Wednesday, April 30, 2008

coming soon.. but maybe not for long

At some point each book mentioned in this blog will link to a website where the book will be available as a gorgeous first edition or a gammy  5 dollar crack paperback. In the meanwhile I'll just have to content myself with links to the best bookshops I know of in the sidebar.

Oxfam have recently become a prominent player in the rare & modern 1st edition trade. As a charity they acquire their books for free, they don't pay their staff and pay less taxes. Their rent is lower too. The rest of us in the trade rely on selling to other dealers for a substantial part of our business and so include, across the board, a trade discount. Usually at around 10% the discount can vary and helps us in the trade keep our chin above water especially at a time like now when fears of a recession are hitting small bookshops really quite hard. Oxfam don't give the discount, which is admittedly a courtesy discount, and their books are priced exorbitantly by people who are not experts but capable of looking up the top prices on abebooks.com regardless of condition and sometimes edition. I've come across one or two book club editions that were posing as 1sts. Now here's the question.

Should a charity, which is being run as a business, be allowed to keep the perks that go with charity status, if it is to the detriment of the others in the in the same trade? In a trade that has been in recession for the last five years; amazon is the number one attributed reason why independent shops close down, WH Smith, once an esteemed bookseller with a history that goes back to 1790, is now nothing more than a glorified newsagent & there are plenty of documented cases where a Borders or Waterstones moved into some small town and literally forced the closure of the local little independent bookshop.

Small bookshops are always going to exist. There will always be someone with the dream of sitting in a shop discussing their favourite literature be it comic books, counter-cultural books from the near contemporary, chapbooks. There will be bookshops in galleries in Brighton and Hackney (link coming soon). There will be boys and girls that roam the countryside on the lookout to dip into an unknown bookshop and find the next perfect book who dream of opening their own bookshop. Hell, my last long-term relationship was entirely based around that very premise - a love of books that aspired to being a sustainable obsession. What is in danger now is the viability of these bookshops. That smaller bookshops won't be able to stay open for longer than one maybe two years. Come to think of it my last short-term relationship was negotiated around the sale of a beautiful signed Sometimes I think, sometimes I am 1st by Sara Fanelli.

A friend of mine also in the trade remarked to me earlier this month that Oxfam were not allowed to join one of the secondhand book unions for, among other reasons, the lack of a courtesy 10% trade discount. This seems wrong since everyone in the book trade, charity or not, should be geared towards the advancement of the independent book cause. Oxfam would do well to have fairer pricing by experienced traders and the courtesy discount for other traders. They should also be in the union. On the flipside independent booksellers in high-rent blackspots should be given rent subsidies and there really should be a separate sliding tax rate  based on profitability for the small business. It's not that these independent booksellers are not turning a profit, the problem is that the profit doesn't last long...

All this however didn't stop me from spotting (in an Oxfam bookshop) a 1st edition of Raymond Briggs' Ethel and Ernest published 1998, the absolutely gorgeous story of his parents from the beginning, their marriage, before the Second World War to, well the end. I was also quite pleased to see it was signed by the great man himself. If you haven't read the book do. I'm keeping my copy to stick in a prime position for my bookshop when it opens in 2***. 
Posted by littlesnapper at 23:42:57 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I won't read it, I won't but maybe later

Say what you want about meagre categorisations but there are three kinds of books in the world.

1) Books that need reading as soon as they appear on the market. They can be of the expected or the unexpected sort. A favourite author's newest title (see below for Marian Keyes), or just something that you happen to have been tipped as the hottest new piece of candy the world has ever seen i.e. Richard Milward's exquisite 1st published novel by faber&faber last year called Apples. You wait for it, perhaps you pre-order it

2) Books that have been around for a little bit and have seeped into the good book-reading public's conscience. Perhaps a film has now been made about the book and the author's next book has appeared. Perhaps the well-known book occasionally shows signs that it might out-sell the follow-up book mentioned. Perhaps because of a film tie-in edition or just perhaps because the market has not yet been properly saturated. This book is a zeitgeist indicator. Shows us exactly what it is we should want to read and, once success has been established and proved profitable, a slew of books based on the same psycho-cultural premises appear on the bookshop shelves.

3) The Classics. Books that have been around forever and always will be. This category not only includes cult classics, modern classics as well as ancient classics and everything in between but also the books that are remembered personally by the reader. Think less classics in the Penguin C*****c sense or the Oxford C*****c sense and think classic in terms of a bok that defined exactly what you were doing with your life and seemed to express it better than you ever could. The author could have been watching you and noting down your thoughts so you could see them on paper, in print. Only better. Could have been Dostoievsky, Eliot, Burroughs or Winterson. Think personal. Life-changing on a sliding scale from one to a million.

This may seem like a long-shot but it's only a general categorisation for the purposes of further analysis. Press it too much and it'll just become scholastic and ultimately absurd. There are the obvious exceptions but they can loosely fit into one or other of these categories. It doesn't matter.

The book to be called into question is The Kite-runner by Khaled Hosseini. I don't want to read this book. There is the obvious all-round hyperbole surrounding any new book, of course but I can't shake the feeling that there's something more akin to cultural hypocrisy going on here. Are we, as a general reading public, attracted to books that stand as examples of modern Persian literature merely because the vast majority of the reading public have never even heard of Rumi let alone read Rumi? I'm not suffering from any 21st century guilt just because up until a few years ago Islam and its culture was veiled and incomprehensible without active inquiry.

It's a big question that calls all sorts of tricky personal politics into play. I'm only phrasing it as a question there because it seems to be skirting the knife's edge. We are well used to the Christian hang-ups in Western culture and its lingering effects that are seen in books from Angela's Ashes to Ulysses to Paradise Lost. Persia has been shown to be a cradle of civilisation. Jason Eliot's beautiful pair of books An Unseen Light & Mirrors of the Unseen give us so much that we can't know about modern Persian culture. Reveals to us the standing importance of their ancient roots. The Kite Runner is only the beginning of a general introduction and is a revival of Persian literature as being both internationally recognised and available for us masses. When I say I don't want to read the book my motives are purely personal & completely biased in my own favour. As they should be. Having not read the damned thing I can't comment on its literary merits and am not doing so. I'm simply not comfortable with feeling shepherded for ignorance's sake. I'll read it when I'm good and ready. When I find it as a used paperback in a bookshop I haven't visited before. Or when the film furore dies away.

There is no need to read a book simply because everyone is doing so. It is a mode of reading that has been used since the dawn of Literature. Makes me think of mad monks giggling hysterically at the Book of Revelation pissed on Communion wine "Have ye read this bit here, oh brother?" It has promoted and kept alive interest in reading simply by the fact that we see others reading the book and monkey see, monkey do, monkey want. Just don't bother telling me that it's interesting without being able to tell me the plot or follow up a summary with "Have you seen the film? 'Snot as good as the book." Of course its not the same as the book otherwise we'd be talking about the bloody film wouldn't we?
Posted by littlesnapper at 01:31:20 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Book snobs

I'm a book snob. Really I am. I scoff at books and dismiss them as rubbish without having read past page fifty or seventy. How-and-ever I will attempt to read any damn book in existence. I'm a bookseller by trade as well as a student of literature. Literature comes out of my damn nose and chokes me when I've had too much coffee and am talking too fast about it. So I understand it when people say they don't like a book for such and such reasons. There's nothing better in fact to find someone who has read the same book as you have, hated it in just the same way, so you can spend the time (constructively) shooting down the usually not-so-badly off author. 

Four examples:

Late Anais Nin is terrible. It's self-indulgent and trite. I'm setting myself up for grievous bodily harm by saying so by various friends, colleagues and enemies but there it is. If anyone ever reads this blog and cares to know why I'll elaborate. Otherwise I won't.

Martin Amis is boring. The most interesting book he wrote was the autobiography with the title of Experience. God knows I wish he'd gone out and had some. In the autobio his writing comes alive and it shows that he is scraping the thoughts together on his favourite topic- himself. Where the father was a firebrand and xenophobic to boot, a word which here I want to mean he just hated everyone with an equal intolerance, the son is a dullard. After The Rachel Papers and the autobio don't bother any more. Ever read Night Train? Case in point. If you haven't just go out and read a Jim Thompson novel instead. Less painful and on the whole a much more unsettling and satisfying event.

Salman Rushdie. I once thought the man's writing was brilliant shining. When I was twelve.

Jonathan Safran Foer is just plain crap. His first book had such a great title that I was disappointed to find that the 'delicate and intricately linked web of narrative' was nothing more than three mixed stories that had already been written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the early Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. I was willing to read the second book to see if some original authorial persona would raise itself, claim the right to exist as a man among men. Same narrative use of a limited narrator. Appropriated gimmicky artistic bits from the 70's & the 80's that, briefly novel, didn't last or stand to illumine any over-arching point. I mean if you thought you liked Foer's books read some Jerzy Kosinski. Whether or not Kosinksi stole and plagiarised is moot I s'pose but the actual work itself and the visceral impact of his books, both gentle and brutal, is undeniable.


So... Where was I? Marian Keyes. I was going to talk about Marian Keyes and her newest book This Charming Man. Why is it people turn up their nose at chick-lit? In this world where honesty is so difficult to come by and where we've got to grab at anything out there that'll comfort us in the sad knowledge that as humans we all ultimately go down for a damn long nap; that it ain't ever going to be possible to know how you look like, feel like, sound like to another except by reflection, Why, dear God, is it so difficult to accept that a book can be, squeezed by definition, chick-lit and yet have a hard-cored theme of domestic violence, corrupt politicians, alcoholism and be just as worth while reading as Palahniuk, Angela Carter or Dave Eggers? It's hugely funny too. Not even close to being as pretentiously sappy, mawkish and over-sentimental as Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Keyes' writing is tightly controlled and boundary breaking. The cast of characters is diverse and they reflect a changing Ireland, and by extension for all those whose Nationality ain't Irish, a changing world which sometimes we can be uncomfortable with and sometimes deal with in unimagined ways. I would quote a great lengthy bash of the book here to illustrate but would probably be sued. Not by Ms. Keyes herself since she's obviously a decent hard-working and intelligent soul, but by her publishing company's lawyers who I would imagine to be slightly less understanding of the human condition.

I'm one of the worst snobs there is. I know what's good and what's bad and I expect the world to be made a more interesting place after I've put down the book I'm reading. I know the history behind the books that has influenced whatever I'm reading like a great deal of other people. I'm not afraid of any genre and would be ashamed of myself if I didn't stand by what I thought was possibly great literature. It's precisely because of this and not in spite of these mishaps of character that I defy you to read This Charming Man. Don't be a pretentious twat about what you read, be a snob instead. But whatever you do, don't be a wimp and accept any trash marketed for your demographic. It's about damn time that some demand was made on our horribly all-too-public authors to produce some decent literature that doesn't only deal with softly pleasing generally irrelevant categories that make publishing houses so much money.

Maybe Marian Keyes could give masterclasses on how to be an honest writer. Whaddaya say Marian?

Posted by littlesnapper at 18:17:05 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |