Jen Campbell - The Bookshop Book

Also by Jen Campbell

non-fiction

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

poetry

The Hungry Ghost Festival

Jen Campbell

Constable London

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Constable

Copyright Jen Campbell, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-666-6 (hardback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-670-3 (ebook)

Constable
is an imprint of
Constable & Robinson Ltd
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.constablerobinson.com

This is a room of transpositions and tricks,

of tiny time machines lined up, a spectrum of spines.

In this room, two people kept apart

for three hundred pages can begin to love each other

at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air.

And the air is turning, is it not? It is filling

with flesh smells and fruit smells,

it is thick with swarms of flitting black letters.

Life appears where there was no life.

Where the world was flat and angular, suddenly

it is round, like an orange.

In one corner the Macondo sun shines

brilliantly on a woman with shoes the colour

of old silver and a hat made of tiny flowers.

She browses near a man who moves among the shelves

systematically, serenely, running his hands

over covers and titles in the same parsimonious way

he papered his house with banknotes.

Elsewhere, a cast of characters become complete,

three-dimensional and disgraceful in a faded front room,

answering their own distressing questions.

Though outside it is raining and unspectacular,

inside (somewhere in the stopover between

being and oblivion) there is lightness and weight,

soul and body, words misunderstood

for nothing more than the turn of a page.

Rebecca Perry

bookshops are
time machines
spaceships
story-makers
secret-keepers
dragon-tamers
dream-catchers
fact-finders
& safe places.

(this book is for those
who know this to be true)

Bookshops are full of stories. Not just stories on shelves, but those hidden away. There are the stories of bookshop owners, and all the books they read that made them fall in love with reading. There are the stories of authors, and why they wrote their first book. There are the stories of second-hand books, and all the people who owned them. And theres the story of every single customer who walks through the door. We all love stories, with their sense of mystery and adventure.

At the antiquarian bookshop where I work part-time, a little girl once told me she loves bookshops because they are houses for stories. Another asked if she could get to Narnia through one of the bookcases. A young boy suggested I get a dragon to guard all the books in the shop when I wasnt there. When I asked him if that mightnt be a fire hazard, he rolled his eyes and told me that obviously Id have to get a trained one.

Sadly Im yet to find a bookshop dragon, let alone a trained one, but its true that stories have always been associated with magic. Some of the earliest writing ever found, in southern Iraq from 4,000 BC, was used to record horoscopes. Archaeologists have also found Chinese writing on 50,000 tortoise shells, called Oracle Bones, on which shamans would carve questions before examining them by firelight as an early form of divination.

Ive never written on shells myself and, despite a strong desire to work at Flourish and Blotts, I dont think Im a witch, but when I was much younger I loved writing short stories about witches, sometimes on tree leaves using gel pens. I also remember writing secret notes using lemon juice as invisible ink something Id learnt from Enid Blyton. To make the writing visible youd have to iron the paper and, as no parents going to let their child use an iron, it wasnt so much invisible ink as impossible ink, but it was still fun. When I was twelve I moved on to machinery, writing a biography of my dead hamster on a ridiculously loud typewriter that would drive my parents mad as I powered on late into the night, the sound of typing punctured by gasps whenever my fingers got jammed between the keys. I thought the story was a masterpiece and secretly posted the manuscript off to Penguin in the hope they might publish it. (Wisely, they didnt).

Weve written tales on many things over the past few thousand years: stone tablets, ivory, tree bark, palm leaves... Historians have even discovered copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey written out on the dried skins of serpents. The Ancient Romans used the inner bark of trees to write on, a peel called liber, which in turn became the Latin word libri, meaning book, and subsequently livre, libro and library. The Ancient Greeks wrote on parchment, the Egyptians on papyrus; the Chinese invention of paper didnt reach Europe for nearly a thousand years.

In the Ancient world, most books were read out in public by would-be writers the notion of silent reading came much later and if an audience approved, it was likely that a patron would pay to have the authors work copied out by slaves. Such patrons were the first publishers, and the book stalls they would set up near temples and in the food markets of central town squares were the first bookshops.

By the 1400s books were being created by carving a print block out of a huge chunk of wood, dipping it into ink and pressing it onto paper a very inefficient method, because the block would often break. But in 1450, when Johann Gutenberg developed a moving printing press in Germany that enabled books to be produced faster and more cheaply, literacy was able to spread to the masses. Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his bookshop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.

So what about the booksellers and bookshops who didnt throw their toys out of their prams? Bookshops as physical places only became prevalent from the 1500s onwards. For thousands of years before, ). The first mention of a bookseller setting up a bookshop permanently in London is recorded as late as 1311. The early booksellers often sold other wares too, such as fabrics and plain parchment, and with the invention of the moving printing press they took on the role of bookbinders, often designing bespoke book covers for customers with their initials embossed on the cloth which, for a premium, could be dyed a particular colour.

Weve now reached the twenty-first century through a period of intense change for the book industry in recent years, with the rise of chain bookshops soon followed by their swift decline, the exponential growth of online shopping and the invention of the e-reader. So much has changed, indeed, that a lot of people have again been asking: are physical books and bookshops still relevant? But when so much of our lives is spent on computers, dealing with concepts and files that we cant actually hold in our hands, the idea of a shopping experience, and of a physical book, is perhaps more important than ever before.