As well as buying vinyl records, I have begun collecting three-dimensional books constructed of paper that you hold in your hands and operate manually by turning their pages over. I buy them from bookshops.
There are a few of these emporiums scattered across the country. My favourite one is called My Back Pages in Balham, and it has just put up a sign saying that it is closing down. This means I have only weeks to ransack its cramped shelves to loot them of all the books I have ever seen in there that I want to own. I contemplated telling the nice Irish man who runs it that I will order a lorry and simply take away the lot.
Every time I walk past and see the Closing Down Half Price Sale sign I look at all the beautiful, forlorn hardbacks in the window and feel like I need to rescue them, as if they were unwanted puppies at a dog home.
But in the absence of a house big enough to accommodate them all, I went in there in a panic and started pulling books randomly off the shelves and heaping them up in my arms. ‘There, there,’ I thought, as I took each one as the one next to it cried out to be chosen, too, ‘don’t you worry. You are going to a nice home…’
I came out with a selection featuring Stephen King’s Insomnia, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, and The Collected Short Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle. Sadly, the entire haul came to £8.50. And that tells you everything you need to know about the likelihood that books will continue to exist.
And it makes me all the more convinced that I must hoard them. What I love most of all is the inscriptions. Inside my De Quincey is a pencilled scrawl: ‘James Cook, January 23rd, 1899’. And a place beginning with F, which I shall puzzle over for a long time, possibly indefinitely. It looks as if it were written yesterday and on the facing page is another owner inscription, also in pencil, by one R. Cook, either his father before him, or his son later.
For less emotive, more sensible, everyday book shopping, I have found a bookshop near my weekend place in Cobham. It is called The Cobham Bookshop. The other day, a very strange thing happened to me in The Cobham Bookshop, which is bizarre in itself, as I’m sure nothing strange was ever meant to happen at The Cobham Bookshop.
I swear that what I am about to describe is the god’s honest truth, even though I know you think I make up a lot of things. (I really don’t. I’m cursed.)
I was mooching around The Cobham Bookshop, looking for a thriller advertised in the window called The Dinner. The display was very eye-catching, showing a table with a crisp, white cloth and a glass of spilled red wine, depicted by a piece of red, shiny plastic cut into the shape of a splash. In the end, I had to ask the lady behind the counter to find me a copy of the book. ‘Oh, they’re all in the window,’ she said, reaching over the display from inside the shop to pull one out. ‘We’re trying to win a competition for window dressing, you see.’
It occurred to me to point out that it might be a nice gesture to the poor author who was trying to sell the book he had painstakingly written if she put some of his work in piles in the shop. But I restrained myself. At the till, she took my bank card and said: ‘Hmm. I know that name. Yes, I’m sure I’ve heard of you…’
‘Well, ha ha,’ I said bashfully. ‘I do actually have a book out myself.’
‘Oh, what’s it called?’
I told her and she looked blank. ‘What’s it about?’
I told her and she looked blank. I tried harder: ‘It’s a funny book, with amusing anecdotes about life.’
She shook her head. I took my bag and dejectedly started to slope away. At which point, a venerable-looking gentleman, who had been queuing up behind me, approached the till and said, very cheerfully and robustly, ‘Hello! Do you have any funny books with amusing anecdotes, please?’
The lady behind the counter stared and stared at him. It was one of those moments when time is suspended and everything goes into slow motion. I turned around, looked back at her and made a pathetic, pleading gesture. Then time snapped back from wherever it had been and she said, ‘Sorry, I’m fairly sure we don’t have anything like that. I could look out the back, if you like?’
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