Bookshop Memories

Surely a university town of some 200,000 people warrants a decent bookshop.  As the downturn continues to play itself out, the latest local example of corporate retrenchment was the abrupt closure of the branch of Waterstones.  There were several small bookshops in the town throughout my childhood and my teens.  All gone now.

In one of the side streets, off what once was the town’s major thoroughfare before the construction of a huge blight of a shopping centre, there was a cramped and dusty bookshop run, if memory serves, by two old ladies.  I remember going there when I was immersed in a school project on the history of aircraft, or the Second World War, or some such, and spending ages in deliberation before settling upon The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe . 

I don’t think it can have been of all that much use for the project as it lacked all the sort of cutaway diagrams necessary for that sort of thing in favour of a dense textual soft apologia for the life and unpleasant works of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, one of AH’s technocratic true believers.  In my defence, I’ll say that at the age of 10 or 11 I had no idea whatsoever of who David Irving was and I can only assume that I chose it because I was with my mother, who I had cajoled into the promise of buying me a book and so a book – any book – had to be bought.  Scanning over the online PDF just now reminded me enough to be grateful once again for the systematic inefficiencies of the Third Reich.

Eight or ten years later.  The old ladies and their dusty old shop had gone and I was working, rather unhappily, as a wages clerk by day and leading what I took to be an alternative lifestyle by night.  This involved a lot of music.  It was that time of life when you enter into no-holds-barred competition with friends to discover and lay claim to albums and artists for yourself before they do.  The Rolling Stones were quite unfashionable then but I had developed an interest in them as ur-Punks and was proselytising with the fervour of the convert and, predictably enough, I was especially enamoured with Sympathy for the Devil.  I’d picked up a copy of Anthony Scaduto’s biography of Jagger in the market and come across a reference to how the song was based upon the book by Bulgakov.

It felt like a big deal then, going into a shop and going through the whole officious process of filling out forms and leaving a deposit.  At that time there was a small independent though hardly, I think, cutting-edge bookshop on the fringe of the town centre and I went there during one of my lunch breaks and ordered The Master and Margarita.  I don’t know what I expected the book to be like, coming at it, as I did, courtesy of the Glimmer Twins.  I’m sure that it was the first translation that I’d ever read and I could see that it was an allegory of the same Soviet Union that I’d come across in Animal Farm at school.  I knew next to nothing about Faust but I found both the major story and the book within the book, about the ‘fifth procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate’, amusing and moving.

That shop is long gone too and probably unmissed by anyone.   For a number of years there was a book stall in the indoor market.  I passed by and had a browse on a fairly regular basis but there never seemed to be that much of a turnover of stock.  The only purchase that comes to mind now is Volumes 1-3 of the, then long out of print, Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which prompted me into my first foray onto eBay to pick up Volume 4.  There are many Orwell collections, from one volume affairs through to the massive 20 volume Complete Works, but CEJL remains the connoisseurs choice for its mixture of the many Orwells.  The market stall closed a few years ago and now, with Waterstones gone, only WH Smith and the various charity shops remain. 

Out in the pub the other night I carried out a straw poll on the theme of A Town Without A Bookshop and the result was as near indifference as makes no difference with responses ranging from shrugs to mutters about doing all book buying online.  I think it’s a shame.  Not because I’m a fan of Waterstones but because, like libraries, bookshops are a Good Thing, providing the space for serendipity that online shopping, even with its Recommendations, somehow lacks.