About unread books

A number of celebrated authors have offered their support, if not their creative juices, to a book called Don’t Steal This Book, intended to highlight the way AI technology rips off the work of published authors with nary a by your leave. Beyond the names of the not-writers, the pages are blank, so I assume anyone who buys it will immediately ignore it, just as I did with the empty poetry book Release the Sausages, a passive-aggressive squib targeting the timidity of Keir Starmer.

That said, books that sit passively on the shelf aren’t that unusual. The same trawl that offered up Charlotte Sometimes also netted me a copy of Ben Judah’s This is London. It was published in 2016, 10 years ago, but showed no evidence of ever being opened, let alone read, during that decade. In fact, the only interruption to its boxfresh perfection was a receipt, suggesting that its previous owner had picked it up in a different charity shop in 2018. So two separate owners had bought it and then callously ignored it. And now I’m looking warily at my own shelves and wondering what I’ll discover.

PS: From the Judah book. Pawel escaped Poland in 1981 and ended up as a builder in London:

“You know what it was like then? Back in the eighties, the nineties, when I was first building, your painter, he would’ve come from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts... You’d tell him to rip off the wallpaper and throw on three thick coats of paint and he would just begin telling you about Polish minimalism. Your bricklayer... He would be a sociologist, talking Hayek when it was tea break.”