About bookshops and GBS

News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been a London commuter on and off for over 30 years and when I first did it, I reckon at least half my fellow travellers would be reading something, even if it was a tabloid or lad mag. Now I’m very often the only person with any kind of print matter to hand and, yes, maybe some of the phone-gazers are getting to grips with a new translation of Dostoevsky or Derrida but when I do sneak a glance at their screens, they’re really not, are they?

And then to David Hare, who bewails the current tendency of the National Theatre to prioritise star vehicles with West End/Broadway potential over its old repertory policy. And for some reason, George Bernard Shaw gets in on the act:

Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.

Except that I’m not so sure they’re proud of them any more. Or even know they exist. 

About Shakespeare and Company

A confession. When, several years ago, I ambled into the bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank and was growled at by the owner George Whitman (I think I interrupted his lunch), I thought I was following in the footsteps of Hemingway, Joyce, Pound and all the other expats who decorated Paris between the wars. Only now do I discover that there were two completely different shops, and that Whitman renamed his own in 1964 as a tribute to Sylvia Beach’s place on the rue de l’Odéon: she closed it in 1941, having refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer, which is a story in itself, surely.

Which is only a preamble to the news that you can now find out who made use of (the first) Shakespeare and Co’s lending library, and what they borrowed, on this fun site. And, connected only by being around at the same time, you can wander through Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from the safety of your own lockdown.

About books, again

Following on from the Thatcher Wine horrorshow, I was in Waterstones in Gower Street yesterday and saw, on a tabletop laden with books as slim and pretty as a posse of wannabe fashion models, this sign:

Which annoyed me a bit. Of course, it could be justified as a bit of stealth marketing, selling books to non-bookish people on an aesthetic basis, and, hey, maybe a few of them may absent-mindedly pick them up and read them. But would such people be in a bookshop – specifically a bookshop in the heart of the University of London – in the first place?

I calmed down a little when I turned 90 degrees to face the delectable wall of orange and cream below, all the Evelyn Waughs and Angus Wilsons you can eat at a fiver a pop. (The pale blue Pelicans were round the corner.) But then I noticed that these are being marketed not as second-hand books, but as “Vintage” Penguins and I’ve got a horrible feeling they’re also being shifted as design accessories first, books second. And yes, I accept that anything that helps to keep proper walk-in bookshops viable has to be a good thing. And yes, I’ve lost count of the books I own that I’ll probably never get round to reading. (The Japanese word for this is “tsundoku”) And yes, by taking a photo of the old Penguins like a bloody tourist, I’m further enabling the fetishisation of design and appearance over content.

But it’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to. And now my degree’s over I can get back to reading what I bloody well want, so I bought a remaindered copy of the most recent edition of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, the book proper of which is just 168 pages long, but has enough notes and discographies and indexes and similar geeky stuff to take the whole package well past the 400 mark. Will it make my bookshelf look good though?

About my non-existent book

I’ve long been fascinated by the saga of Jim Crace’s Useless America, a book that never existed but, thanks to a typing error or a misheard phone call or something, came to life within the Amazon hive mind. In fact, such occurrences aren’t that unusual. A few years ago, I was supposed to be writing a book about Lady Gaga, but after a few thousand words, the publisher decided the market was glutted with such products and elected not to go ahead with it. (This sort of thing is also fairly normal practice.) However, the title, cover and provisional release date had been released to the online and high-street retailers, so the book now had a virtual existence that would never be realised. And it’s still there, hovering amidst the ones and zeroes; as I type this, it’s the 10,363,298th best-selling book on Amazon.

Over at GoodReads, though, things have progressed to the next level. Not only does my non-book exist, but you can find out how good or bad it is; three people have bestowed upon it an impressive five stars. Which makes me wonder how well it would have done if I’d actually written the bloody thing.

(One of the people who was so nice about my masterwork is called Miley Cyrus, although I assume she isn’t really. Which adds another level of postmodern wonder to the whole thing.)

It isn’t, it really isn’t

Heaven knows, in these postmodern, cross-cultural times, the borders between plagiarism, tribute, pastiche and coincidence are so blurred that they might as well not be there. That said, it might have been nice if Selfridges had chosen to set up their Christmas window display while Frank Sidebottom was still around to enjoy it.

PS: Seems as if Selfridges has been nudged into doing the right thing.

The wane of wax

Celebrated Record Store Day with a farewell trip to Beanos in Croydon, which is closing down and reinventing itself as an indoor market of some description. I've long had a soft spot for Beanos because it's where we got most of the vinyl that powered the jukebox we hired for our wedding in 2000 (the biggest single expense of the day, as far as I recall).

As I suggested a few weeks ago, with reference to Bangkok bookshops, it's difficult to assess a product's popularity by its presence or absence in a second-hand shop. If the five-for-a-quid rack contains, for example, several copies of 'Love Your Sexy...!!' by Byker Grooove, it might suggest that nobody wants it - but it also reminds us that someone once did.

I didn't buy it, but I did buy this:



(And no, I know it's not Coldcut.)