Bookshops are a precious shelter from the storms of life
It was blowing a gale when I took Lemn Sissay on to my bookshop roof to talk about open-air poetry readings. Gulls on the wing struggled stationary in the wind and even the cathedral peregrines were nowhere to be seen. When we came back down to the warm, bright bookshop it was like coming below decks on a sailing ship. Lemn said he would return to Canterbury one day for a rooftop reading and wrote a poem, which is still on the wall by our poetry section. I found myself with a line from
Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm in my head: “Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm.”
Bookshops have been in a perfect storm of online competition, business rates and parking charges for a while, but they will always survive. Even the tornado of the pandemic won’t defeat them. It has, however, made me appreciate my job all the more – I’ve been bookselling on the shop floor for 36 years – and the customers, from the tearful first few on the day we reopened after lockdown to the joyful children getting back on the rocking horses or gazing at the fish, seem to feel the same way.
“We all become stories”, as Margaret Atwood once said, and the same is true of bookshops. When we refer to our favourite bookshops, we’ll mention the cat or the nice coffee, or the spiral stair
case, or the really knowledgeable children’s buyer. Book-ish, which I recently stumbled upon after getting lost in a Welsh storm, has old typewriters lined up above the bookcases, all donated by locals, a reminder of how a community can take a bookshop to its heart.
Customers have told me how bookshops inhabit their subconscious as well. Graham Greene dreamed in such detail of a London bookshop that he went to look for it twice before realising it was completely dream-forged, and the novelist David Mitchell – who used to be my fiction buyer – said my shop was “the Piccadilly of [his] psychogeography”. In bookshops, as Virginia Woolf noted, we can lose the carapace of self, we can flit around our levels of consciousness and inhabit any of our potential selves. After reading that Greta Garbo spent hours in Rizzoli Bookstore because she needed “a break from being Garbo”, I look back differently on the day in 1988 when Faye Dunaway somehow left her passport – her identity – among the books of my independent shop in Chelsea. (Obviously I still boast about her kissing me after I phoned her hotel to say I found it in philosophy.)
Perhaps the most important self you can rediscover in a bookshop is from your childhood. Recently, a woman in her mid-60s was buying a contemporary literary novel when a dreamy look came over her and she asked: “I don’t suppose The Silver Sword is still in print?” I’m the same age, and we both identified deeply with the refugee in Warsaw during the second world war who kept his parents’ paper knife – the “silver sword” – in a shoebox. She was surprised when I told her it is still consoling children facing the storm of adolescence. Like The Magic Faraway Tree and I Capture the Castle, it is part of the secret canon, unknown to academia, of shot-in-the-arm books.
They exist for adults, too, and sell as steadily as chai in Delhi. They are written in a sort of trance-state burst of creativity, like Brideshead Revisited and 1984, the result surprising their authors but forever feeding the readersoul. These are the books which are sniffed before purchase and hugged or kissed afterwards.
Serendipitous browsing throws up discoveries and rediscoveries in a way that algorithms never can. Every day there’s a customer who thumps a great pile on the till and exclaims “I’ve got to get out of here before I find any more – I only came in for a card.”
With new restrictions currently making it impossible to browse, it may be a long wait until those of us in England can find our many selves among the bookshelves again. But whatever the storm may throw at us in the meantime, bookshops will forever be a shelter where it’s always safe and warm.
The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham is published by Particular Books (£16.99).