The new curiosity shop

David Cunningham

In spite of the material with which it pro- vided him, Orwell seemed to regard his bookselling days with scant affection. It wasn't the cold, dusty air or the dead blue- bottles littering the tops of the books that put him off so much as the fact that his job obliged him to come into daily contact with the book-buying public:

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortu- nately she can't remember the title or the author's name, or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.

I applied for my bookshop job when the mixture of university tutoring, administra- tion and writing with which I'd supported myself since gaining my PhD suddenly dried up. And though I've had my fair share of enraging and surreal experiences with customers (most memorably the one who wanted a book by James Joyce and, when I'd suggested some titles, barked, `Well, just give me his latest one!'), I don't think I've ever experienced the remorseless loathing that Orwell conveys with such gusto.

In a town like London [he writes elsewhere] there are always plenty of not quite certifi- able lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

He would doubtless be appalled to learn that modern developments in bookselling have increased this trend to an undreamed- of extent. When a shop is open — as ours is — from eight in the morning until 11 at night and has a licensed café and lots of comfortable chairs distributed around every floor, it becomes a practical Mecca for the narcoleptic and the sadly bewildered.

Orwell, like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, chose a job in a book- shop because it gave him time to write. He described his routine in a letter to his friend Brenda Salkeld: 8.45 go down & open the shop, & I am usual- ly kept there till about 9.45. Then come home, do out my room, light the fire etc. 10.30 am-1 pm I do some writing. 1 pm get lunch & eat it. 2 pm-6.30 pm I am at the shop.

It sounds like a small miracle of domestic productivity: the author rattling up and downstairs between selling books and writ- ing them.

The booksellers in my shop, mostly grad- uates, work there because there's nothing else. Some of them intend to continue in bocikselling, which is fair enough — it's an honourable profession. But I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with a society that seems obsessed with cramming more and more youngsters into higher edu- cation, most of whom are going to end up working in shops or call centres. I think we're seeing the emergence of a disenfran- chised generation, encouraged to indulge in the luxury of a liberal education and assume huge debts to pay for it when, due to qualification inflation, there aren't grad- uate jobs for them to do. It's this aspect of working in a bookshop, rather than the incidence of 'paranoiac customers' bemoaned by Orwell, that has made the greatest impression on me.

I also find it hard to share his despair at the literary tastes of the public: `Smoking or non-smoking?'

Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either novels that it is impossible to respect or detective stories.

Perhaps the way in which the electronic media — particularly television — have so thoroughly eclipsed reading for most peo- ple means that the modern bookseller expects to spend a substantial part of the day on his or her knees constructing squat monoliths of novelisations and books by stand-up comedians. In my shop a select group of bestsellers shoulder their way to prominence at the front of store — the men (Jeffrey Archer, Clive Cussler, Wilbur Smith) by virtue of their muscularity, the women (Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, Barbara Taylor-Bradford) through the sheer width of their shoulder-pads. Mean- while, the sensitive winners of obscure lit- erary prizes cower in small quantities at your feet or in dim corners.

It's a kind of commercial Darwinism: the strongest occupy a disproportionate amount of premium space and grow stronger as a result, while the weakest elude the eye and gently atrophy. As for the division that Orwell detected between male and female readers, a larger number of my customers do tend to be female. The older ones buy novels by authors who com- bine accessibility with critical acclaim, mod- ern Bennets and Galsworthys like Sebastian Faulks and Louis de Bernieres. The younger ones favour racy tales of urban professional women, the covers of which show models in pin-stripe jackets and stilettos posing jauntily with briefcases. The men buy more non-fiction and, if they buy novels at all, seem to prefer the ones based on historical or scientific research, as if they suspect any story that is flagrantly made-up.

Orwell concludes:

The real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a dis- taste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro.

Being a bookseller does tend to demolish any fond notions you might entertain about books as aesthetically pleasing objects. You regard them with the same dispirited fatigue you would a pile of building bricks or a stack of two-by-four. And the book- shop becomes, instead of a Mecca for lovers of the written word, an artfully lit, softly furnished warehouse — just the place where you work. Some day, when I've moved on, I'll miss it (I'll certainly miss my colleagues). And I'll probably remember with affectionate indulgence that woman who informed me I just was not good enough when I was unable to provide her daughter with the third Harry Potter book in paperback because it had only just been published as a hardback. Some day — but not today.