Do We Need Secondhand Bookshops?

Reflections of an incorrigible browser

I have written elsewhere about my obsession - not an unusual or rare one it has to be said – with poking around secondhand bookshops but increasingly I have a sense that this pastime’s days are numbered. Like the British pub, a dying institution as the grim statistics of weekly closures (eight a week say the Campaign for Real Ale) confirm, the bookshop seems to be a species heading for extinction.

To those who live out their lives online this is neither surprising nor bothersome. Why on earth waste time scouring the shelves of a grotty old bookshop that will probably be closed unpredictably when you arrive or watched over by a grumpy owner whose prices are in many cases a damned cheek? Online booksellers like Abe Books (or the incomparable Bookfinder site) enable you to track down what you are looking for with ease and speed and – up to a point – more cheaply, and without leaving your seat. True, many don’t know how to describe a book or understand in many instances that the particular edition sought matters. This is actually getting worse with many online booksellers resorting to so-called “generic” photographs of the book in question and saying that it “may” have some undesirable features like annotations that can’t be erased. There are often too lazy to give you the key publication details you need. But if it’s a copy of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party you want then they will probably find it for you in whatever condition it presents itself in.

But all this misses the point. Apart from the obvious fact that you can never know until you get it in your hand what the condition of an online purchase is like, the tactile pleasures of book handling (I genuflect in passing to Myles na Gopaleen), the physical feel and even smell of a book (yes, yes, I am obsessive) are all part of the decision finally to go for it. Yet until you take the wrapper off the package from the courier you don’t really know what you are going to get.

But there is a great deal more to book-bibbing than this. The pleasure of the chase is one thing but even greater is the discovery while browsing of the book you didn’t know you were looking for. In the universe of algorithms, online conformity, ‘influencing’, ticking the necessary boxes, jumping to attention when the red asterisk glares a warning at you that some “required field” has not been filled in, it is a pleasure to break loose, to become a free agent who is not being controlled by the digital police. That means going into a shop and, outrageously, just seeing what comes up. Just as digital maps on your phone don’t want you to spread out the map and ponder and play with possibilities but to go to a specific place from the place you are at (and they already know where you are) on the route that they propose in the number of minutes they calculate, so online shopping takes the unpredictability out of things.

I am lucky enough to live half an hour’s drive from Hay-on-Wye, “the town of books” (actually the town of boutiques) and the outdoor shelves at the Cinema Bookshop (the best bookshop in town) or the Honesty Bookshop are often more fun precisely because you don’t know what you are going to find. Of course it means trawling through rubbish or stuff that you have no interest in but the tickle of pleasure when something jumps into your hands is unbeatable. Bookbrowsers, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

Before I forget, a rap over the knuckles for charity bookshops like Oxfam with its notorious “antiquarian” category, which appears to mean overpriced books in crummy condition, and silly prices put on a scruffy book by someone out the back who saw that someone in South Carolina was asking that amount online for apparently the same title. And, by the way, is an Iris Murdoch fifth impression from the 1970s actually antiquarian?

What probably unites most serious book seekers is something more than all this. It is a recognition that the world of contemporary bookselling with its best-seller obsession is a long way from the world of exploratory, serendipitous reading that many of us move in and which the second hand market of out-of-print books serves. Apart from libraries like the British Library or the private London Library these titles are hard to find. I remember in the 1970s getting interested in a Victorian novelist called Mark Rutherford (William Hale White). At the time I was living in London and the London borough libraries organised something called (I think from memory) The Metropolitan Fiction Reserve. This was a very clever wheeze that meant each borough kept an alphabetical section of out of print fiction that could be called upon by any of the other borough libraries if a book was requested. I was able to read all of Mark Rutherford’s novels this way, only one being in print the last time I looked. Things are bound to have got worse and probably all that stuff in the Reserve has been pulped. Tell me it hasn’t.

There are still great secondhand bookshops around – Walden Books and Any Amount of Books in London, Ystwyth Books in Aberystwyth, The Cinema Bookshop in Hay – but many have gone – The Gotham Book Mart in New York, the Marchmont Bookshop in Bloomsbury with its great poetry stock – and no doubt there will be fewer by the end of the decade. But we need them and the attitude to the writing of the past that they sustain. We need their enabling of openness, readiness to discover writers, including profoundly unfashionable writers, and ways of looking at the world that are different and challenging.

They are an alternative to the programmed and the prescribed. They are on the side of imaginative freedom.