It's the characters, real and imaginary, which inhabit bookshops, that make them such fascinating and inspiring places
In his essay Bookshop Memories, George Orwell tells how his enjoyment of secondhand bookshops was ruined when he worked in one. Such places became "too closely associated ? with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles". My affection for bookshops has followed a reverse trajectory. I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.
My great uncle Arthur used to run an independent in my hometown of Penrith. It was tucked away behind the church, next to an old covered market where you could buy anything from saddlery to Sauron's ring. Not exactly prime location given today's high street preferences, but back then bookshops often seemed secluded, almost requiring SAS field skills to find. I liked my uncle. What wasn't to like? He'd been a pilot in the war. He drank whisky from a silver hip flask. And he had a Jack Russell called Patch that would savage my brother's trouser leg, for no discernable reason, every time we went into the shop. We went most Saturdays. My mum was a great reader. She also liked to check that Arthur, who was well into his seventies, and neither a moderate hip flask appreciator nor the tidiest shopkeeper, hadn't been crushed under a teetering stack of encyclopedias.
Despite the appeal of seeing my brother with a small angry dog attached to his trousers, going into the shop made me twitchy. It was a four-storey townhouse, rammed to the rafters with texts, old and new, that I had very little interest in. The ground floor of the building was under siege from clone-like marching legions of paperbacks, the sale of which, presumably, uncle Arthur made a living from. The second floor showcased an array of local literature ? birds, flora and frolicking frogs of Cumbria ? antique maps and paintings of colossal prize-winning Belted Galloway cows. The third floor was a labyrinth of dark oak passageways and shelves containing cracked, embossed spines. There were even some locked glass cases with manuscripts inside. My brother, Patch and I were not allowed to go onto the fourth floor. Lord knows what was kept there. Possibly the whisky stash. Or the Gospel of Christ on his Bike.
And that was the main problem with the place: the books. Books had to be read; they required patience and sitting still, which I hadn't quite mastered. Once broached, books were supposed to contain magical, seditious, sexy worlds and rollocking adventures. Instead they seemed like inanimate objects, withholding and unwelcoming. I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?
It wasn't just Uncle Arthur's overstuffed townhouse of tomes that made me uncomfortable. Other bookshops had a similar Victorian museo-chaotica format and an atmosphere of funlessness. They were muted and cluttered; people ghosted about the aisles looking suspicious, or sat transfixed over leather-bound folios in shabby, odorous horsehair armchairs. There were squeaky rotating wire racks with comic books inside, designed so that children would have to commit noise if they were to get at anything readable. Sometimes, enthusiastically hushed conversations could be overheard between customers and vendors about compelling dramas, wonderful characters or suspenseful plots. Yet all the excitement and activity remained off stage. It took place in closed, papery worlds. Bookshops, it seemed, were a front. They reeked of dust and duplicity, like the kind of quietly suggestive, slightly sinister compound beneath which a government might house a missile silo.
Orwell's problem was with the customers. His litany of undesirables runs as follows: "The kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop ? the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' ? and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy ? she doesn'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 ? There are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money."
The author assures us that being employed in such a place is not a charming or utopian occupation. "They" ? that is, the purchasers, browsers and variously annoying members of the public ? spoil everything.
It was only when I started working in a bookshop in a Civil War town during my stint in America that I actually began to like them. It was the characters frequenting Rockbridge Books that made the job interesting. My favourite customer was an elderly lady who lived in a big wooden mansion at the top of the town. She carried a white parasol and always wore gloves, even in the humid Virginian summer. On her porch was a 12-pound howitzer, which was loaded and aimed at the mansion of the neighbour opposite with whom she'd had a 30-year feud. He was from New York. One day she might feel "inspired to fire", she said. Every week she managed to track down a newly released Civil War history or biography of Traveller, General Robert E Lee's horse, to order. She also kept buying Roald Dahl stories for her grandchildren, reading, then returning them, due to their "vi-owlant" content (grandparent-shrinking potions and so on). In her mind, these activities were entirely reconcilable.
The store had a more mysterious guest too. It became apparent, after several reimbursements had to be made to disappointed customers, that someone was using a black marker pen to score out sexual references and obscenities in novels from the bestsellers section. The books were removed, censored and repositioned, presumably as some kind of moral public service. Although I spent hours patrolling the racks, I never apprehended any criminal in the act of defacement. After a while, the staff began speculating that there was a puritanical spectre abroad ? a walk-in from the Baptist graveyard next door, perhaps.
But oddness was not limited to the patrons and spooks. One of my co-workers had some kind of feline sleep disorder. She had to take catnaps every two hours, which she would do while curled up on newspapers spread on the office floor. The door had to be left open because of her claustrophobia. Customers would occasionally pause to look in, then approach the front desk and ask whether I knew that there was a dead woman in the office. She would rouse herself 10 minutes later and come back to work with the local headlines ? Pervert Santa Trapped in Walmart Cubicle ? printed on her face.
The owner was obliged to be accommodating, probably because her son was possessed by demons. He would arrive at the store after school, with fluorescent evil leaking from his nose, and insist on helping with the returns. This would involve locating the store cat, called, rather beautifully for the purpose of this article, Orwell, forcibly shoving it into a cardboard box ? the kid was immune to mercy meows and claws ? and taping the lid shut. He would then narrate the sad story of how the cat became trapped in the taped-up hissing box. Fortunately for us, and unlike most serial killers, he did not graduate to the imprisonment and torture of humans.
Eccentric behaviour was, if anything, encouraged at Rockbridge Books. I had a head start. I was English. Virtually everything I said sounded bonkers to the native ear. And it was while I was working there that my first novel was bought. This was a surprise to everyone, not least me. I'd sent away a rather rustic manuscript, which I was sure would be tossed from the window of that elegant London publishing house amid gales of laughter. The novel wasn't being published in America, but that didn't stop me sticking a printout of the cover design over a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and admiring it in the bestsellers section. Shortly afterwards, the Baptist ghost went to town on JK Rowling's occult musings. Working at Rockbridge Books was, most days, like being in a Southern Gothic novel. That's why I liked it so much.
Orwell (the author, not the cat) complained that there was an absence of truly bookish people frequenting bookshops. But I wonder what constitutes a bookish person. Isn't it simply someone who has a peculiar enthusiasm for books?
Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. And, although I do still enjoy a spot of mud bathing and tree climbing, I'm now an aficionado of such places. When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop. My favourite is Bookcase in Carlisle. It's ? wait for it ? a four-storey Regency townhouse, gorged to the gills with previously enjoyed (or not) paperbacks, antique maps, local nature compendiums and leather-bound volumes. The owner, Steve, is very compliant. He simply hands me the key to the antiquarian room whenever I arrive so I can lock myself in with the first editions, the fat cow portraits and the frolicking frogs.
Sarah Hall's collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, will be published by Faber & Faber in November. sarahhallauthor.com
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/30/fiction-comes-to-life
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