing.

Fascinating and unexpectedly challenging as the book is, it’s not without its faults. There is something a bit random about the structure. There’s nothing wrong with simply pulling together a set of essays on topics that interest you as an author but that’s not enough to make it a ‘tale’ and I’m not entirely sure why his status as a bookseller is entirely relevant to much of what is, in fact, a fairly academic history of aspects of book culture.

The book also lacks a bit of fizz in terms of literary style – it’s quite easy to get a bit bogged down in some of the more arcane history of medieval marginalia or Renaissance Venice. It would have been nice to come out of those chapters feeling I’d been enthused on a topic I knew nothing about but instead, to be truthful, these sections felt like a slog and didn’t really come alive.

But this is a small set of niggles and this is a book that will certainly have something for every reader to enjoy and get involved in. It’s not actually a book that has to be read from cover to cover and you can dip into those sections that most interest you and take them at your own pace – there’s no story here and no conclusions to reach so the order you read it in doesn’t matter. Enjoy yourself.

At the time of writing the book is only available in hardback but the good news is that it’s got a knockout jacket!

 

Terry Potter

October 2020