War of the prose is breaking out in Yorkshire valleys

BOOK sales have boomed in the pandemic, a small silver lining in a very black cloud.

Fiction has especially benefitted from lockdown, with sales surging 16% to £688million, as we sought escape from the cruel reality of Covid. Even non-fiction enjoyed a fillip, rising 4% to £1billion.

This isn’t unalloyed good news. Book shops were closed for most of the past 15 months, though I regard these as essential purchases. In my life, anyway. Our village book club has continued to meet on Zoom, and this month the choice is mine. I chose Motherwell, by Deborah Orr, the autobiography of a writer born in the Scottish steel town of that name.

We will be zoomdebating the book later this month, but meanwhile there has also been a boom in village book-swaps, often in disused telephone boxes.

One even appeared in a cardboard box on the wall near my allotment. It didn’t reign long. And there’s another up the hill in Cowling (pronounced by locals to rhyme with bowling, nowt to do with cows), where we used to live, which I must walk up to. Or better still, down from.

I hope this swapshop isn’t as censorious as the one in Cornholme, a former mill village on the Lancashire border up the valley from Todmorden. There, the local Mrs Mary Whitehouse posted a ban on “pornographic literature” telling donors “if you like this filth we suggest you move to the cesspit that is Hebden Bridge”.

Oooer! A resident in Hebden objected to religious material in their swapshop, saying “if this filth is to your liking, move to the God-bothering, uptight, holierthan-thou village of Cornholme.”

Brilliant! Book wars in Calderdale. Read all about it!