Fallen Idols

I used to spend a lot of time in bookshops. Now, not so much.

Johannes Jelgerhuis: The Shop of the Bookdealer Pieter Meijer Warnars on the Vijgendam in Amsterdam (1820).

Sometimes when I arrive at Paddington station, I walk past WH Smith, a chain of stores which, in the small, provincial town where I went to school, had the only bookshop I remember (though there must have been others). There I would exchange book tokens received from indulgent grandparents for a precious cargo of literature. This was probably not Enid Blyton books but more likely books of horror stories, which I devoured for a certain phase of my childhood, or a book like Moonfleet which still stirs a spark or two of readerly nostalgia in me.

I don’t go in WH Smith now unless I want to buy a bottle of water or a packet of crisps – they still sell books, I think, but generally not the kind I might want to read. ¹

Growing up in the countryside in Devon meant I didn’t have any relationship with bookshops in my early life. Books would generally arrive via the small mobile library housed in a precarious old van that would slowly waddle down the farm lane according to a timetable no one understood. Or they’d come from a mail-order catalogue. The latter is how my mother bought us books like Black Beauty or Call of the Wild in large hardcover editions, which I used to devour as a child, years after I’d worked through most of the Dr Seuss series. Bookshops, along with other exotica, such as supermarkets, urban transport systems, and coffee shops, would come later.

My first experience of a large bookshop was Foyles in Charing Cross Road, London. That was in the gap year I took before university, towards the end of which I briefly worked and lived in London. Foyles was nothing like the shop in the book (or film) of 84 Charing Cross Road. It was (still is?) a huge, multi-storey affair and intimidatingly large and impersonal. The sheer number of books in one place – I’d certainly never seen so many together – was impressive but left me a little giddy.

Years later, one of my university teachers, no stranger to mild paranoia, would announce to us that he always felt nervous about going into a huge library like the British Library. “There are so many books,” he would tell us, “that I’m convinced one of them contains some unanswerable accusation about me.”

I’ve never felt that level of fear, but Foyles certainly made me uneasy. This I put down to its more or less conscious cowing of the ignorant and undereducated – like me – who wandered into its forbidding aisles (or should that be ‘isles’?) of learning. Just as an autocratic ruler aims to make a statement with the construction of his or her formidable palace or castle, one that strikes fear and awe in the heart of their subjects or enemies (though these, I take it, can sometimes be one and the same), so these huge emporia of books, with their acres of floorspace and apparently infinite choice, seemed designed to make those of us arriving from our provincial wastelands tremble in admiration and fear at their power and apparent glory.

The bookshop would exact tribute from us like a Scandinavian King demanding Danegeld. But rather than gold, the tribute was the paper money we exchanged for books which, we hoped, would allow us safe passage back to our tiny rooms. At Foyles it was with this tribute money that I bought my first copies of Larkin, Hughes, Sartre, Plath, and de Beauvoir and bolstered my modest collection of novels by Graham Greene, who was for a few years among my favourite writers.

If my relationship with Foyles was like that between monarch and distant subject, at Blackwell’s in Oxford, when I became a student, it was more straightforwardly one between reseller and customer. It was, at the heart of the matter, a commercial transaction. Determined to blow my government maintenance grant on books, I opened an account there, which seems now like a ridiculous luxury in a rather 19th-century way (the latter not surprising for Oxford).

But as I didn’t have a credit card and wouldn’t have one for many years, the account was the only way for me to buy a book on impulse and later work out how to pay for it. I was learning about the allure of credit. So in a sense, transitioning from Foyles to Blackwell’s was for me a move from feudal vassalage via a kind of Victorian commercial dependence towards abject consumer servility. Bookshops were helping me grow up in unforeseen ways.

I guess the transactions between Blackwell’s and me worked well for both sides, but especially for the bookshop. My college was just a few hundred yards from its premises on the Broad, and I’d often spend hours browsing through books there, especially the poetry section. I rarely left the place empty-handed and still have some of the slim volumes of poetry I bought then on my dwindling shelves in Tokyo.

Catherine M Wood, “Old books” (public domain).

Over the years I’ve enjoyed visiting bookshops in France and Spain – they somehow seemed more straightforwardly bookish and smelt faintly of their products, the paper, ink and glue or whatever else it is books are made up of. I always found this comforting.

In both counties, bookshops always seemed more austere to me than their English counterparts, perhaps because of the countries’ slightly less commercial mentality. If you leave such a place empty-handed, it’s not a failure to sell on their part, but rather a lapse in literary taste on yours.

On my travels to France, I’d sometimes see the Hachette bookshops at railway stations. Louis Hachette hit on the idea of opening stores at stations from a visit to London for the 1851 Great Exhibition. During his stay in the English capital, he saw that WH Smith’s had opened bookshops at railway stations across the country. He decided to copy the model. The first such store in France opened at the Gare du Nord in 1853.

One notable individual who never visited a Hachette bookshop was Gustave Flaubert. This is not perhaps surprising. He disliked trains and the railway, and he probably didn’t go to stations very often. But what astonished me, at least when I read it a few days ago, was that Flaubert never set foot in any bookshop. However, when I recall that he used to write things like, “the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity of the bourgeois”, I become less surprised. ²

There are some enormous multi-storey bookshops in Tokyo that remind me of Foyles. But I rarely go to them. One obvious reason is that the vast majority of their books, naturally enough, are in Japanese. Occasionally, in pursuit of a gift, I find that locating the whereabouts of a book originally published in English – but which might have a completely different title in Japanese – can lead to an interesting kind of linguistic treasure hunt among the vast labyrinth of bookshelves. Otherwise, I’ll browse the modest section of English books without expectation of finding anything I want to read.

In recent years, when I’ve gone to a bookshop, either in London or Spain, I’ve found myself being simultaneously spoilt for choice and dismayed by the lack of it. These two sensations combine to create the most exquisitely uncomfortable equilibrium of disappointment. The perfect book, the one I really want to read, is almost never on the shelf. And having to head over to the counter and explain what I want before putting in an order seems to destroy the whole point of being there in the first place. More and more, I’ve tended to leave bookshops dismayed and empty-handed.

Bookshops work harder than they used to to attract us, I feel. And smell is part of that: the convergence of bookshop and cafe, familiar to readers around the world, is quite pronounced here in Tokyo. In one of my local stores, I’m actually unsure whether I am entering a cafe with a bookshop attached or a bookshop offering drinks and snacks.

It seems a popular model. This is even the case with the tiny cafe-cum-bookshop that I recently came across at a nearby train station. Online, alongside the many favourable reviews, it proudly announces draconian rules about a maximum stay of one hour and a prohibition on talking – in a cafe! – while declaring anathema against anyone who dares type noisily at a keyboard.

In addition, in a move that would seem to belong to an imperial regime deeply suspicious of its own subjects, gatherings of more than two at a table are forbidden (though special permission can be requested). A group of would-be anarchists in a novel by Conrad would be nonplussed by it, as would, I suspect, Greene’s Third Man. And I can imagine that the ghosts of Dryden and Pepys, frequenters of Will’s Coffee House in 17th-century London, would shudder at this prohibition. ³

I suppose my relationship with bookshops has changed in part because of my changing relationship to books themselves. Living in a tiny flat in Tokyo doesn’t allow for a significant collection of physical books, and I have already shed many kilos of them in recent years. But I also confess that these days I find an e-reader easier to use.

A physical book can be pleasing to look at, feel or even smell, but I find it can be an awkward object to actually read. The paperbacks – which are mostly what my books are – are often difficult to keep open at the right page. Years ago, I invested in a wire contraption that allowed me to keep books open and turn their pages without holding them. However, after my clumsy efforts inflicted some injuries to their spines, I gave this up. It felt too much like putting the poor creatures on the rack and dragging words out of them via that instrument of torture.

Apart from taking up no space, ebooks have other advantages for me. They are available instantly, incur no delivery fee, and I find them more convenient to refer to when writing an essay.

However, a major problem with ebooks is how their use has tended to turn me into some kind of indentured serf in the fields of learning, wholly beholden to a single company, which receives much of the money changing hands. This always feels like a retreat from the democracy of readership that we should be enjoying. ⁴

Another issue is that I feel slightly disenchanted with the whole idea of owning books (as with owning most things). The obvious solution to this, in terms of books, is the use of a lending library. If buying books reminds me I am simply another consumer in the great capitalist emporia that our countries have become, borrowing a book from a library can make me feel part of a democratic reading community. But unfortunately, one of the downsides of living in Japan is that I don’t have ready access to an English (or Spanish) language lending library. ⁵

Sadly, my relationship with bookshops has deteriorated to a point where I begin to wonder whether it may be over. On a recent trip to London, I passed a well-known bookshop near the hotel I was staying at on many occasions but never once went inside. Perhaps, I thought, I am suffering from bookshop burnout.

More tellingly, on a slightly later trip to the same city, I arranged to meet a former colleague at the cakeshop of the London Review of Books, which is attached to its cramped but well-stocked bookshop that’s perched between Soho and Bloomsbury.

I recall having a pleasant conversation in the cramped but cheerful cafe and relishing the excellent gluten-free carrot cake. After the meeting, I picked up my belongings and left through the cafe door and walked briskly into the street. Then, on the leaf-strewn pavement outside, I stopped with a slight jolt, realising that I hadn’t gone into the bookshop at all. But instead of turning around and heading inside, as I would have done in the past, I resumed my brisk walk into the busy streets of London’s Soho without even a backwards glance. It felt like the end of an affair.

1. I understand that the brand is disappearing from the high street but will stay at stations and airports.

2. For these and other observations on Flaubert and Hachette, see this informative review essay by Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books.

3. But note that Swift, ever the contrarian, took another view: “And indeed the worst conversation I ever remember to have heard in my life was that at Will’s coffee-house, where the wits (as they were called) used formerly to assemble.”

4. I’m currently in the process of switching to an e-reader that won’t lock me into a relationship with a single company forever. If I’m lucky, it might help me borrow ebooks (see note 5).

5. At least, as far as I can discover. A perfect solution would be to be able to borrow books in English or Spanish from libraries electronically (see note 4).