The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  I confess to my ignorance and this act of vandalism.

  Sunday Morning, Sète, 1997

  We have come to the sea to taste tielle – a small spicy pie of octopus in tomato sauce – and show the children the water jousting tournaments in Sète harbour. Since the beginning of Sète, the men have practised a spectacular type of combat, which has been passed on through the centuries: jousts. Standing firm on their plank with the bowsprit overhanging the boat with its team of oarsmen, these knights, as they are called all along the banks of the Etang de Thau, brave one another with only a wooden shield and lance for protection. The tip of each lance is fitted with a triple steel point. The aim of the competition is to knock one’s rival into the water.

  The spectacle is yet to begin so I can’t resist a ‘really quick, I promise’ visit to Sète’s Les Puces, a scaled down version of Montpellier’s complete with the North African influence. The family is keen to return to the harbour so I can’t mess about. In jumping from car to car, I pick out some tatty green Penguins – crime titles – in a pile of mostly French books dumped in a higgledy piggledy fashion beside an equally disordered pile of clothing, much of which will be discarded when the market closes at midday. In rummaging about, a red hardback by P.G. Woodhouse, lacking its dust jacket, comes to the surface. Love Among the Chickens, 11th printing. It’s in a pretty parlous state but my enthusiasm is rekindled when I open it to find an inscription on the title page: To Joseph Wilkels in memory of a delightful two months at the Picardy. P.G. Wodehouse Sept 10 1934 referring to his stay at The Royal Picardy – Le Touuet-Paris Plage.

  This will sell it.

  Built upon and around Mont St Clair, Sète is situated on the south-eastern hub of the Bassin de Thau, an enclosed salt water lake used primarily for oyster and mussel fields. To its other side lies the Mediterranean. We eat some of its food after the ‘jousting’ entertainment. Before leaving Sète, we visit Cimetière le Py and find the tombstones of Georges Brassens, singer and songwriter, and Paul Valéry. Best known as a poet, Valéry is sometimes considered to be the last of the French symbolists. Anne tells me about ‘Le Cimetière marin’, a poem based on Valéry’s musings by the Mediterranean where he spent his boyhood.

  Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,

  Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;

  Midi le juste y compose de feux

  La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée

  O récompense après une pensée

  Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!

  This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,

  Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.

  Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame –

  That sea forever starting and re-starting.

  When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding

  Are the long vistas of celestial calm!

  (Distance travelled: 70-mile return trip. Profit (two years later): 1350 francs, sold through abebooks.com on account of Wodehouse’s inscription. Fact learned: Business can be mixed with pleasure, sometimes.)

  Decision Time, Twickenham Bedsit, 1989

  A single duvet on a double bed. It means that Jennifer has left. Eddy sees this but averts his gaze out of a nebulous notion of decency. Partly to put distance between us and so mitigate the mutual discomfort, I am making coffee in the kitchen area. The relationship has partly defined me for almost six years: we do, we don’t, we will, we won’t. It is going to be a testing time; reacquainting myself with the personal pronoun.

  Avoiding eye contact by concentrating my efforts on not spilling the coffee, I hand Eddy a cup with an air of exaggerated calmness. There is a flurry of words about resignations and a change of scenes. Excited by the prospect of leaving it all for Paris, I, too, become garrulous. Coach timetables are scrutinised as the hypothetical seemingly turns to something more substantial. Little attention is given to the television which is left on so as to provide background noise should conversation dry up. But there is little chance of that happening while grandiose plans of book dealing and travel are being made and, to some extent, made up. Getting carried away, he almost misses the last bus back home. It’s nice of Eddy to have called. Our friendship has history and form.

  We used to catch a bus and then the tube out to Heathrow Airport, ostensibly to watch planes. What we mostly did was wander Terminal 2, covertly helping ourselves to a panoply of baggage labels as well as anything else such as key rings and badges – all items offered by the airlines to passengers as freebies, which was how we also viewed them. Our Heathrow jaunts were considered self-made teenage entertainment in the late seventies; a successful Saturday afternoon culminating in a bag chock-full of tangled, multi-coloured paper that spoke of exotic destinations. Eddy was stopped on one occasion. I’d done a runner, leaving him to his fate. On the bus home, he relates the ‘bollocking’ that he’d been forced to endure.

  Corcoran Irish Pub in Paris, 1990

  Eddy has tipped me off. A Virginia Woolf? I don’t seek out the pub immediately, deferring an anticipated pleasure. I walk in desultorily fashion until Corcoran’s catches my eye. It is strange to walk off a French street and into an Irish pub. Irish by name but certainly not exclusively Irish by its patronage – inside is a mix of Brits and Parisians. Ireland is a country loved by the French; English boozers not commanding in gallic hearts anywhere near the same degree of romantic reverence. It can’t really be a Celtic thing either; the continent is hardly overrun with Welsh or Scottish pubs. Maybe it’s the Guinness label and their pure marketing genius.

  The bar staff are unfailingly polite, graduates, perhaps, of a Guinness finishing school that produces clean-cut personable young men. In addition to pulling pints, they provide a social service for tourists and the homesick. This evening, I don’t class myself as either. I’m here for business.

  I order a pint and sit down in the corner to the right of the pub’s door. This is where Eddy says he saw the book. The décor is typical: plenty of old pictures, mirrors, bric-a-brac, frames of old Guinness bottle labels and books to which I am drawn. There is a row of books on a single shelf running above my head. A frisson of excitement. Always the same. It’s not just the thought of finding a valuable book. It’s curiosity’s pull. Corcoran’s library comprises mostly small hardbacks lacking dust jackets.

  Sipping Guinness, I survey the books whose spines have faded into a uniform appearance of greying grubbiness. On closer examination, beneath the dust, are the distinct hues of brown, green, red and blue. Book club editions, some with Boots Booklovers’ Library labels. George Eliot’s Romola in BCA plonked beside Board of Traffic Offences, third supplement to the 15th edition. And there, as Eddy has said, is a copy of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

  Taking care not to dislodge the surrounding titles, I reach up and extract it from the shelf. There is no dust jacket but it is a first, the book published by The Hogarth Press in 1927. I wipe the dust off the blue cloth, revealing gilt title lettering on the spine. There are no inscriptions. People still aren’t paying me any notice while I casually reach up to replace the book. Sipping more Guinness, I try to gather my thoughts.

  A simple offer to buy it might raise suspicion. The thought to pocket it does cross my mind. Who would miss it? These books are for just for show, aren’t they? I could try to justify the theft but I can’t bring myself to actually steal a book. It feels wrong; it being a betrayal, as it were, of my trade. My moral compass, in spite of its innate dodginess, draws a distinction between a book and, say, a Cadbury cream egg whisked surreptitiously into a young boy’s pocket. What to do? Maybe I should come clean and offer to go halves with the pub on any profit accrued from its future sale. I finish my pint and leave with the intention of returning tomorrow with a canny plan.

  I don’t need one.

  Eddy has anticipated my prevarication. The following day in the Montparnasse McDonald’s, over a greedily consumed McBacon roll, the book is plonked down before me. He’d simply asked
Simon, one of the bar staff with whom he is on friendly terms, to take home the book. As easy as you like.

  It has a firm binding with no leaning to its spine, which is unusual given its previous resting spot. The book contents are in very good condition; no spotting or any marks. I get lucky in London. A dealer in Virginia Woolf pays over the odds because he has an authentic dust jacket lacking its book. Being a highly sought after title, its sale generates a good deal of wonga which I happily share with Eddy. A good proportion of his share will be spent on beer… in Corcoran’s.

  Car Boot Sale at Mona, Anglesey, 2004

  The sun is shining for once and it’s great to be tramping about this windswept green field in Wales. We arrive late and so have the excuse to lunch on local lamb burgers washed down with tea. Emily is eating candyfloss and Matty is absorbed in adding to his collection of Disney films. Making the most of this small window of pester free time, I look through a box of history books. I also notice some Enid Blytons and an Oxenham. None of them have dust jackets but the lady selling them says that she only wants £15 for the lot. Fair enough.

  Later that afternoon, with the help of the internet and some reference books, it becomes clear that the Oxenham, despite its less than pristine state, is highly collectable. There isn’t another copy for sale on any of the main book websites.

  After further deliberation and research, I upload the following details to my list of books in cyberspace.

  Author: Elsie Oxenham

  Title: Finding her family

  Illustrator: W.S. Stacey

  Publisher/ The Sheldon Press

  some spotting to page edges, darkening to green cloth cover, picture on cover of girl on bed being consoled by a woman. Frontispiece of woman gazing out into garden, very rare book hence price £480

  The book sells four months later and I try to justify my profit. How many car boots have I visited in order to find this gem of a collector’s item?

  The buyer in Australia might be a seller or a collector. I have no way of knowing. She may well intend to sell the book on, providing that she has a customer or a better judgement of the book’s value. A hierarchy of knowledge, the fundamental setter of price, determines the chain of book transactions.

  (Distance travelled: 15 miles. Profit: £465. Fact learned: My business success is as unpredictable as Anglesey’s weather.)

  Tuesday Morning, Montpellier Auction, 1996

  The room is packed with objects and people milling about them. I am slightly apprehensive. This is my first auction and I’m late which means there is only time for a cursory glance at the various lots. Beneath a settee, there is a box of books, which I crouch down to assess. There are plenty of Folio paperback classics and I consider them worth a bid. I’ve got increasing confidence in my judgement of French books.

  The auction soon starts and the auctioneer is rattling through the bids. His voice lulls me into a trance-like state out of which I am jolted upon hearing the words ‘boite du livres’. I thrust my hand skywards and soon discover that nobody else wants to bid. Sixty francs is all I’ve offered and I feel slightly exhilarated to have participated and triumphed at my first attempt.

  Successful bidders are expected to assemble fairly promptly at a desk near the hall’s entrance where payment is made. In handing over the money, I am then puzzled when the auction ‘ushers’ walk straight past the box of books. They go instead to a massive mahogany headboard, which they need two men to carry. My mistake dawns on me.

  ‘Bois du lit’. Idiot. Attempting to appear unfazed, I lead the assistants outside to my van into which they heave the bed. I feign contentment with my purchase until I drive out of their sight whereupon I unleash a volley of expletives.

  (Distance travelled: 3 miles. Profit: None. Fact learned: A little knowledge in French can lead easily to humiliation.)

  Southport, July 2009

  Drawn to this smart town with a reputation for good bookshops, I am not disappointed. The owners at Kernaghan Books, situated in Wayfarers Arcade, are friendly and much of their stock is reasonably priced (by my definition) in that it can be bought and sold on. I willingly part with £10 to own the works of Voltaire and the diary of Jules Renard in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade.

  My next port of call is Broadhursts, established in 1926. The shop covers four floors and is a delight for any bookworm or bibliophile. Some of the rooms have a museum feel about them and they get me thinking. Broadhursts boasts an impressive array of Biggles and Just Williams. Many other books – including modern firsts – are struggling to fetch prices achieved in previous decades. W. E. Johns and Richmal Crompton have resisted this trend but for how long? The rule of supply and demand dictates but demand has no inherent hold on stability at the best of times. Collectors covet certain books because other collectors have previously done so and are continuing to do so. Someone is buying a book whose ‘value’ is based upon other people’s assessment of its monetary worth. A philosopher acquaintance and former customer points out that these books as an investment are dependent on a third party’s investment decision. He has me scratching my head and wading through Keynesian theories of economics in the tertiary sector.

  Opening Bangor Bookshop, April 2007

  The city is roofed in local slate – Penrhyn purple – which imbibes somehow the grey skies, something of a meteorological default setting in North Wales. To compensate, there is the timeless melancholic beauty of the mountains.

  Bangor is really a small town although its compact cathedral confers upon it official city status. It has an old university (by today’s standards) and a proud, friendly working class community. There is an absence of snobbishness but Bangor is still, in other respects, a microcosm of Britain, and somewhat schizoid in nature; PhD meeting KFC: professors intoxicated by the abstruse, lads on lager overload, seaweed from Japan for sale in Upper Bangor’s health food shop while, below, the city’s High Street is awash with the country’s regulation fare. Seagulls gorge on the leftovers. A plethora of chippies but no fishmonger. Packed pubs at weekends. Drunk students, skunked students, but studious ones too, that, I hope, will buy second-hand books. Some locals resent their presence and the mess of their rubbish spilling out of discarded bin liners. But they are the lifeblood of the city, and in the High Street, at the cheapest end, I open a bookshop prosaically called ‘Bangor Bookshop’.

  I make a stab at targeting the university market but the margin on academic texts is, after a student discount, fifteen per cent at best. It makes more sense to concentrate on used books. Rents and rates mean that I have to conjure, from book sales, some £800 a month before I’ve made a penny. I’m struggling from the start.

  The truth of it is that not enough people buy my books. Unhesitatingly, the public buys newspapers and magazines. But not books. Arnold Bennett in the 1920s announced that he had ‘scarcely ever met a soul, who could be said to make a habit of buying new books. Most people look upon money spent upon books as money wasted: the public hates to spend money on books, although they do not hesitate to spend lavishly on such ephemera as newspapers and magazines.’ Plus ça change…

  A pub opposite, The White Harp, makes me think if only people could get drunk on books, ordering one after another. Hey, this Rankin is the business, bookseller, serve me up another three more Rebuses and a Dexter chaser.

  Rogers Jones Auction House, Colwyn Bay, March 2003

  On the ‘viewing’ eve of the monthly antiques sale in Colwyn Bay, an oak Welsh dresser distracts me from the purpose of our visit. Anne gets me back on track by spotting The Speaking Picture Book for the amusement of Children by Image, Verse and Sound.

  Lot 278 intrigues. The pages are inside a carved wooden box upon which is a colour pictorial label. At the front of the book are eight fine chromolithograph illustrations, each facing a page of text. Next to each page of text is an ivory knob that, when gently pulled, causes a different animal sound to be produced (cock, donkey, lamb, birds, cow, cuckoo, goat and mamma and papa).


  I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a half book half toy antiquarian oddity. We return home and the internet sets my pulse racing. Haining (Moveable Books, p. 136–7) calls this ‘the piece de resistance of any collection of moveables’ and adds that few complete and fine copies have ‘survived youthful hands’. The guide price in the auction catalogue is £250–£300 which is well out of kilter with valuations on various websites. There are copies going on abebooks.com for well in excess of £1000.

  I rush back to Colwyn Bay to convince myself that it is the book that was published in Sonneberg, Germany by Theodor Brand in 1880. All evidence indicates that it is. The label on the cover notes that this is ‘A new picture book’. Inside the front cover is a printed label at the bottom of which reads ‘A German edition is also appearing.’ It also notes that it is patented in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Austria. The thought of a patented book appeals to me.

  The next morning in the salesroom I wait nervously for Lot number 278. I have my card at the ready. On arrival you register your details at reception and they provide you with a bidding number on a card. This is what you raise to the auctioneer’s attention when you want to place bids.

  Wondrous items abound but I’m transfixed by the possibility of owning The Speaking Picture Book. The auction is in full swing. The salesroom is heaving. Rogers Jones’ employees hold phones to their ears; their faces tensed up with concentration. They bid on behalf of what I imagine to be wealthy dealers in locations rather more exotic than Colwyn Bay. It creates a buzz of excitement. Prices rocket. The gavel is thumped down with theatrical glee.