Dec 8, 2002
On Books
A couple of years ago, when I lived in Maida Vale, my looney flatmate (who had appalling taste in tourist tat – ethnic carvings and folk art and the like: truly shuddersome) informed me one day that she doesn’t like books, because they clutter the house up. Even on the bookshelves.
“So where,” I inquired, “do you propose I keep them?”
I shouldn’t have asked. Apparently, bookshelves are for ornaments and photo frames and candles, while any books that I’m not reading at the moment (and there are many, many, many), should be packed into boxes and “stored in the airing cupboard or something.” So now we know.
That conveniently decided for me what I was going to do that weekend, then. Rather than spending my hard-earned in IKEA or down the pub, I headed down to the Notting Hill Second Hand Book and Comic Exchange where I proceeded to buy as many books as I could physically carry home. And some more shelves, to boot. I love it when a plan come together. There’s nothing quite so contrary as a bookworm riled.
See, the thing about my fucktard flatmate was not that she didn’t like books, but more that she just didn’t get them. In a conceptual way. I think she just had a psychological block – she couldn’t see why someone might want to have books, rather than read them, especially if you can’t read them all at the same time. She subscribed to the disposable book theory, I think – books are to be bought at an airport John Menzies with neon covers for £5.99, consumed on interminable flights and crowded beaches, then left in the top drawer of the bedside table in the Gran Hotel De La Squeegymop as you jet home.
No. Quite simply. Wrong.
I’ve got gazillions of books. I worked in Waterstones and then Dillons in Liverpool for 4 years while I was at uni there and I swear I never made a penny. Every bit of my pay ended up being ploughed straight back into buying books (with hefty staff discount, natch) – when I supervised the bargain basement for the christmas season in 1995, I found myself facing a series of moral dilemmas.
As well as selling Penguin classics to the Liverpool public (Thin grey paper and cheap watercolour card covers, a bargain at �1 each. Top seller: War and Peace, because it had the most pages. I swear.) I had the responsibility of pricing damaged or worn books according to a strict list of criteria – you know the kind of thing: jacket torn: 25% discount, pages folded or torn: 10% discount, spine bent or creased: 10% and so on. As books came in from the other 4 floors, I’d have to go through them in my little back office with a bunch of price stickers and a calculator. And you know, naturally, there would sometimes pop up something I wanted – or rather more accurately, something I neither wanted nor needed specifically, but wouldn’t mind having. I’m sure you know the sensation. So then I’d look at it and decide what was wrong with it…and the temptation occasionally to bend the spine just a little bit more for that extra 10%, to fold back a few pages, to make a tiny rip in the back cover….well, it was sometimes irresistible. Whack a 35% staff discount on top of whatever I’d had to take off for damage and…well, lookey here, wouldn’t you know that book gets added to my pile of things to buy on payday?
If you visited Dillons in Liverpool in 1995, I apologise for the paucity of books on display in the bargain basement. They were all on my shelves at home, looking slightly tatty. (Of course then there was the whole guilt thing about damaging books – but that’s another issue entirely.)
One of the hardest things about working as a bookseller, though, was undoubtedly having to deal with people who did not share my passion for books. As well as the hoards of people buying penguin classics, you’d inevitably get those who would come in around christmas saying
“I’m looking for a book”
and when you asked which particular one, they’d hold their thumb and forefinger an inch and a half apart and say
“oh, I dunno, something about this thick. For me gran.”
My favourite classic bookselling moment came when a woman from the posh suburbs of Liverpool came in looking for Millers Antiques Guide. I showed her the new edition for 1995: it had a green cover. She asked if we had any previous editions. I explained that this was the most up to date. She said
“Yes, I realise that. But do you have it in blue? I want it to match my living room curtains…”
Sigh.
I adore books. At home, I have seven doublestacked bookshelves in my not-especially-big house, and I know for a fact that there are another 6 or 7 boxes at my mum’s house, waiting until I find that mythical home with lots of storage space that I long for (the quest continues apace).
I know exactly where my addiction comes from, too – my mum is incorrigible when it comes to books. I grew up in a house where the carpenter was a regular visitor, being called out every few months or so to install another set of shelves in a ridiculous place – along the stairwell, above the kitchen door, in the hallway – as well as all the usual places. Like living in a library.
When my mum – a journalist – had to go away to Sri Lanka for two months for a story, she left presents for me and my brother (aged 6 and 8, respectively). Books, wrapped in pairs, to be doled out from the top of the wardrobe once a week. Two books a week was nothing for voracious readers like us, and so each word was savoured, turned over in our minds like boiled sweets in the mouth. We grew impatient waiting for the next dose of reading matter. We ached for the next words. That was our contact with Jan while she was away. I learnt everything I know about feeding my book addiction from a master.
So it was no wonder that my illiterate flatmate and I failed to agree on issues of book storage. The entire time we lived together – a year and a half, though I’ve no idea how we ever managed it – she complained that my books (on the bookshelves) made the living room look cluttered.
A week before I was due to move out, she was still showing the flat to prospective room-mates (presumably holding out for the mythical perfect flatmate who pays double rent, likes washing up and is never there). A couple of days before the move, I packed three huge packing crates full of books from the living room, because I knew it was going to take forever and I had to do it sometime. In one final, brilliant moment of idiocy, she stopped me on the stairs on the way to the bathroom one groggy morning and said, with no hint of irony or mischief
“Oh, I wish you’d left the books in the living room. It made it look much more cosy. I’m showing the flat again tomorrow – would you mind putting them back on the shelves?”
I nearly fell over laughing.
You seem to be prone to the same condition as most of my neighbours here in Cambridge. Walk up and down most city-centre residential streets at twilight and through every tasteful box-sash window you will see shelves groaning under the weight of worthy-looking books. Those most visible will be the hardback classics and uniform arrays of second-hand Penguins – the sort of thing you are meant to imagine they read on long foreign train journeys. The soltan-stained Harold Robbinses and Jilly Coopers (and the scores of self-help books they only read the first chapter of) will be tucked away somewhere like the bedroom, lest you might think they actually read such rubbish. The video collection is carefully hidden behind cupboard doors, despite the fact that, aesthetically, it is largely indistinguishable from the books.
I have absolutely no argument with someone who buys and reads masses and masses of books – I’m given to spurts of it myself – but the act of putting them out on display on shelves is nothing to do with what’s written inside them. It also has little to do with making them instantly accessible for reference – how often do you reach down your copy of Middlemarch to check a quote, or read a chapter? No – having shelves full of books, as opposed to boxes or airing cupboards, is nothing to do with how much you read. It’s more a statement to the effect “Look at how worthy and intellectual I am – I’ve read all these books.”. Now, your ex-flatmate may well be the dullard you describe, but I know a few people (the exceptions that prove the rule) who could resemble her at first glance. Although they read constantly, they have only a few dozen books on shelves – mainly dictionaries, atlases and other reference books that they need at their fingertips. The rest are either sold on when read (where do you think your favourite second-hand bookshop gets its stock from?), stored in the loft if wanted to be read again, or chucked out. They also pay regular visits to the library (why buy books when you can read them for free?). They don’t regard books as décor in quite the same way you seem to (and in fact you tell amusing anecdotes about people simply taking your ideas to ridiculous extremes). In a similar way, a lot of musicians have (by audiophile standards) a pretty poxy sound system at home, and professional photographers have a beaten-up old manual SLR with two lenses. They are more concerned with the content and the results than they are with the material they use to get them.
Now, to get off my high horse for a mo, the fact that all my books are sitting in bags stacked up in the corner of a bedroom, and languishing in boxes in a cupboard, is less to do with my holier-than-thou attitude, and more to do with the fact that I’m too lazy to sort out better storage for them since my move – but I’m determined not to advertise any mock-intellectual credentials.
The reality is that books are just a medium, and there are as many crap books out there as there are crap TV programmes and films – probably many more, as they are so much cheaper to produce – and I’ve read some absolute shite. I hate the idea that just because something is printed it has greater legitimacy than something that is filmed, taped or recounted from memory. Why do you think Shakespeare, supposedly the greatest ever writer of the English language, was so keen on writing plays? Because he wanted them performed, not stored on planks either side of people’s fireplaces. Were he alive today, I’m sure he’d much rather be a Spielberg than a Rushdie or even a Pinter.
Aaanyway – you should be careful about what book-snobbishness says about you.
Well, thanks for that. I don’t think I’m a book snob, but thanks for sharing your opinion.
Partially in response to “plig” and partially in response to the original article:
For me, having books that I like around me is very comforting. Almost every night before I go to sleep, I scan my bookshelves for something that will fit my mood or help sooth me or just give me something to think about, or something not to think about, depending on my level of tiredness or current capacity for thought. I admit to “hiding” some of my books under my bed or in cupboards, as opposed to displaying them, but it’s more because I don’t like them anymore than because I’m afraid someone else will think I read rubbish.
I do like the physical feel of a book — it’s easy to get attracted to a certain medium as somewhat separate from its content when you’ve had an experience like the one Meg describes, with her mum leaving books as presents when she went on long trips. When I was little, books were like friends — I spent whole days with them, dragged them everywhere, dropped them in baths, brought them to the dinner table, dog earred them, smelt them, fell asleep with my face on them when I was sick and woke up stuck to the pages. I’ve been known to rub a favourite book affectionately against my face, happy about the book the way parrots are affectionate with their food.
So it’s perhaps not so much an issue of book-snobbishness as it is one of a taste developed early in life — a comfy affectionate thing, rather than a “look how intelligent I am as I’ve got Beowulf on my shelf” sort of thing.
Em… as a follow-up to the previous post, I’d be grateful if readers would selectively apply my simile “books were like friends” — I have, for example, never dog-earred a friend.
Just found your site today and I’m already hooked. I love what you say here…I know way too many people like your ex-roommate. (Um, my ex-roommate for one.) I’m seriously considering adopting some of your mother’s ideas for bookshelves, as it will probably be the only way I can even hope to hold my collection!