Tristram Fane Saunders
Today, book stores around the country are reopening – Tristram Fane Saunders is thrilled
Why there is nothing quite like the joys of a real bookshop
One of the most personal gifts I ever received was chosen by a stranger. They knew exactly what I’d like. What happened was this: my sister walked into a Waterstones and told the person behind the counter she was looking for a last-minute present, a gift for someone keen on poetry and Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasies, a lazy reader with little patience for long books.
An algorithm would have suggested a poetry anthology, or more Pratchett. But the human bookseller knew the right book would be Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. I read it straight through the day I was given it, wept, then read it straight through again.
Today, bookshops around the country open their doors after almost three months of lockdown, and this kind of interaction will once again be possible. Bookselling is as much an art as a science: number-crunching can’t replace the personal touch. Good booksellers get to know their regular customers’ tastes and quirks in a way no internet monolith can. A few shops have been generously offering recommendations over the phone in recent weeks, but it’s not quite the same as in-person browsing.
A bricks-and-mortar bookshop is a temple to what the writer Mark Forsyth (to deliberately misquote Donald Rumsfeld) calls “the unknown unknown” – “the delight of not getting what you wanted”. Internet data will only point you towards what you’ve already searched for; a bookshop allows you to stumble across the strange and wonderful by sheer chance.
The basement of London’s marvellous LRB Bookshop is an Aladdin’s cave of mysteries. I once picked up a book of sonnets there called Sonnets – hand-stitched, no barcode, not even an author’s name – and I’ve been rereading it with pleasure for years. I’d never have found it anywhere else.
That bookshop is tentatively looking at a July reopening, and many independent shops are proceeding with caution. At the time of writing, I’m still waiting to hear about my much-loved local, Bookseller Crow, though plenty of other independent booksellers are opening, from the Barnsley Book Vault to Winstone Books in Dorset. Today doesn’t mark a full return to normal, but it’s a promising first step.
Waterstones shops in England are reopening, but not in Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland, where tougher restrictions are still in place. Most Foyles bookstores remain closed, but three of its London branches are reopening, as are the micro-chain Topping & Co’s shops in Bath and Ely.
In the reopened shops, browsing won’t be the same as before. Foyles now boasts of its “quarantrolleys” for manhandled books. If you touch but don’t buy, the potentially tainted item will be quaran-trundled off to spend 72 hours in isolation, before being allowed to return to the shelves. It may take time to get used to all the new precautions – such as hand sanitiser on entry and exit – but many of us will still leap at the chance to step through the doors of a bookshop.