Bookshop backwaters
By Harry Eyres
Published: May 30 2009 01:31 | Last updated: May 30 2009 01:31
You might think that I have little interest in the retail sector (more Brûlé territory); in fact, I suffer from a rare condition called “emporiophobia”. Far from being attracted to shops, I shun them. Imprisoned within a department store, I develop symptoms of panic, disorientation and, after about 40 minutes, loss of the will to live. There are exceptions. As a young child I was fascinated by fishmongers and, to a lesser extent, butchers. I like good food markets, delicatessens and specialist cheese shops. But my favourite shops are bookshops.
Of course writers love bookshops. They may haunt them, secretly hauling down their own works from high and invisible shelves and positioning them in front of rivals’ publications. But they may also despair of them, seeing the strange company of the sartorially challenged who frequent them, often with no intention of making a purchase.
Surely the picture I am giving is out of date. Didn’t the arrival in London of Waterstone’s and then of the impeccably smart chain Daunt Books change all that, filling their wood-panelled stores with well-heeled professionals and yummy mummies? But the smartness of Waterstone’s proved its undoing: Tim Waterstone sold out to WH Smith as long ago as 1989 and now these stylish-looking emporia are piled with three-for-two offers, the betrayal of everything truly bookish. Three-for-two offers might be suitable for budget lavatory cleaners but never for books.
In fact, while Waterstone’s and Daunt Books were coming to prominence, some irreplaceable independent London bookshops disappeared. Compendium in Camden and Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop (which migrated from Kensington to various venues in Covent Garden) were the only bookshops truly serious about, respectively, philosophy and poetry, and now both have gone. Of course the situation was and remains much better in America, where truly great bookshops such as Powells of Portland, Oregon, and Elliott Bay Books of Seattle continue to thrive. But London came close to having no proper bookshops at all.
Salvation has come from an unlikely quarter. Foyles was always London’s biggest independent bookshop, but also its most dingy, chaotic and, not in the best sense, Dickensian. There was a strange system of queuing up to get a ticket, then queuing up again to pay, then queuing up a third time to collect the book. People who worked there told dark tales of employment practices from another century. Foyles was a place you went to only when you had to, because an obscure or out-of-print tome was stocked there and nowhere else; it was not a place associated with pleasure.
Suddenly all that has changed. I could hardly believe the transformation when I went there recently to take part in a recent event on “wine and words”. Foyles now has probably the most attractive café in central London, modelled on the ones in the great American bookstores but more lively, with jazz at weekends. There is a gallery on the top floor where frequent events and readings are held; it also boasts a fine Yamaha grand piano, so you can catch pianists of the calibre of the brilliant young Scot Stephen Osborne limbering up for Wigmore or Southbank recitals with lunchtime run-throughs.
Next to the gallery is a particularly good music section, with an excellent collection of sheet music, as well as carefully chosen CDs and DVDs (the huge Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, by contrast has a pathetic selection of classical CDs and no music DVDs whatsoever, apart from a few hackneyed opera films). I don’t know whether this pays its way in terms of shelf space, but it feels profoundly civilised. The sound of your columnist playing Mozart’s “easy” Sonata in C from the adjoining gallery was enough to persuade one customer to buy a complete set of Mozart piano sonatas – the right degree of distance making the heart grow fonder, or the wrong notes inaudible.
Foyles is a family business, not a faceless global chain; we know from Dickens (Clennam & Co) that family businesses are not always benign, but, at their best, they permit someone to express a personal vision through an enterprise, without being excessively beholden to accountants. What happened at Foyles was a generational shift; following the death of Christina Foyle, doyenne or battle-axe according to taste, in 1999, her nephew Christopher decided to refurbish the store and modernise the company, opening three other smaller shops in London. Some apparently still miss the old chaotic and bad-tempered Foyle’s, but they must be people who prefer overcast gloom to sunshine.
Why does this matter? The point is that, as I and other emporiophobics know, bookshops are not really shops at all, or not simply shops. They occupy a peculiar no-man’s-land between the private and public sectors.
Some of them are more like libraries or clubs than shops – Joseph’s Bookstore in Golders Green is one such place. Bernard Stone ran three publishing ventures alongside his bookshop.
That was why the poet Michael Horowitz was able to describe the Turret Bookshop as “the merriest backwater of the time”. Backwaters can be curiously important in the literary culture.
harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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