The Bookseller's Tale by Martin Latham (2020)

 A bit of info: the author and I are roughly contemporaneous. He's a few years older than me, started working in a bookshop the year before me, and we've spent a good amount of our lives bookselling; he's made a career out of it, though he's not keen on that description, whereas I've strayed into repping and publishing. We've seen approximately the same things from not dissimilar vantage points. So, of course it's interesting to see any contrasts between us. This book is filled with interest, in the compendious sense. It's a wide-ranging look, ranged around where human beings encounter books - so, bookshops, libraries, of course, but also the streets. And how we relate to them once we've grabbed them and taken them home to be with us, or consult them in a library chair. And also some shots of history to tell us how they began and what other forms our more familiar modern examples grew out of, and the key industries and cultural leanings which gave them form. He has a fun way of drawing out psychological points concisely, figuring the book "thing" as a relationship. I'm guessing from some of his angles that he's thinking broadly in psychogeographic terms. My instinct here is to draw back and see what this achieves in this case. For me, it introduces on the one hand a pleasing warmth, a sense of exploring connections, on the other a kind of forced quality, where tropes are identified in a search for defining illustration which don't bear out in the cool quiet of ordinary observation. We have blanket statements about (I'm paraphrasing) "staircases inhabiting our dreams" when discussing interior architecture, or talk of customers stopping short on entering his bookshop, eulogising the atmosphere. Also quite a few examples of dreams he's had exactly echoing a point he's making! And his preoccupation with women kissing books is a worry. There's a definite romanticising going on here, but perhaps that's what partakers of psychogeography want? If they do, more power to their elbow, as long as it's identified as such. At the cooler end, this tendency is enriching and efflorescent, at the warmer it's approaching the selling of snake oil. I'd want more of a documented sense of his warping intention here, rather than a presentation of this information as cold hard fact. There are some fascinating excursions, though: apparently there are recent developments in the study of street literature, tiny ephemeral pamphlets sold by pedlars, which are uncovering the genre's true extent, believed to be game-changingly significant; there are similar developments in studying the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, which I'm less convinced by, but open to. The form of this book is governed by it being a compendium, literally a magazine, in the military sense. And his very fluid style helps to cover over the "and then......and then......and then...."-ness of this. It flows between tendencies to the academic and Sunday Magazine-writing pretty successfully, though is best read in smaller chunks. As might be expected, I was very focused when it came to the last chapter on his own life as a bookseller, and throughout the book on his attitude toward the workings and significance of bookshops now. The aforementioned romanticising inspired concern; also I think I've worked out what's missing from my point of view, which is related. Reading this book as a book trade layperson, so to speak, one would get a pretty rosy image of a palace of dreams, chock full of delightful eccentricities of stock and staff, and a huge upthrust of inspiring waft to fertilise us. I can only consult my own feelings: I get a lovely sense of anticipation when entering even the most modest bookspace - there's a charity bookcase on the way out of my local supermarket at one end of the spectrum, there's Shetland's only "proper" secondhand bookshop in a glacial valley, opposite an old mill, where a noisy burn powers toward the voe below right by the windows, on the other. But that feeling is not overwhelming and crazily significant, it's the simple delight of the lucky dip. It's modestly enriching and then life goes on, other things are attended to, and I'm not theatrically concerned with any peculiarity of stock or staff. I do though have secondhand bookshop dreams, where I'm finding unparalleled rarities tucked away. And I do have new bookshop dreams still, despite having been away from the trade for 18 years, but they are blocked things, where I can't work a till, or keep going round and round trying to fix a problem in the typical circular way of dreams of that nature, so it's interesting to have it confirmed that I'm not the only one with these elements embedded! I worked at Waterstone's (as the author still does as manager of the Canterbury shop) for five or six years from the mid-nineties to just after the millennium. Now, perhaps Canterbury is an extraordinary branch, I've never been there, but certainly the two branches I worked in, and all the ones I visited as a rep, are incredibly neutral places, very much fulfilling the chain-shop mantra of samey dependability. Some of them are/were in lovely buildings, which lent some charm, but the corporatism certainly dulled that down. And certainly, to also give away the game from an insider perspective, the corporate "mind" dominated proceedings in a highly unromantic way behind the scenes. Perhaps we need to wait for his update-book on his experiences, after retiring from the work? I'm guessing he's had to edit himself for the purposes of continuing employment. Part Two could be intriguing.....  This is what I think is missing - this rosiness doesn't speak of some of the really bad stuff that goes on. I remember a "notable" manager of the Bath shop in my time had a truly woeful attitude to reps, and had infected all his staff with the same, though he and they weren't the only ones by a long chalk. I heard he went on to work at the head office - goodness knows what damage he did. And the snottiness which comes from being a major player and therefore abusing your "power" out into the trade, laying down the law to get what you wanted, despite the fact that it really negatively influenced, for example, small publishers. And mismanagement and pettiness on other counts arising from chainism - whole "programmes" on removing posters from the wall of your goods-in and staffroom back area, presumably in answer to some sort of inane "tidy walls mean tidy mind" anal screwup. The absence of really any politics and the resultant imbalance of the portrait here is telling. There is a sanitised complacence in the trade still: it exists as a dominant bookseller and a few huge multinationals, with an "allowed" scattering of independents. It will be good to see that hegemony break up if the very current period of political veil-lifting is successful. I also hear that Waterstone's is now largely centrally-bought, with centrally-approved "OK" titles (largely multinational) only, with only tiny budgets for local purchases. I hope the booksellers are making the most of the few things they can still do these days in order to enjoy the work. The customers will hopefully provide a good amount of that.