The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online
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I am drawn to Penguin Modern Classics with a pale green livery. On their covers are specially commissioned illustrations, or paintings, as they say, by kind permission of the artist. Penguin no longer has a team of in-house designers, which may account for the reduced aesthetic appeal of the current Classics list.
Working as a reporter, I can keep unconventional office hours. At unshackled moments, I sneak into Anthony Hall’s. In the course of several months, the shop’s collection of Penguin Classics becomes my collection of Penguin Classics. I find myself making lists of books obtained and books wanted. I am lost. Skimming excitedly through the pages of the Book Collector magazine, I am in book list nirvana.
Fast forward twenty years to Bangor Bookshop where a customer tells me he got his diagnosis in the Hughes’ Llandudno bookshop, its renowned and much respected owner declaring: ‘You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?’
Books, and dealing in them, get into your blood, but there is normally a collecting gene already there, whether it be for books, toy trains or airliner luggage labels.
Fez, Morocco, 1993
‘Remember me. I can give you spices for your mind,’ he says. Then he laughs, realising that I will not be sampling his wares. The purveyor of ‘spices’ is content to make conversation, commercially driven or otherwise. This is typical of the Moroccans I meet. A striving to sell, followed by a philosophical grin when their pitch fails to work.
The Daily Awaaz, a bilingual (Urdu and English) British daily newspaper based in Southall, is paying some of my expenses. I am tasked with returning with pictures of Moroccan tiles. They are to be immediately recognisable aspects of Moroccan art and architecture; zellij geometric mosaics first appearing in the late twelfth century in the city of Fez.
I have travelled from Casablanca. The great Hassan II Mosque is nearing completion but I haven’t been able to properly approach it.
Mustapha clamours to capture my attention as I get off the coach in Fez. Fighting off rivals to win a coffee and vital time with a new tourist in town, he impresses me with his candour. ‘You get hassle free time and I get money and a chance to practise my English,’ went his line of patter. I explain to Mustapha the purpose, as it were, of my trip. He will help me take all the photos I need. Then, in producing a cigarette from nowhere, he sighs and proudly declares it to be his first of the day. It is Ramadhan and the day’s fast is over. His mood is one of contentment and he is not alone. The wide streets of Ville Nouvelle are filling with people at ease. Family members stroll in relaxed fashion, arm in arm. Teenagers crack jokes. Small children skip with a spontaneous joy. As in Casablanca, most women are unveiled and clad in Western dress. Boys and teenagers tend to wear jeans whereas the men favour Djellaba cloaks.
It seems that the city of Fez still lingers in the Middle Ages. As you arrive in the city and begin to walk around your senses are torn between beautiful Islamic architecture, distressing poverty, alien sounds and an array of smells. And oranges, oranges galore. To the first time visitor, the two most obvious sources of income appear to be tourism and drugs. My guidebook sternly warns of the risks involved in smoking cannabis, in spite of the air being filled with its all-pervasive sweet aroma. Mustapha confirms, however, the danger inherent in smoking. ‘Lots of arrests. Even for people like me.’ Later he talks of an unexpected benefit following the police clampdown; a marked improvement in the quality of the drug.
Towards midnight I feel a chill in the air, but this does not deter devout Muslim men from staying up all night in the cafés, playing cards and smoking, thus ensuring that everyone will know that they have abstained from sex. Over coffee, we chat late into the night. Mustapha is keen to know what I do. I explain that in addition to working for a newspaper, I buy and sell books.
The next day is a whirlwind tour of the medina, and meeting the challenge of locating, through a maze of narrow streets, the sites of famous mosques. I take plenty of photos and think my editor will be happy with them. We gaze up at the minarets and listen to the strident sound of Islam calling the population to prayer. Seven veiled women and an infant are waiting patiently outside a mosque. Having just prayed, the men exit in a charitable frame of mind. The girl gratefully receives their donations, beaming with satisfaction, though her demeanour alters when approached by a man in a green uniform. All money is removed from her begging hand and redistributed among the waiting women. The girl is confused and starts to sob.
In the afternoon it rains and the medina is soon a mass of people engaged in noisy commerce. We do our best to avoid stepping in the thickening mud and donkey shit. Enterprising kids start selling plastic bags as makeshift coats to desperate sightseers.
After a conventional tour of the Imperial City, my clandestine guide directs me towards the Kasbah. The site of an old French fort is not mentioned in the guide book. Upon arriving, I see why. Only the castle walls remain and inside you come face to face with its inhabitants, who evidently live in grinding poverty. The ruins contain a shanty town where mothers hurry to remove their washing from makeshift lines. The faces of children peer out of corrugated huts. Mustapha tells me this is where his formative years were spent.
The rain is falling more heavily and young women exit the Kasbah with care to prevent the mud from splattering their smart costumes. A dignified and neat appearance is at all times retained as family and friends embrace before breaking their fast as tradition demands. An atmosphere of wellbeing is once more settling upon the city of Fez as its inhabitants dine on spicy bean soup and egg. Afterwards, there are sweets and dates. At this time of the day and year, hospitality becomes an obligatory virtue. Several families invite me into their homes to eat simple but tasty meals. A friend of Mustapha learns of my interest in football and informs me of a game scheduled for tomorrow.
Not being a fan, Mustapha isn’t pleased about attending a football match. I don’t force him to watch but he feels obliged to keep me company, concerned by the possibility of other guides encroaching upon his territory – me. Palm trees encircle the stadium, which is by no means full, but there is a good atmosphere. We take our seats next to men who wear tasselled hats. Music starts and the tassels are swirled about. The business of fasting is taken seriously, even sportsmen are not exempt. (Reassuringly, airline pilots do not observe the fast.) Despite the fast both teams play with energetic abandon. Mas, the home side, perform with admirable skill and determination. Their win against RAJA, one of Casablanca’s top clubs, is made sweeter still by it ensuring the club’s survival in the top flight. The home supporters celebrate by dancing jigs of victory.
The medina of Fez is believed to be the world’s largest car-free urban area. The market inside is a treasure hunter’s labyrinth of leather goods, carpets, brass work, silver, gold and the world’s finest hashish, so Mustapha claims. We venture deeper into the medina. Mustapha says we should visit a Riad, a traditional Moroccan house. In a lane adjacent to the main thoroughfare of Fez’s medieval quarter, the door is already open. Mustapha nods to a young man slouched outside. We step inside. The house is built on several levels around an interior garden that boasts a solitary orange tree. The ground floor appears sparsely furnished and there is a simple kitchen. We ascend a few stairs and Mustapha can’t resist showing me the bathroom that is covered floor-to-ceiling in zellij mosaic tiles. I already have enough photographs of them. And Mustapha gestures that he has brought me here for other reasons. A little further up the stairs we come to more rooms on the first and second floors. He shows off the cedar ceilings, windows and doors, and the carved tadelakt plasterwork. I have read that these houses were inwardly focused to allow for family privacy and protection from the weather. But where is the family? Away, Mustapha simply says. And then he takes me into a room that is magnificently furnished with books. ‘You buy,’ explains Mustapha. ‘I sell for professor friend.’ The books are mostly in French and Arabic. I spot some Flaubert and I recognise some that are translations of Paul Bowles’ novels. Un thé au Sahara is a French edition of The
Sheltering Sky, which I have in my hotel room. Gore Vidal cites the book as one of his favourites. Think, he says, about what Bowles means by the ‘sheltering sky’ – that the ‘sky’ is a fiction, protecting us from our very insignificance. Mustapha is haphazardly picking out books for inspection; stories written by ‘les ecrivains anglo-saxons’. Thrilled by finding a book in English – an Edward Heath autobiography – he can’t understand why I don’t share in his excitement. But suddenly I am intrigued by an old looking edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. It has an 1861 publication date, which means that it was issued in Baudelaire’s lifetime. (The second edition contains thirty-five additional poems but lacks six poems that appeared in the first edition. These were banned and stayed so until 1947.)
L’invitation au voyage
Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
This book might be worth thousands of francs. How much does the owner want for it? Mustapha unhesitatingly says 5000 dirhams. That’s about £400. I start to feel uncomfortable. It dawns on me that we may be trespassing. The price drops to 40 dirhams. The book’s wildly fluctuating price confirms my fears. I hurriedly make my way down the stairs and exit the house. On the street outside, Mustapha is aggrieved. My hasty departure has been misinterpreted as an underhand negotiating ploy.
Montpellier Football Club Car Park, 1993
Traders buy and sell. Book dealers are no different. Books are bought and sold. Simply that. Open air markets appeal; their ancient and overt purpose of bringing buyer and seller together. Their ‘openness’ extends, somehow, beyond that of the physical selling arena. Not that I wish to romanticise; people can just as easily be ripped off here – openly or otherwise – as in other environments.
On Sunday mornings the car park adjacent to the city’s football club comes to life as hundreds of car booters and professional traders join together to form a huge flea market known in French as Les Puces.
Such is Les Puces popularity with buyers and sellers alike, we arrive pre-dawn in order to guarantee a place in which to sell our wares – livres en anglais. Pulling up behind a Peugeot 807 fully packed with Indian jewellery and trinkets, we are struggling to come to terms with the early hour. The plan had been to snooze awhile but our growing anticipation, together with the activity of others outside, makes relaxation impossible. A hoard of bargain hunters shine torches into the back windows of the van but we make it clear that we’re not yet open for business. We heed a friend’s advice not to set up too soon. Jemal teaches geography in a local secondary school and supplements his salary by selling Moroccan pottery he transports from his home village in the long summer break. He warns that certain traders/hustlers will pounce, like the proverbial early bird, on the items brought to the market by unwary families, which are then brazenly sold on later that same morning from their own stalls.
We grab coffee, experience the early morning chill. We then take a tour as the rising sun reveals the sheer variety of goods on offer. Plenty of clothes and bric-a-brac along with an eclectic mix of junk and antiques. The place is lent an exotic flavour by the rugs from North Africa, Rai music blaring out. All classes of society will soon be caught up in the age-old customs of surveying and scrutinising. In catching the mood of the market, we adopt an easy stroll while casting a keen eye. By observing some of the early transactions I ascertain that haggling is very much de rigour.
In spite of the variety of stalls and merchandise about, it is still with a slightly embarrassed air that we set up, unfolding the pasting table upon which the books, mostly paperbacks, are laid out. To my relief, nobody bats an eyelid. The books are casually surveyed. A few people linger to take in the titles and only one elderly gentleman chooses to express surprise over their language. In opening a shop one year later, I am met with considerably more scepticism from passers by. One guy even insinuates that the shop must be some kind of front for ill-gotten gains. I try to look affronted but take perverse pleasure from the thought.
Our spirits receive an early boost when a man, with dishevelled hair that gives him a somewhat professorial air, snaps up our entire collection of Sotheby’s Art Auction catalogues. Great. We’re in profit.
Although it’s only nine in the morning the alleys are thronging with punters. As the sun rises higher, we understand the advantage of being in the row of cars opposite us, for they lend the sellers a modicum of shade. We are forced to beat a retreat into the van and cast envious glances at people who erect makeshift awnings. The covers of some books curl under the fierce sun and there are sporadic gusts of winds that have me reaching for elastic bands to stop the pages from being blown about. Conversations are started with neighbours and an inchoate camaraderie means that we mind each other’s stands to permit toilet breaks and ‘getaway’ tours of the market when boredom thresholds are reached.
‘Ah, Travels in the Hindu Kush. I’ve been there,’ a Dutch holidaymaker informs us. ‘Buy it to remind yourself of the experience,’ I reply as he leafs through it. I fail to convey the intended humour for he takes seriously my comment. ‘You really can’t compare the two. You need to go.’ He returns the book to the table before buying a couple of Agatha Christies whose gaudy covers attract the attention of many browsers.
In taking a distinctly scenic route back from a declared ‘coffee and croissants top up mission’. I scan some of the stalls and spot a 1884 edition of Pall Mall Magazine. I note that Father Christmas is depicted in what we, these days, assume is his traditional garb; a bulky red coat with white trims to go with a large white beard. I’d thought that the look had come later, derived from Coca-Cola ads. This makes me buy the magazine for 10 francs and I am later pleased to discover that it has in it ‘Aepyornis Island’, a short story published for the first time by HG Wells. It also has Letting in the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated with a demonic looking Bagheera and Mowgli pictured as a naked Aryran child with a rather pert bottom. It’s not what you might expect from the Victorians. Or maybe it is.
I return to our stall where a middle aged couple are intensely inspecting the books, many of which are now crammed together in boxes, with their spines facing out, so as to avoid the ravages of the sun. I hear snippets of their conversation, which is in English, and I soon gather that it is Ian McEwan and his wife. Living in France, the author has recently published Black Dogs, which is partly set in the Cevennes whose foothills are 40 miles to the north of Montpellier. The book is concerned with the lives of June and Bernard Tremaine that epitomise the tug-of-war between political engagement and a private search for ultimate meaning. The catalytic event in the Tremaines’ lives occurs on their honeymoon in France in 1946. In an encounter with two huge, ferocious dogs – incarnations of the savagely irrational eruptions that recur throughout history – she has an insight that illuminates for her the possibility of redemption. A novel of ideas with the hard edge of a thriller; highly recommended. I have a first edition of this book at home in addition to a paperback of McEwan’s first collection of short stories. I’m quite a fan and let him know. He offers to sign my copy but I haven’t got it with me. (I go through phases of separating my private library of books from those to be flogged off.)
His wife, seeming to take umbrage at her husband’s fame, wanders away and Ian McEwan decides finally to buy a couple of Henry James Penguins, one of which has been recently recommended to him. I later recount the story to a much valued customer in my bookshop who, it turns out, was a friend of McEwan when they both taught English as a foreign language in East Anglia.
Household Waste Recycling Centre, Llandegai, November 2007
I look into what is essentially a giant paper-compressing skip. What am I doing here with this family heirloom, a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1911? The pages are still legible inside heavily disintegrating red covers. But the CD Rom and more modern editions have made mine moribund, it seems. The charity shops reject such volumes. I can’t give them away.
Taid, as a student at Manchester University, bought the set second-hand in 1919. He’d been invalided out of the front line trenches in the First World War not with war wounds but with severe goitre, which was subsequently treated with success by an early form of radium irradiation. From a modest background, Taid had made his purchase – which I think of as being the equivalent these days to a top of the range Apple Mac – with funds from the Government. He’d applied successfully for a Kitchener Scholarship, a grant given to those who fought in the war. It enabled him to enter higher education; he even professed never to have been so well off before or after his time as a student.
I do the deed before learning several months later that the Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edition, 1911, is considered to be one of the most collectable. Damn. I discover further that it is a much sought after edition; the first to be published as a whole set at one date. It is seen as the most scholarly edition, with contributions by over one thousand authors writing in their fields of expertise. All have an abundance of illustrations including numerous foldout maps in both colour and black and white.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner