The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  My grasp of history even today has its foundation in the reading of, and having read to me, Ladybird History books. The lives of famous people and events condensed expertly into Ladybird chunk sizes. And whole page colour illustrations to boot. The diversity of the subject matter hints at the vastness of it all and how it works: cars, trees, the human body, stamp collecting, etc. Knowledge imparted, not in a dry sense but calculated to invoke wonder. And all for 2/6 Net (2 shillings and sixpence), its monetary price, marked on the front end paper, kept fixed for some thirty years. The secret to its affordable pricing? Cleverly using a 56 page standardised format that was made from just one sheet size measuring 40 inches by 30 inches.

  I can sell some titles for considerably more than 2/6. The series What to Look For: in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, all illustrated by C. F. Tunnicliffe, always shift. But the discrepancy in prices between Ladybird books is difficult at times to fathom.

  See below:

  Item: The Story of Napoleon (A Ladybird ‘Adventure from History’ Book) by Peach, L…

  Listing ID: 1111B677068

  Purchased on: 2008-12-11

  Postage Credit: £2.75

  Buyer’s Price: £0.01

  Item: Tootles the Taxi and Other Rhymes by Joyce Blaikie Clegg; John Kenney

  Listing ID: 1111K102601

  Purchased on: 2008-11-30

  Postage Credit: £2.75

  Buyer’s Price: £18.00

  Phone Call to a Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, 1992

  Enquiring into the value of some Victorian magazines, a friendly voice says: ‘Remember we never really own them, we are only custodians until somebody else takes over the job.’

  Mind Travel, December 2006

  Tipped off by my uncle that a bookshop in Palma is selling its entire stock, I make tentative enquiries. Being an itinerant bookseller allows me to dream of journeys actually taken, and to imagine others. Majorca’s major city can be reached by taking a ferry from Sète. Could an inspection of the books justify the trip?

  I exchange emails with Joachim who is handling the sale. He sends me a ‘books for sale’ list as an Excel document. On it are some tantalising names. Robert Graves, as you might expect given his connections to Majorca, first editions of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and much more besides. All in all, a mouth-watering list of collectable authors but at a bank busting price; the total in excess of sixty thousand euros.

  I soon gather that Joachim is acting on behalf of Simon Finch, a London book dealer based in Mayfair. Having recently paid £2.8 million for a 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, he might well be drumming up funds. These books in Majorca appear overvalued and Joachim agrees to some stringent price-cutting.

  On 18 Dececember 2006, at 08:33, Joachim Reuter writes:

  Hi Bill,

  Sorry to insist so much after having taken a while to get back to you, but please let me know whether you are still interested in the books. As we are closing down before the end of the year, I need to know where to ship which books. If you are interested, we need to come to an agreement this week. As I mentioned in my last email the final price is negotiable beyond the 40% discount. So, please let me know your thoughts by tomorrow morning. If you want to reach me on my mobile today I am available all day.

  Thanks

  Best

  Joachim

  I’ll have to pass. Sorry but I can’t allow myself to be rushed into such a deal. I would be seriously interested if we are talking more along the lines of an 80% discount. (I consider the books to be very much overpriced) Otherwise I can’t see any real margin in it for me.

  There is no further contact.

  The Road to Bangor Pier, April 2004

  It’s on the front page of the Chronicle, with Dan extolling its virtues along with those of the local land and seascape. A bookshop on Bangor Pier; the smallest in the world. And Dan’s big claims don’t end there. ‘The most beautiful place to have a bookshop’, he adds. It is.

  A Victorian octagonal kiosk with an onion domed roof stands at the pier’s entrance. Plywood shelves are diligently fitted. We fill them with a range of second-hand and new guidebooks and maps, those being supplied by Dan. It’s a joint business venture/gimmick; Dan is using the kiosk to advertise his bookshop in the High Street and I am hoping to generate some buying opportunities.

  We endeavour to keep the shop open at the weekends, weather permitting. A peppercorn rent charged by the council means that the kiosk doesn’t need to be open on weekdays, when we are otherwise busy. And there are a few sunny Sundays. Dan brings along his deck chair based on the original 1935 Penguin book jacket design for The Big Sleep. We take turns in it; relishing a lounge with the Sunday papers. There are even customers to disturb our peace. On colder windy days it is, however, an effort to man the shop; our vigil fortified by tea and scones, courtesy of Vic and Sheila’s tearoom at the far end of the pier. My daughter Emily keeps me company. Finding activities to alleviate her boredom and mine, we fly kites with difficulty, and catch crabs, even the occasional edible one, but they are too small to actually eat.

  My fishing line is soon wetted; feathery lures hurled out into the strait to entice the mackerel; the sighting of whitebait giving us encouragement. Anne is missing her fresh fish. (It will be another three years before I take home freshly line caught bass, exchanged for books on the world art of tattoo.) Bait in the water, bait in the kiosk. Angling is an apt analogy for what I do. In casting from the pier, care is needed to avoid the jetty. Ah, the jetty. On the pier’s east side. Grade II listed, I’ll have you know. I know because I get it listed – this resilient narrow stone jetty, some 100 metres in length, sloping downward to the strait. Seaweed adheres to its roughly coursed stonework and the large blocks that form its surface. History resides in its architecture. And poetry too.

  The jetty was marked as a pier on the 1831 Ordnance Survey map of the area, and is probably the site of an early crossing point to Anglesey. Garth Ferry was an important crossing point before the construction of the Menai Bridge in 1826. A ferry continued to operate from this jetty until the 1960s. I am given to ruminating on the jetty. Before long, I’m fantasising of re-establishing a ferry service between Garth Jetty and Beaumaris. I know a man with a boat licensed to carry passengers. But the council is decidedly unenthusiastic. You can only fantasise so much. Dan and I decide not to renew the lease.

  A week preceding the kiosk’s closure, a young woman asks me for ‘that poem in the Four Weddings and a Funeral film.’ Having no Auden in the kiosk I give her directions to Dan’s shop.

  The pier has an awe-inspiring panorama of wave, wood and mountain. Fixed to the benches are memorial plaques with touching inscriptions. ‘In loving memory Florence Magdalen Feasy who swam the Menai Strait in 1929, aged 15’. ‘Capt Marcel Le Comte 1938–2007 A true Garth boy Son of Henri and Gladys.’

  Wind whistling through the shrouds in the boat yard is good for the lamentation of the soul. And for sheer power nothing beats Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch’s Lament for Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last Prince.

  ‘The heart’s gone cold, under a breast of fear;

  Lust shrivels like dried brushwood.

  See you not the way of the wind and the rain?

  See you not oaktrees buffet together?

  See you not the sea stinging the land?

  See you not truth in travail?

  See you not the sun hurtling through the sky?

  And that the stars are fallen?

  Do you not believe God, demented mortals?

  Do you not see the whole world’s danger?

  Why, oh my God, does the sea not cover the land?

  Why are we left to linger?

  Prades, Pyrenees, 1995

  We drive to the Pyrenees via Carcassonne. Consuming several cloves of garlic in a cassoulet there has undesirable consequences. In the night the garlic will seep out from my every pore, much to everyone’s disgust. Fortunately, by the time we call on a newsagent in Prades, a small tow
n perched high in the Pyrenees, my body hasn’t yet worked out a purging strategy for garlic overdose. It might have undermined the business proposal.

  I have compiled a 200-book collection of holiday reads; best sellers in the main, including plenty of thrillers. The newsagent is open-minded; perfectly willing to take the books on sale or return basis. We agree to go halves on a standardised sale price of three francs.

  Two weeks later I descend the Pyrenees, from near the Spanish border, on a little yellow train in an open-air carriage. We pass through little villages clinging to the rocky hillside, narrow gorges and tiny valleys. This scenic narrow gauge petit train jaune connects with a standard gauge service at Villefranche, the terminus for main-line trains from Perpignan. En route, I call on the Prades newsagent to learn that she has sold 108 books. In addition to English tourists, she tells me that Dutch and Germans are also buying.

  Correze, November 1996

  We take turns driving to Correze in a hired van. Brian, my new business partner, is in good form; his conversation is a strange mix of the sublime and the obscene. Brian’s true passion is classical music and much of the four-hour journey is spent with Bach. We make appreciative sighs as the landscape rushes by until we venture up the driveway to a large farmhouse. Waiting to greet us is a self-described American aesthete and owner of one of the rare, complete sets of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. I break the news that I don’t have the confidence or contacts to handle his piece de resistance or his facsimile reproduction of the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Codices. I offer to buy his First Edition of Chatwin’s In Patagonia but he is reluctant to accept less than £250 for it. We agree, however, to a price on the paperbacks; a one thousand strong collection of modern literature, in tip top condition, in which there is a fair sprinkling of cult titles and books with a high ‘novelty’ factor (always a big plus) like Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle.

  Having come prepared, we soon begin the labour intensive process of packing the boxes. Overweight and in his fifties, Brian isn’t the fittest of individuals. He sweats heavily while helping me lug the boxes into the van.

  ‘You’re the muscle, eh?’ says the American who has emerged from the kitchen with coffee.

  What I imagine to be a wry smile escapes my lips. Oxbridge graduate and former Head of English at Exeter College, Brian now organises poetry recitals in the shop when he isn’t leading a choir in the Cathedral of Beziers, a city to where he supposedly retired. An accomplished pianist, Brian is also something of an artist when it comes to performing lengthy monologues on a myriad of intellectual topics. The American is treated to one on rhythmic patterns in English and French classical music

  ‘Well, well. You’re the most intellectual muscle I’ve ever come across.’

  We leave in a van which, with all its book ballast, now feels easier to handle as we begin the long drive back.

  Moving to 44 Rue de l’Université, Montpellier, 1996

  The opening of a sex shop next door in rue de Cheval Vert was not our prime reason for moving. Nor was it a reason to stay put. We had been looking for a bigger place.

  The owners of a shop, selling new books at the top of the street we’ve moved to, feel threatened by our sudden presence, but we are ignoring their enmity. I won’t be turning down textbook orders but I’m not chasing the student market in spite of our new address. We’re attracted to a different concept, more of an ideal actually, one encompassing tea, cake and a good read. ‘BBC’, in moving from rue de Cheval Vert to rue l’Université, has opened an adjoining tea-room. These days every business refers to a pretentious mission statement. If we had one, ours would be based on the following paragraph from Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

  ‘But the spirit of a café is altogether different. Even the richest, greediest old rascal will behave himself, insulting no one in a proper café. And poor people look about them gratefully and pinch up the salt in a dainty and modest manner. For the atmosphere of a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfaction of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behaviour.’

  We tempt shoppers with scones, melting moments and bara brith. But our business model is flawed. Many customers turn into friends and it’s difficult to refuse them a tea or a scone on the house.

  All sorts of people walk into the shop with a multitude of motives other than wanting a good read. In six months, I encounter clowns, buskers, beggars, thieves, novelists (Adam Thorpe, Sam David), poets, pavement artists, aspirant suicides (I have to pretend that I no longer have a copy of the Handbook of Hanging) and replica gun-toting junkies.

  A tall Yorkshireman with an eyepatch, who is rumoured to be on the run, steps into shop on the look out ‘for a dirty old man’. He pauses for effect before adding: ‘Charles Bukowski’. I don’t have any because Bukowski is an author that flies off the shelves. It transpires that Bob really is a wanted man. Amenable, and an avid reader of literature, his presence bothers nobody in the shop, least of all me. Eventually caught by police at Montpellier train station, he is extradited back to Britain from where his solicitor contacts me to request a character reference. I willingly comply. There is mention at a Parole Tribunal of a now banned medicine once used for treating epilepsy and Bob is soon released.

  Lecturers and authors breach the shop’s entrance but I find myself more intrigued by the conversations I have with society’s more disaffected members.

  Hailing originally from Ladbroke Grove, Tony the tramp has been eking out a beggar’s existence for at least a decade in southern France. A diminutive, handsome man, Tony has lived with the gypsies but is now a confirmed inhabitant of the streets. He confesses to having stolen books from outside my first shop but I can’t muster any real anger such is his likeable demeanour, providing he’s not too far gone on wine. We lend pens and help to compose heartrending slogans, on pieces of cardboard, designed to elicit sympathy and cash. Anne gives Tony soup and he genuinely wants to help our fortunes; offering to distribute flyers about the town. One day he is excited because Motörhead are in town. Tony intends to beg a guitar off Lemmy, a former friend, but he misses the concert because of an exceptionally drunken binge.

  There are people who believe my working in an English bookshop is proof of an allegiance to all things English, exclusively so. I am required on occasion to point out that the shop contains just as many American authors. And also helping to fill the shelves are plenty of books by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers.

  A great deal of social intercourse is involved in running the shop. Sometimes it is welcome, but there are days when you lose the will to haul up the shop shutters. Montpellier is an increasingly popular destination for English speaking holiday-makers. I give them a potted history of the city, extolling its attributes and warning them about its high petty crime rate. Some express their thanks and buy the guidebook recommended at the end of my spiel. But I grow quickly wary of the tourists who monopolise my time before deciding that they have quite enough ‘reading material’ on them. So why walk into a bookshop? The tourist board would more usefully employ me. I begin to recognise the signs that betray a determined non-buyer. Overly effusive in their praise of the city, they merely want to communicate this fact with someone who speaks their language. I develop a tactic to uncover some paperwork requiring my urgent attention. This doesn’t always work though and I can find myself trapped, longing to escape. One spring morning a softly spoken Canadian walks into the shop, introducing himself as ‘Don Bell, book scout.’ He has difficulty breathing but manages to convey his intriguing life style; that of cruising the bookshops and flea markets in Paris. Our conversation makes me hanker for the open road. I recognise a fellow spirit but learn only after out meeting that he wrote a book, Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory, that won the 1973 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for humour.

  Prague, February 1996

  The air is cold but invigorating. I’m staying with my brother and his Czech girlfriend who live here. I knew that Cz
echs were big on beer but their penchant for ice cream has come as a surprise.

  Tom and Katka give me a potted tour of the city before taking me to the Globe Bookstore. It exudes a welcoming atmosphere (all the buildings in this city seem to have a surplus of heat) and they serve hot food as well as cakes. I note the international newspapers and permit myself a quick scan of the books whose prices are higher than I expected. A friend tells me of someone who buys second-hand books in bulk from charity book depots to sell to shops throughout Europe. As you head east the prices increase.

  Drinking strong coffee, we overhear a good-natured argument over Czechoslovakian literature. A group of Americans debate whether either Franz Kafka or Milan Kundera can be considered as Czech writers. Neither author wrote in Czech, they contend, before an irritated Czech pipes up to question their hegemony of opinion.

  We leave the Globe and head out for more traditional tourist destinations. I have a fleeting impression that all in Prague is bars and bookshops. The atmosphere is suitably bohemian.

  Agde, South of France, June 1996