Love of books

In the past few years, there has been a raging fight going on between those who love ebooks and others who relish the traditional paper books. The ebook proponents argue that its portability- you can actually carry a library of 5000 books on one of these tablets- sets it far apart as the device of choice. The traditional book lovers however argue that there is nothing to neat the crinkle of pages of a paper book. Indeed the smell of a new book is something to die for. But there is one thing the ebook cannot have and that is a visit to second hand bookshops in search for a book which then leads circuitously to a dozen others that you did not know even existed.

Theodore Dalrymple, in a lovely article writes of his sojourns in various second hand bookshops. "Birds of a feather flock together: and if birds could be tweedy rather than feathery, I would be of that genus or species." he writes , " With others of my ageing type, I assemble outside provincial book fairs waiting tremulously for them to open, as drinkers waited outside pubs in the days when they still had opening and closing hours. We all rush in, hopeful of finding something special and fearful that others will find it first. It isn’t only fish that get away.How many hours, among the happiest of my life, have I spent in the dusty, damp or dismal purlieus of second-hand bookshops, where mummified silverfish, faded pressed flowers and very occasionally love letters are to be found in books long undisturbed on their shelves. With what delight do I find the word ''scarce’’ pencilled in on the flyleaf by the bookseller, though the fact that the book has remained unsold for years, possibly decades, suggests that purchasers are scarcer still."

Alas, second-hand bookshops are closing daily, driven out of business by the combination of a general decline in reading, the internet and the charity shop. Booksellers tell us that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet. Except for the true antiquarian dealers, whose customers are aficionados of the first state and the misprint on page 287, second-hand bookshops make less and less economic sense in the present day economy.

Second-hand booksellers are not in it for the money, of course: it is probably easier to make a good living on social security. The booksellers love books, though not necessarily their purchasers, and in their way are learned men. When they have been in the trade for many years they know everything about books except, possibly, their content. Possessed of astonishing memories, they say things like “I haven’t seen another copy since 1978”. Some of them seem destined to be mummified among their books like the silverfish, and probably cannot conceive of a better way to die.

Certainly, those of us who like ancient books on arcane subjects have noticed that many of our purchases emanate from institutions of learning. It makes no difference that Mrs Theobald Smedley-Wilkins left Lead Poisoning in the Later Roman Empire to an institution in perpetuity in memory of her late husband, Alderman Theobald Smedley-Wilkins. The librarian takes his revenge upon the now redundant work by stamping it sadistically with a large and ugly “withdrawn”, thus successfully reducing its resale value. This means that those of us who would like to leave books to public institutions as being exceptionally rare or even unique now think twice about doing so.

Customers of second-hand booksellers are in general a rum lot. What kind of person spends two-and-a-half hours in a shop and then havers indecisively over whether he really wants a copy of Augustine Birrell’s (unjustly) forgotten essays marked at £3? If he fails to buy it, he will regret it the moment the shop has closed or he can’t get back to it. If, on the other hand, he (and customers are almost always he) buys a book that his wife will find outrageously expensive by comparison, say, with a pair of shoes, or even a single shoe, he will ask the bookseller to rub out the price. All booksellers are so familiar with this pattern that they are ready with their rubbers even as their customers buy.

Browsing among the shelves is rewarding in a way that surfing the internet (the largest second-hand books website searches through 140 million volumes for sale, or says it does – I haven’t counted) can never be. Of course, if there is a particular book that you want urgently, the internet is a wonder: you type in the title, you pay by credit card, the book arrives the next day. There is no need any longer to resort to the bookfinder, that strange professional searcher after needles in haystacks, who guards his sources more jealously than any journalist and, I suspect, would not reveal them under torture.

But serendipity is the greatest pleasure of browsing, and there is no substitute for being able to hold the physical book in one’s hand. Among other things to be found in books are the markings of previous readers. When I first started buying antiquarian books I rejected those that had been marked, but now I find the markings sometimes more interesting than the books, and certainly revealing of the byways of human psychology.

There are, for example, those who seem to read hundreds of pages with the express purpose of finding the single spelling mistake or misprint contained in them and underlining it, putting a triumphant exclamation mark in the margin, as though finding the error established their intellectual superiority to the author. (Of course, they attribute all errors to the author and none to the printer.)

Then there are the underliners. The majority of these rarely get past the first chapter or two; some underline things so banal – Smith then went to London, for example, or The snow fell in flakes – that one wonders what kind of mind wants to commit such things to memory. Philosophy books of the Forties and Fifties, meanwhile, tend to smell strongly of tobacco.

The joy of finding something that one did not know existed, and that is deeply interesting or connected in a totally unexpected way with one’s intellectual interests of the moment, is one of the great serendipitous rewards of browsing, and one unknown to those who take a purely instrumental view of bookshops, leaving them the moment they discover that they do not have the very book that they want.

As for book aficionados, the strange thing is that one is guided by a kind of instinct to the right shelf and to strange book titles : for example a slim paperback entitled Making Sense of the NHS Complaints and Disciplinary Procedures – an illustration of an important literary principle, namely that there is no subject so boring that no one has written a book about it. This little book had so many bullet points that one felt one’s brain had been attacked by a Maxim gun; in the foreword, Sir Donald Irvine, erstwhile president of the General Medical Council, wrote the following one: “The early recognition of dysfunctional doctors, adequate public protection, and the chance of effective mediation before damage dependent on sound local self-regulation in which doctors know what their duties and responsibilities are, and how to make the system work.”

Why on earth did I hone in on this book, so dull and tedious? There was a slip of paper in the book. It was a review copy, and had been sent out by a medical publication to a doctor for review. The doctor in question was Dr Harold Shipman, and the book had obviously been read thoroughly. I bought it for £5, not as a memento but more as a reminder of the irony of human existence.