I come from the Amazon generation, or perhaps even the post-Amazon generation: bookshops are perceived as either quaint (an elderly relative who makes a cup of tea for you to say thanks for visiting) or esoteric and intimidating (an elderly relative who throws a cup of tea at you because you've interrupted her research). During my Creative Writing MA, publishers and agents occupying various stations on the spectrum of smugness informed me that we're moving beyond the age of the printed book and into the age of the self-published work, instantly available for Kindle. Then again, those same publishers reckoned that stories about ghost zombies would be 'in' this year, along with stories about astronauts (presumably any zombie-ghost-rocket combination will be a sure-fire success).
And yet Kindle books are ephemeral in a way that printed books are not. All too often, they serve as examples of what Geoffrey Hill calls 'commodity English': mass-produced, bought, sold, forgotten. Of course, printed books can be forgotten too - my tasks at Wenlock Books included clearing dust from the top shelves, picking old books out for a January sale and realising that some had gone untouched for years. Even in a bookshop as frequently visited as this one, it's inevitable that a few books will slide into obscurity - but the long decline takes place over years or decades, whereas e-books have the unwanted capacity to vanish instantly, leaving no trace behind. No volunteer comes along to brush away the dust and restore them to a more prominent place on the virtual shelf.
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In the prologue to 'God's Gift to Women', Don Paterson writes,
'The poem is a little church, remember,
you its congregation, I, its cantor...'
Sticking to religious analogies, the bookshop is perhaps a cathedral; Wenlock Books perhaps a friendly parish church. Much like churches, bookshops (and poems) contain spaces dedicated to the preservation of the past. Wandering among the shelves, it's hard not to feel the weight of previous lives, or the sense that, somewhere among the thousands of volumes, your thoughts will find mirrors. The further I go, the more I'm aware that others have preceded me every step of the way:
'...what there is to conquer
By strength or submission, has already been discovered,
Once or twice or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again...'
(Eliot in East Coker)
The fascination with the past (especially when combined with the cathedral analogy) suggests sterility, perhaps a fear of change, but bookshops are incredibly vibrant places. Each time you walk through the door, you see thousands of books, each of which you could potentially buy and begin reading within the next few minutes (obviously anyone with a student loan to pay back should take care to buy the books one at a time, and only on special occasions). Of those thousands, how many have the potential to challenge and change your assumptions, to lead you down unexpected paths, to shift the course of your life? Dozens? Hundreds?
A friend of mine once walked into our college library and opened a book at random. An October storm was raging outside, and he was lucky enough to be able to watch the waves swelling and bursting out at sea, to listen to the wind battering against the library windows and take in one of those black autumn skies that hangs so low you feel you could touch it. The book he picked was Shelley's Collected Poems, and the page he turned to was the first page of Ode to the West Wind. The book collided with his life and altered it irreparably: now he's a writer with four published novels behind him. It's incredible to think that, in this shop, there are books with a similar power to change career paths, political views, whole lives...
**
Over the last few days, I’ve realised that I’m a woefully inefficient shelf-stacker: I pause to read first chapters, compose impossibly long reading wish-lists and occasionally lose my grasp on the alphabet (more or less the same phenomenon you experience when you stare at a word for minutes on end and begin to wonder whether it’s really spelt that way). It’s been wonderful to be part of a shop where the owner makes time for every single customer, where I’m always encountering books I desperately want to read or have already read and half-forgotten. Orwell famously devoted an essay to his ideal pub, The Moon Under Water; had he undertaken a similar exercise on the theme of the ideal bookshop, it’s tempting to imagine that what he’d have ended up with would be something bearing an eerie resemblance to Wenlock Books (albeit with the name changed to something rather more ethereal).
Jacob Silkstone
(j.silkstone@themissingslate.com)
