Bookshops/Homelessness

(Disclaimer: nothing I write here could possibly come up to the standard of Orwell's essay on working in a second hand bookshop, which is a really excellent essay. You can find it in his collection 'Books and Cigarettes' which also has an excellent essay about the price of books relative to smokes. However, his is a light hearted, amusing spiel; this is a bit more self-righteous and upsetting.)


I work in West London, in a desirable, trendy expensive area (needless to say, I don't live there as well. Oh no.) The sort of area where the poor people wear Boden and the rich people are international ambassadors. I really didn't think it was the sort of area to attract tramps.


Nonetheless, last week we had a homeless chap in the shop. He was apparently here for most of the day, with a suspicious carton of drink next to him and snoring continuously. He didn't buy a book, of course, although he offered to, on the basis that he could stay a little longer. A colleague had to threaten him with a visit from the police before he would, in that horrible Dickensian way, 'move on'. (I'm not a huge Dickens fan, but do look up that chapter in Bleak House where Jo has nowhere to go after being turfed out from Blackfriars Bridge. Dickens at his best and truly affecting.) His presence irritated, upset and angered other customers.


I doubt a tramp would last that long in a coffee shop, or food shop, or clothes shop, or frankly, any other sort of shop. Why did he seek out the bookshop (it is along a high street; he could have gone anywhere)? Why did he associate the bookshop with sanctuary? Why did he think he wouldn't be moved on? Bookshops do, notoriously, attract the 'oddballs'. Because they are quiet, safe, and you're able to spend a comparatively long time in them without buying anything: a bookshop is one of the few places you can get away with consuming the product without actually buying it (you don't wear Topshop's clothes, or eat a Starbucks pastry without paying, after all). I guess in that sense, they are extremely appealing to the average homeless guy. Also, let's make some suppositions about your average book buyer. Quiet, meek, unwilling to cause a fuss. Likely to stick nose further into the book he's reading than to kick up.


In some sort of way, I don't really mind the presence of the tramp. I object to chucking a tramp out of a warm, safe place, just because he smells. It offends my sense of what it is to be human (call me self-righteous, but this is important stuff). We have a duty to treat the poorest with the same level of respect as we would the richest. If we let a rich person read Murakami's Norwegian Wood all day (as happened a few weeks ago; darn, she damaged that spine) then we have to let poor people do it too.


On the other hand, I can totally see the perspective of the other customers. Say I'd wanted to sit for ten minutes and flick through the first chapter of my potential purchase. Would I be distracted by a smelly homeless guy next to me? Yes. I'd try to find elsewhere to read the book, and if I couldn't find that space, I'd  move on myself, and Bookshop PLC would lose a sale. Bookshops aren't charities or soup kitchens either. Like any other capitalistic enterprise on the high street, they have a duty (sure, a self-imposed and ethically questionable one) to make money. If this means excluding some customers to ensure the continued fiscal support of others, so be it. However, I've said that I can 'see' this perspective; I don't agree with it at all. I think it's pretty awful.


What saddens me the most is that the situation has come to be in the first place. What chain of events led him to fall into a drunken snooze on a Sunday afternoon? Why was no-one looking after him? Homelessness is the social issue that I care about the most - we are all so perilously close to it ourselves. The chain of events that lead to it (lose job - lose family - lose home) is such a familiar narrative that I think at times we (accommodation-safe) types become desensitised to it. It's infuriatingly easy to accuse the homeless guy of letting himself get into 'that situation'. The accusation that homeless people are 'weak' in some way is painfully untrue; the association between homelessness and poor mental health is one we need to look at again. Plenty of insane people have houses; very few homeless people are mentally healthy. Tramps stand out in a bookshop partly because they smell/dress bad, but mostly because, on sight, we make the assumption that they don't have the mental capacity to cope with reading. Intelligence and mental health are totally different things, guys!


So sure, those few lines above are an invitation for a longer argument about the causes and effects of homelessness. Let's come back down to the micro level: the one guy I saw. He still matters. He's an individual, and probably spent Sunday night curled up in a doorway (my dad made the very good point that tramps might be attracted to that part of London precisely because the doorways are so generous and make good sleeping places). The bookshop was a haven for him, and it embarrasses me that the other customers felt it appropriate to complain loudly about his presence. Hell, I'll say it again: he's still a human. Please can we not  be so offended by those who expose exactly how fragile out comfortable, financially secure, home-inhabiting, book buying lives are? Can we please do something constructive about the situation. He was threatened by a police call: was this really the best approach? He didn't do anything illegal, or offensive (in the sense of harassment, rather than sensibilities), and eventually left. 


I think a revealing irony lies in the location of the episode, the bookshop. Why do we read? To expand our minds, and to think about the world around us, and to try and be better people (at least, this is what your average Joe would say). None of these processes were evident in anything I saw last week - it seems that we're all very good at talking the mantra. But when it comes to doing it? I didn't see anyone actually being the change they wanted to see. No-one offered to take him to a shelter, or to walk him to a bus stop (he offered to buy a book, so possibly had some change on him), or to even direct him to somewhere that might have been of use. This collective failure, from a bunch of people who have the time, money and facilities to help, happens on a daily basis in London, but that doesn't stop this one example I've discussed being painful to watch.




A note on language: yes, I've written this from the point of 'us' and 'them' whilst at the same time acknowledging how close the two are. An error perhaps. I've also used the word 'tramp' pretty freely. Is that a problem? I don't think so. Everyone knows what I mean, and I don't want to use a word or phrase ('accommodation negative citizen' to make up a ridiculous example) that totally desanitises the problem for 'us'. I think 'tramp' is a good word because it shocks and makes people uncomfortable, and that's exactly what we need to do on this issue.

Big Green Bookshop

I'm not sure exactly when I turned into a Guardianista, but for a while now I've been a fan of their Life & Style pages, and the Culture pages too. Imagine my delight then, to find an article about bookshops (and local ones at that) on the front page.


Alas, it took me just a quick click and a dash of trade awareness (and the headline, of course, but let's not be literal) to realise it wasn't going to be a happy story. Oh no. The Big Green Bookshop is facing bankruptcy and soon to close. The chain British Bookshops went into administration recently, and Waterstone's have also recently made public plans to close 20 stores (of course, closures don't hit chains so bad, but redundancy is sad for anyone). The book trade hasn't been in a good way for a while, but this recent spate of closures doesn't set the tone for a good year.


To avoid closure, owners Mark, Tim and Simon have set into action an impressive publicity campaign. On their blog (humorous, regularly updated, and full of character) they've written about the problems they face. They've helpfully included the visual aid of the 'Strugglometer', reminiscient of a Blue Peter charity appeal, to let readers (bloggers and book-buyers, geddit) know the progress the store is making. [Hello, BBG: I hope you don't mind me copy+pasting this.]





Anyway: to get to my point. From 6th - 12th March, the Big Green Bookshop are asking people to buy just one book from them. Just one (by which of course I mean, 'at least' one). They already have 1000 customers on a loyalty card scheme, and I don't doubt this number will increase thanks to their publicity efforts. According to the site, a cash injection like this will save them from the abyss.


So. Please go to buy a book from them some time that week. Please. I write this as someone who loves books and the book trade too. Let's not turn our high streets into identikit shopping areas with identikit bookshops and identikit titles. Let's celebrate a local bookshop, one that certainly seems to go way beyond the remit of just a 'shop'. Look! They have board game days and readings and book groups and events for children. They seem like a hub of their community (N22) which is something that all bookshops aspire to do - so few do it well, so let's save the ones that do.  Bookshops matter. They matter so much - Amazon doesn't get chatting to you about your current read, Amazon won't give you honest, from-the-heart recommendations, and Amazon couldn't give a toss, frankly, about anything but profit (see this damning description of how they treat their staff).  Moreover, the chaps behind this operation seem like such lovely blokes - do we really want to see them made redundant, having set up the shop three years ago after the Waterstone's they managed went under? No, we don't. So let's buy some books!

Busy.

Hey Kids.

I've been very busy recently, and so bookish things have been put to one side recently. One thing that's been making me busy is my new job in a bookshop. Hurrah!

However, I have not been so busy that I haven't found the time to shop. Oh no. I found Graham Swift's Shuttlecock for 50p in a book exchange in Notting Hill recently (not realising until later than it won the Booker Prize - so it baffles me that Gower St Waterstone's didn't have a copy - as I found out on an extended, leisurely, Friday break from Joyce). Followers of this blog might have picked up on my Swift love. Today I bought a copy of Jonathon Safran Foer's Eating Animals, in the hope that it'll provide some sort of moral impetus to turn to vegetarianism. It has an HFW quotation on the front, proving that I am as much a sucker for celebrity promotion as the next girl.

On JSF: if anyone reading this fancies buying me a nice, expensive birthday present, you couldn't do better than his newest title Tree of Codes. It looks just amazing. £25 (RRP; note Amazon price of £15.56) seems a bit steep, given that most of the pages are cut out, but I'm hoping the intellectual experience might be worth it.

And on that note, if you do buy it, please - do so from a shop. Please. Bookshops are infinitely better than the internet/Amazon. I will go into why in a later post. (Yes, I know I direct all the links to amazon, but that's only for the 'look inside!' feature. Honestly.)

Review: The Novel: An Alternative History

Hello all! A book review for you follows below. It's not mine, and the author would prefer it to be anonymous - though I'm sure would welcome any feedback. Either leave a comment, or email me and I'll pass it on.

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Just finished The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore. How alternative? Well, this is volume 1 of 2, and it only goes up to 1600.

It's not a very deep work, but it's incredibly broad, beginning with ancient Egyptian stories, working through Babylonian myths, the Tanakh, Greek and Roman novelists, Irish myths, Arthur, Norse sagas, the Zohar, and the Renaissance; then it skips over, via Central America, to Indian, Iranian, and Arabic novels, Japan, and ends up in China with three of the Four Great Classical Novels. Stories grow off the pages like trees. It's a pretty amazing tour of fiction and mythology: he defines "novels" rather broadly, especially with the Ancient Near East stuff at the beginning. Even if he occasionally talks about books he hasn't read or haven't been translated into English, the breadth of reading is pretty impressive (and he refers to many more in footnotes), and popular as well as academic - he describes something as fanservice towards the end. He's also enthusiastic and insightful: describing "the novel" as primarily intellectual, rhetorical, and self-absorbed, rather than psychological or truthful. He likes lists, formal designs, and wordplay; for instance, he describes the heroes of Monkey by Wu Cheng-en as "Wu's Tang clan".

If you don't like lists, length, and style, you might not like it. It probably spends too long describing rather than analysing, and Moore's judgements are sometimes sloppy - he describes the end of an Egyptian story as like Kafka or Borges, and later that page as essentially realistic. His defence of the difficult/innovative novel sometimes leads him into the false dichotomy that anything easy to read is worthless. The sections on non-European novels are too brief compared with the European stuff, and it's a very masculine book, both in the sense that there are very few female writers and that Moore loves describing beautiful women and the men who have sex with them. His textual libido is a pain in the neck by the end, and his constant "maledictions against religion", as the index has it, are the same - and I agreed with most of it. Finally, the introduction, in which Moore clears himself some aesthetic elbow room, is too polemical.

Overall, though, I thoroughly recommend it. If there's a similar survey of stories from the whole world and most of history, I don't know of it (but please enlighten me if you do.) Nor can I say how complete it is; in fact, sometimes it seems to have very sparse pickings indeed. It's not close reading or deep criticism, but it is a golden treasury of fiction that's left me itching to get my hands on some of the goodies he mentions.

Probably the only thing I will get for Valentine's this year....

..is a promotional email from Foyles. Oh yes. Life of a singleton at its literary best, etc.

Foyles has never been a favourite of mine; in fact, I think it’s pretty much the most overrated bookshop ever. From my experience, the staff are bored and not engaging enough with customers to make it the amazing experience it should be: the last time I went, I didn’t buy anything (proof in itself of a bookshop not coming up to scratch!) and, when a lady bought whatever it was she was after, the staff continued to have their own conversation behind the till, totally ignoring her. Worst service ever – a total bugbear of mine. From what I remember too, they didn’t really use the space very well, and there were no exciting visual promotions. Whatever faults you might think Waterstone’s have, at least their shops are pretty!

Anyway, this email. Further evidence of why I don’t like Foyles. Because I’m feeling angry and pedantic, I really can’t be bothered with a counter-argument to consider why Foyles marketing may have sent this out. I am aware that you can’t read the email (I’ll see if I can make it into an image somehow) but I hope that my description coveys my distaste. Reasons I don’t like it include, but are not limited to:

1. It doesn’t fit on the page properly, and, instead of being beautiful, it’s full of red hyperlinks and horrible blue font:

It reads more like a draft email than promotional tool. The ‘In this Issue’ box at the top of the email upsets me too, because it doesn’t make sense. It’s an email, not a newsletter. If it’s meant to be a newsletter, please can there be a pretty graphic or something? Maybe a title box informing you it’s a newsletter? None of the images load correctly, and even when I pressed 'images not displaying?' the email is still littered with above hyperlinks. I don't think I have an unusually sensitive eye for aesthetics.

2. Oh god, Valentine’s day. Yes.I know bookselling is tough right now....but, really? Urgh. What sort of cretin gets his roses from a bookshop? Why on earth would a bookshop offer roses? Surely something – I don’t know – something bookish? This is the most lateral promotion ever and I totally fail to see the point of it. And I doubt they’d be Fairtrade roses anyway.

3. They make four suggestions for titles you might want to pop in the store and buy, which will be wrapped and, the best bit, tied with a Foyles ribbon. A propos my earlier point, I fail to understand the type of person who would want a Foyles ribbon (but then I also fail to understand the type of person who shops there in the first place).

The titles on offer are all pretty naff. Edward Monkton, though ace, screams 'I bought you a cheap novelty present because I'm wacky, poor, and don't really know you at all well enough'.

4. However! Apparently in Spain the tradition is for men to buy roses and women to buy the books. This is, firstly, something I didn’t know and, secondly, way cute.

5. Then Foyles remembered that it’s also Chinese New Year – which had already gone by the time this email reached me, but we can forget that if you like (New Year was on 3rd February, but this was sent on 4th. Afterthought, anyone?). A much smaller portion of the email is dedicated to this, which is sad. Though I suppose it reflects the general lack of interest in anything that is translated, or not based in some Anglophone society anyway. It'd be hypocritical to criticise this, as I’ve read very little that’s not Anglo-American. Perhaps if Foyles – and every other bookseller too, I should add – could actually invigorate my reading and make me try something outside my core choices, rather than promoting tokenistic titles as per the calendar’s dictation. I can't comment on the titles on offer, for exactly this reason.

6. Ok, maybe I’ve cheered up a little. Clearly lots of events going on! Classical concerts and events at all the different branches (including the new Bristol one – that city definitely needs more bookshops!).

7. The slogan ‘love books, love Foyles’ is a bit naff. Something better please? Sure, it’s better than ‘Feel every word’ (surely ‘read’ would be a more appropriate verb?) but it’s obvious and forgettable. Work on it, marketing types. You could have something great; you have something mediocre.

Things I have read recently.

I read an awful lot. I should read more - this is true for everyone, after all - and I try to read a wide range. I study literature full time (I am taking this degree) and it would be so easy just to stick to the Victorians. But that would be naughty, so I do try to read around a bit.

Over Christmas I read Graham Swift's Out of this World, which I thought was just wonderful. I, like every right thinking individual, love Waterland, so I was excited to see this one for sale for only one pound at Housmans bookshop! (A review of this store will follow in due course.) Out of this World grapples with the same themes as his most famous title, such as family traumas and the difficulties of representing histories, and I thought it was excellent. He's so insightful and painfully accurate.

I followed that with another family saga. The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen, was recommended to me by a friend. It has the line 'Mum loved Christmas the way other people love sex', the sort of pithy observation that litters the novel. It was pretty good. Certainly he's a wonderful writer: the plot was sewn together beautifully, and I was genuinely affected by some parts of the narrative. The final part of the story, which deals with Parkinson’s sufferer Albert’s rapid decline in health, and subsequent death, was excellently written. But I think the work as a whole was probably lost on me. The tone suggested some sort of crisis in contemporary American culture, and, not knowing a huge amount about America, I think some of Franzen’s observations went over my head. The power of the pharmaceuticals companies, for example, informs the backdrop to the main story, as concerned son Gary attempts to strike a deal with a nasty corporation who have screwed his dad over. It’s also a staggeringly long novel, at over 700 pages. Definitely one to look at again.

For my course, I’ve read a huge amount as usual. Lots of theory (Foucault and Freud, mostly) which I tend to dislike. Also some obscure Victorian fiction, which, though it does nothing at all on the page, is actually fascinating. We studied it alongside Darwin’s Origin of Species, and came to some interesting conclusions! Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is short but perfectly formed. A seriously amazing story. I saw a reader full of her stories for sale at the Calder Bookshop the other day, for three pounds – I wasn’t quite sure, so decided not to. I may treat myself tomorrow morning, perhaps, as I wander past on my way to the library.

Coming up over the next few weeks: George Gissing’s The Other Women, Collins’ The Woman in White, and Dracula. Looking forward!

So, this will be familiar to a few of you...

Because I'm a little lazy, this is a cut and paste job. But, oh! It's just so true and excellent - I love that feeling when somebody (far more eloquent) puts your thoughts into words. So, this Walter Benjamin, on collecting books:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing davlight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

[...]

ActualIy, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector's attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust. But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

[...]

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg,'s "Bookworm." For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownersliip is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.