And then it happens. I’m in my late thirties and have settled in Copenhagen, infinitely far from the potato fields of central Jutland. My grandfather no longer asks for release from reality, Grandma no longer pines, and I’ve just written a short story collection. It’s called Karate Chop, and now it’s out in the shops. I’m walking down Gammel Kongevej in Copenhagen. It’s winter, I think. My feet are cased in black boots, my hands have vanished into gloves, and I can see my breath before me as I step lightly through the cold. The stories have been favourably reviewed, I’m feeling proud, and on the far side of the intersection there lies a bookshop. It looks small and cosy, but I’ve never been inside before. I get an urge to go into it and see if my stories are there. Across the street and into the warmth: a bell rings as I enter.
My eyes have to adjust to the dim light, but then I see the counter, and the woman behind it. She’s not young, and her cardigan is buttoned up her chest. I say I’m just browsing. She nods, and I walk over to the bookcase with new releases. The tip of my index finger glides affectionately past L and M, and then I come to N, where my book stands. Seeing your work on a bookshop shelf never stops being meaningful, and even though I have a crate of author’s comps standing in my flat, I still have to touch this actual copy. I take the book from the shelf, open it, thumb through it, read the jacket copy, and imagine I’m some unfamiliar customer in this bookshop, considering whether to buy this book. It’s the sort of slim book that easily disappears on a shelf. Which is to say that it’s easy to overlook, and I do so want for people to see it, to leaf through it and quicken with interest. What I do then is not to put the book back in its place. Instead, I place it facing outward on the edge of the shelf. I place it on display—on exhibit, in short—and I smile a little shyly as I do so. It’s as if I’m showing my nakedness to strangers. It’s a silly act, but there’s something tender in it, at least I think so, and then I hurry over to another shelf. Take a book, check the price, and walk to the till with a girlish smile on my lips.
And then she stands there, the older woman behind the counter. She’s not tall, and I set the book down, saying, It’s a lovely shop. She nods. I say, Yes, I actually write a bit myself. It’s embarrassing to say, but I can’t help but say it, and she doesn’t respond. I say, In fact, I was just over by the new releases to look at a book of mine. I couldn’t help but place it with the cover facing out. I laugh. One can be so nutty sometimes. And then I glance from the book the woman is putting in a little bag up to the woman’s face, and it is severe: Have you been going and moving books around my store? she wants to know. I say, Round and round, it’s still in the N’s. She steps out from behind the counter and squeezes past me; I catch a faint whiff of lavender. Outside the shop it’s begun to snow, and the woman, clad in nylon tights, skirt and sensible shoes, is heading over to the N’s. She stands on tiptoe, grabs my book, and then stuffs it roughly back into the shelf. Do you have any idea how many authors I get scurrying through my shop? she says as she edges past me again. You all just want to be seen and touched, she says. But when you move books around, then I can’t find them again, and then I can’t sell you!
I’m upholstered from the inside out against the Scandinavian winter, and yet at the same time I’m standing there stark naked. I try to defend myself from the woman’s gaze, for she’s calling into question both my integrity and my very being. She doesn’t want to touch or be touched by me, doesn’t want to see or be seen by me. She doesn’t want to be in the same room. She says, Out of my shop. I say, What’s that? She says, You heard me. Out! I say, But you can’t just do that. She says, I can do what I want, they’re my premises.
Fortunately there’s a green man at the crossing outside. It’s snowing, and I’m leaving the scene of the crime with my little bag. I don’t make it any farther than the bakery by the intersection at City Hall before I let myself cry. I don’t want to stop walking, for it’s winter; all the faces I pass are twisted in grimaces, and I go as fast as I can through the park, home to my street, in the main door and up to the fifth floor: the shame.
I have a hard time getting the sobbing under control. And the anger. I walk around and sound like a kid sneering at a playmate, She can’t do that! The two of us were supposed to be playing the same game, and I thought of course she understood; but instead, I ended up making myself vulnerable, and she ended up punishing me for it. A bit of internal bleeding has occurred, a break in confidence, and when I’ve cursed my throat dry, I make up my mind that the woman in the shop on Gammel Kongevej should know, so I sit down to the computer and write:
Dear proprietor,
I was in your establishment today, and you threw me out for reasons you no doubt recall. I want to tell you about my grandmother and a man named Erichsen. He was a bookseller in Jutland. One day she stepped into his shop to buy some genre fiction to read aloud to my worn-down grandfather. But Erichsen knew his calling, and so he convinced her to buy a great work of literature by Sigrid Undset, the Nobel prize-winner. My grandmother had been sent to town after some Korch, and how my grandfather reacted when she came home has not been recorded. The point is, Erichsen understood that he shaped the physical space around the encounter between reader and book. This encounter can be a delicate one, but he knew how to enter it with dignity. And curiosity, something no book can live without. In short, Erichsen was doing some cultural outreach in his bookshop, and when he died, the next person who managed the shop knew that he too should try to see his patrons as something greater than they sometimes might see themselves. He also understood that he served as literature’s outstretched hand, and that if he didn’t believe in literature, he wouldn’t be able to believe in his customers—or worse, in the intimacy between one consciousness and another. And it is the author who writes literature, and even if she might come across as a pathetic, even laughable figure in person, she’s still the horse’s mouth. If nothing else, Erichsen respected that. I know, for there was also an old man standing in Erichsen’s Bookshop when I was young, and he pulled me over to the shelf with Jorge Luis Borges one day when I was intending to buy something frivolous—the selfsame Borges who wrote:
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.*
In Erichsen’s Bookshop, they understood that they were providing the square footage for relationships, whether potential, existing, or broken off. They understood—but do you? That it revolves around intimacy? Perhaps that’s what scared me most today: that you did know and then breached it anyway. I won’t dare set foot in your shop ever again.
Yours faithfully, etc.
I sent the letter off without hesitating, after which I walked up to the storeroom and dug Kristin Lavransdatter out of the box where I’d buried it alive. I didn’t want Erichsen to have sold such a thing to a potato farmer’s wife in vain.
Translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra
* “Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”, “Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw” (1951), translated from the Spanish by James E. Irby, in Labyrinths, 1964.
Bohemia Road
IAIN SINCLAIR
The shock of being confronted by the handwritten CLOSING SALE notice hit me like a family bereavement. On Bohemia Road in St Leonardson-Sea, where fugitive operations peddle war surplus survivalist gear, plastic duck lures, electrified invalid carriages, knitting wool, carnival masks and PVC nurses’ outfits, they don’t go in for seasonal stock-clearance gimmicks. The stock in Bookmans Halt (no apostrophe, please) is organic: a colony of contented lifers. Armpit tomes mature in the perpetual twilight like mushrooms in a damp cellar. The critical mass of dead paper sustains the integrity of the building. It smells, in the best way, of suspended mortality. This library of ex-library rescues and boot fair probationers is proudly posthumous. The books passed away, honourably, with their previous owners: retirees, hoarding eccentrics and charity cases for whom charity had run out. The stock is buried on the open shelves, to be devoured, piecemeal, by starch-feeding silv
erfish. Then snorted as legal dust, the cocaine of the underclass, by clinically melancholy customers, silent as Quakers or white-lipped and fugue jabbering like speed freaks. Regulars treat the title above the door—Bookmans Halt—as an order. They freeze on the pavement, check that they are not being followed, before slipping furtively inside to join the permanent wake. The last rites for a significant resource on the point of euthanasia.
My feeling, after visiting Bohemia Road from the time when, having exhausted all other possibilities, I made a desperate punt at dealing, was that the books predated the shop. They were grave goods from some remote Iron Age; tattered remnants of a lost civilization around which the shell of the shop had grown up like an evolving earthwork. Struggling up the steep hill from the station was a pilgrimage, carrying me past the ugly church where a vicar, having fallen into dubious company in the railway pub, conducted conveyor-belt marriages between African gentlemen and Eastern European ladies to whom they had not been previously introduced. My ascent had the same heart-racing anticipation, the same realignment of the body’s magnetic poles, as coming down the Ridgeway, after a three-day hike, into the stone circles of Avebury.
Clive Linklater, the proprietor, talked about deciding on a whim to promote the copy of British Friesian Herd Book Vol. 39 that we’d all come to know and respect. This unlovely item was part of the shop’s furniture. And books not only furnished this cave, they propped it up. They buttressed the sagging walls. You felt guilty about lifting even a nicotine-tanned, friable leaflet from one of the mounds of slightly tired arrivals forming stalagmite towers on the floor. When Clive made the Herd Book part of his window display, it was the beginning of the end. Double-banked shelves shuddered and creaked. That odd volume was the East Sussex equivalent of the fluttering butterfly wing in China that brings about climate change, tornados in Texas, tsunamis in Thailand. Apocalypse. Finale. Night without end.
Bohemia Road was the perfect address for a functioning used-book pit that represented everything now amputated from the good life in the imaginary state we call England. Here was the antiquarian’s equivalent of Orwell’s 1946 pub, The Moon Under Water: that muted, gravy-brown boozer existing in no temporal space outside the wet dreams of John Major’s speech writers.
Bookmans Halt did exist, on the periphery of reality, for more than fifty years. An authentic address in an authentic suburb of an authentic seaside town. But I could never quite believe it. At first, as a scavenging dealer looking for weekly replenishment for my Camden Passage stall, I parked my car and interrogated the windows of other deluded Bohemia Road enterprises, hoping that Clive would still be there, still in business. I was often accompanied by a bristling skinhead autodidact known as Driffield, a person who claimed to have inspected every last nest of books on this island. And to have duffed up the pretensions of every trembling trader. The first step of Driffield’s downfall came when, licking his blue pencil, snorting and barking like a seal at the wit of his own acid put-downs, he began to compose, in block capitals, Driffs Guide to All the Secondhand & Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. The lesson for this conservative anarchist, a man who once failed with a free bookshop in Notting Hill, where customers viewed his stock with extreme suspicion, was to stay under the radar. You can’t be a self-promoting invisible. You can’t dodge taxes, bills, bailiffs and creditors if you are constantly puffed in the broadsheets and doing a reliable turn in chequerboard plus fours on television. Driffield was a disappearance waiting to happen. Either by his own volition. Or by the hand of one of the increasing number of furies who pursued him with writs and hammers.
In Driff’s first, self-published, difficult to navigate guide, brought out in 1984, Bookmans Halt is glossed as: “A med sized stk of low key bks. Very low prices. Very easy to get on with. Trade & Discuss.” High praise. Certainly Clive’s shop was a “Driff Special”: a place where the megaphone-mouthed ruffian could browbeat and bamboozle the owner into letting him walk away with a sack of plunder for next to nothing. But the point that strikes home now is that, before Thatcherism really bit, before the internet swept away Linklater’s brand of freelance poverty dodging, the Hastings catchment area could boast of twelve second-hand bookshops. By the time Driff abandoned his project and vanished into India for seven years, with the last guide appearing in 1995, we’re down to four bookshops in Hastings and four in St Leonards. And Driffield is the soapbox orator, a romancer by other means. He devotes the first forty-six pages of his guide to stand-up routines, before starting on the Domesday survey of pre-millennial bookshops still hanging on. The entry for Bookmans Halt has now expanded into a riff on book dealers who dare to become authors (a warning the man himself should have heeded). “You would think that booksellers would be the last to write bks, surrounded as they are by bestsellers that are now forgotten… All Mr Linklater worries about is selling his own autobiography.”
When Clive sent me a copy of Reflections from a Bookshop Window in 1994, I picked up the danger signs. Most book pit proprietors, slumped at their desks, imagine themselves as writers. Given half a chance, they would outperform the charlatans whose over-promoted dross insulates their hideaways. But somehow they never quite work up the energy to do it. It takes too much out of them to keep trespassers and potential thieves, otherwise known as customers and dealers, away from the stock. Their pygmy kingdoms are book prisons, where they can take a leisurely revenge on volumes they hate: the ones that refuse to escape.
Linklater, the most genial and humane of his breed, tolerated some of the sourest time-wasters on the south coast with good grace; a snivelling procession of libricidal neurotics whose empty days were plotted around new methods of demanding impossible rarities they instantly spurn, quibbling over prices so modest they were being pretty much sponsored to take them away. With bed-ruffled hair, unshaven (and proud of it), Clive was a man who looked as if he should be wearing a tattered goalkeeper’s jersey over his pyjamas. He admits, in his brisk and entertaining book, that he would prefer to be watching football on the flickering television set he has wedged in a corner than fending off potential purchasers. In fact, he’d prefer to be watching anything: pot-bellied darts from an Essex leisure centre, snowboarding, underwater chess. Or even talking for three hours on the phone with Driffield. Who demands a detailed description of Clive’s experience of standing in line, waiting for the doors of a church hall to open on a charity book sale in Crowborough, the only adult among a troop of schoolgirl Brownies in uniform.
The final clearance over, Clive can watch football at his leisure or tinker with a further memoir. He is a free man. And we, his parasites, his penny-pinching regulars, are the bereaved. I made the same move a few years earlier. I sold out and slunk into authorship. There is such a powerful connection between the two trades: the honourable and altruistic profession of providing modestly priced reading matter to a hungry but diminishing demographic and the entitled, despised tribe of scribblers who cough out product. Booksellers dream of the pleasures of staying at home, rising late, finessing their notebook jottings into acclaimed masterpieces, while authors, ground down by the drudgery of hackwork for advances that shrink with every book, once the novelty of the first appearance is over, fantasize about finding that delightful antiquarian bookshop in a quiet village tucked against the South Downs.
Between 1975 and 1995, I was a book dealer, first on a weekly stall, then at book fairs; a book dealer (curator, promoter, archaeologist of the re-forgotten and unloved) who wrote, a little, and published from time to time. From 1979, when my own independent press folded (costs skyrocketing, demand shrinking), to 1987, when Mike Goldmark, a barefoot entrepreneur, ace double-glazing salesman, East Midlands bookseller and future gallerist, took an insane risk in publishing my first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I produced nothing. Or so I thought. Until it was pointed out by Jeff Johnson, a canny American bibliographer, that my sixty or so book catalogues, taken together, constituted a special kind of novel. He was right. They were advertisements for my
self, mini essays, critiques by selection, diatribes against non-payers and the overvalued literary stars of the moment. These self-published booklets were a revenge of the disenfranchised by way of the list, a form previously exploited for short stories by J.G. Ballard and others. The booklets were illustrated and looked not unlike punkish fanzines for alternative lifestyles or counter-cultural manifestos (with price tags).
Without my experience of bounty hunting across the territory, through frontier trading posts like Bookmans Halt (a dozen a day), I would never have found the dynamic for White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. I mean the underlying energy system: the metaphor of the marketplace, where nothing is worth more than you can get for it. Driffield and his fellow scavengers were pressed into service as characters. All I had to do was shave off several layers of eccentricity. The real thing would appear grotesquely overwritten. This was a Masonic world of covert circulation, conspiracy, betrayal, addiction, shotgun suicides. A world governed by arcane rules and strict hierarchies. I could track an item, in one week, everybody taking a cut along the way, from the gutters of Brick Lane and Cheshire Street to the crystal cabinets of Savile Row and Covent Garden. A simple but essentially closed system was undone by the arrival of the internet; suddenly all the information was out there and desired titles were either impossible or available for the price of a postage stamp. At a stroke, a subculture governed by gossip, rumour, superstition and bad juju, was undone. Clive Linklater, wedged behind his heaped desk, hidden by protective bulwarks of as yet unpriced purchases, reported that customers now used his shop to note the particulars of items they would track down, at prices even more modest than his own, on Amazon and AbeBooks.
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