Why More Book Shops Should Be Like ‘Black Books’

Posted on April 16, 2008 in Uncategorized

[Click] [Tap-a-tap-tap] [Click] [Analogue rumble] [Procrastination] [Surprise at the manner in which ‘Eric A, Basingstoke’ deftly manipulates English into something entirely unrecognisable] [Analogue rumble] [Click]

That was the sound of me buying a book. More specifically, a book plucked from the webulous (you will note I am using ‘One-click Buying’ – I’m a busy man with many things to do and a hundred sites to browse on work time).

I’ll be honest: I can’t remember the last time I bought a book in a shop. You remember: a shop with real faces on the inside and tangible wares on display.

Of course, I buy books from time-to-time in charity shops but that is always an accident. Whenever I find myself in a thrift shop, (a misnomer, I find many are not so competitively priced) it is to root around the men’s section in my fruitless quest to find a respectable jacket that fits and would ‘do’ at the many funerals and weddings I anticipate being required to attend in the future. But refusing to leave empty handed, I’ll pick up a book or two, occasionally ones I know I’ll get around to reading.

But books from a high-street chain? Not for years, since I was a student and they were a one-stop shop for your set texts (these I knew I would never get around to reading but I felt an obligation to my parents to fritter away my allowance on something that didn’t make me gregarious and dizzy).

These days, there’s nothing about the big franchise shop that appeals. They’re too clean, too anodyne. Don’t misinterpret me, this is not snobbery at work, I just find them relentlessly smug. From the smug young things in brown cords and woollen scarves, reclining for eight hours in a franchised coffee shop nursing the same small latte in one hand and cradling whatever’s made the Booker shortlist in the other, to the immensely friendly and helpful, yet inscrutably smug staff, the whole shebang reeks of self-satisfaction.

And what these papyrus-pushing monoliths boast in smug abundance, for me they lack in soul. If something’s going to tear me away from the cosy, soulless – but essentially convenient – glow of my monitor, it needs to bring something to the experience. It needs character.

Which is why more book shops should be like Black Books.

I want a drunk Irishman to shout at me when I ask for the new Bill Bryson; I want to see him physically assault his hapless assistant with a toaster; I want to be in a book shop that looks like a book shop, not a supermarket.

I want it to smell of books, books that have been read by people before you and not of the cellophane that houses them. In old book shops where little thought is given to organising titles into user-friendly sections, where tomes appear to have been distributed by a bomb, above the aroma of wine stains and cigarette ash, is the smell of books that have been enjoyed many times before. It’s reassuring and it’s comforting – which is especially important when a drunk Irish man is shouting at you.

But in the franchises? You can smell little more than coffee and nappies. Yum yum.

By Egg