The Simple Art of Buying Books

The great majority of the books I buy are those I find in second-hand bookshops. There are about two dozen very pleasant shops within fifty miles or so of here, as there are from most parts of England, and furthermore I enjoy dedicated week-long or weekend browsing expeditions with agreeable companions to further-flung parts. Any other journey I am obliged to undertake is accompanied by the question, ‘where’s the nearest bookshop?’

Quite a lot of those I find are books I didn’t know I wanted until I saw them. That is one of the great joys of real bookshops: serendipity. The ability to take a book out from its niche, beguiled by the title, or the author’s name, or the publisher, or some aspect of the spine design, look through it and say to yourself ‘Aha!’

I have lots of favourite books I knew nothing about until they called to me from dusty shelves and dim corners. To the pleasure of the book itself is added the pleasure of discovery. This is enhanced further when the book is not where you would expect it to be, and there is an element of oblique chance to the find. And that is where real bookshops still score against online bookshops.

Serendipity of a sort is still possible online, but not to anywhere near the same extent, and it is a more sterile experience. The touch of the plastic key is not the same as the touch of the book. The finding of books in real bookshops is tactile: indeed, some collectors have claimed that their fingers seemed drawn to particular titles, as the noted bibliophile John Gawsworth described in his essay ‘Magnetic Fingers’.

But there is another reason why real bookshops are a much greater attraction than online ones. The art of browsing may be arduous, mysterious and tangential. But the art of buying isn’t. In a real bookshop, I select the book I want (or more often books in the plural, indeed the highly plural), take it to the counter, pay, exchange a few words with the more sociable of the booksellers, and walk out. That’s it: the simple art of buying books.

Not so online. I no longer buy books if I can at all avoid it from the three main purveyors, ABE, Amazon and Ebay, because I’ve had irksome experiences with sellers on all three, and their resolution procedures are now opaque, mostly automated, and ponderous. It’s too much trouble. There are, of course, still many entirely decent, professional booksellers working through these organisations. But they now jostle with many other, often highly industrialised, outfits who are quite the reverse.

But even buying from better, smaller firms has its trials.  I recently tried to buy a book from a small press, an independent publisher: not, I hasten to add, one of the fine presses in our fantastic literature field. I wanted to get it direct from the press so they had the full benefit. I went to their website, and navigated through the usual several pop-ups. I located the book, I filled in my contact details, pausing a bit at the request for my phone number: I wasn’t intending to have a chat with them about the book, charming though it would no doubt be.

Then I came to the tick box asking me to confirm I had read and agreed to their terms and conditions. A sigh of exasperation escaped me. I was just buying a book, not taking out a one hundred and one year lease on a dilapidated mansion in the Grampians, nor negotiating a treaty about pudding-bowl navigation in international waters. But dutifully I consulted the terms and conditions. They went on and on, and were of course written in impenetrable legalese. For all I knew I could be signing up for an expedition to outermost Patagonia or agreeing to write a sequel to The Pickwick Papers in Esperanto. At this point I gave up.

Well, it is true that there can be setbacks even with real bookshops. They may prove to be not open when they are said to be, or even not to exist when they are said to. The proprietor may give every appearance of resenting the incursion of a customer. The books may be piled up so perilously that a sneeze seems likely to cause consternation on the Richter scale. The shop may have a miasma suggesting it is situated above the subterranean recesses of a hitherto unknown marsh gas.

Yet nevertheless and withal these are at least real experiences, adding to the adventures of book-collecting. They are part of the human lot in a way that online interactions are not. And at least there are no ‘terms and conditions’. Here’s the book: here’s the money. Thanks. Bye. The bell on the door peals and out we go, into the sunshine or the storm. The simple art of buying books.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Three Wise Men of Gotham by Charles Folkard, via Jonkers Rare Books.