Megan Dunn - Tinderbox

IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN. In the spring of 1950 Ray Bradbury sat in the basement of the Lawrence Powell library at UCLA, took a dime out of his pocket and slotted it into the small timer. Clunk. He struck the keys of the typewriter; each letter of the alphabet sprang forward printed, its likeness on paper, then snapped back into place. Students sat at the other eleven pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the basement of the library and pounded the keys. Bradbury added his own fingertips to the stampede. He was following a character along the white sheet of the page. Guy Montag left the fire station after a day of burning books and took the tube to the suburbs. Montag emerged on a blank street and turned a corner. The wind picked up. Autumn leaves scattered. The sentence came to a full stop.

Bradbury stretched in his chair and rubbed his forehead; his eyes felt heavy. His back ached and his right leg had gone to sleep. His wife and baby daughter were waiting at home. Outside, the sun was setting over L.A. but he couldnt see it. The basement had no windows. Bradbury glanced at the student sitting in front of him. Her blonde ponytail had flared on the edge of his vision all day. She typed in a neat, even rhythm as though she knew exactly where she was going and what she wanted to say. The blonde unwound the last page from her typewriter and gathered together a thick ream of paper. Bradbury watched as she stood up and walked out of the basement of the library. Her pony tail swayed from side to side. She didnt look back.

Bradbury had to keep going. He wrote in half hour instalments. His fingers raced over the keys. The typewriter outran his thoughts. The story barely paused for Bradbury to stop and add another dime. He finished the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 in nine days: a 25,000 word story called The Fireman. It cost him $9.80.

The timer went off.

In December 2009 I stood behind the till at Borders Kingston-Upon-Thames and held the scanner over the binc sticker on the back of a book. The scanner flashed red as it registered the title, beeped and added the price to the total. A fleet of Borders stores had opened throughout the UK. Born in the USA, the typical Borders two-storey stores were large, friendly supermarkets where browsers could freely roam the aisles. Borders presence on the local high street had once seemed as assured as a Starbucks Grande Cappuccino. Now size and range had become its downfall. Is the discount on there? The customer glanced at the total on the cash register. During the sale I noticed customers had developed a heightened distrust of technology. Yes, I said. The books are all half price. I pressed Enter on the till. The receipt began to print. I handed the customer the Eftpos machine. You can swipe your card now. He swiped. We waited for the transaction to complete. Does this mean youre all out of jobs? he asked. No, I said. Borders is in voluntary administration. I explained the difference between voluntary administration and liquidation. It was a difference that sounded tenuous even to me. The customer checked his itemised receipt as I stuffed the last book in his bag, noticing with distaste that it was a Dan Brown novel. Satisfied, the customer looked up. Thank you. He grabbed his bag of books. Good luck, he said. I didnt bother to reply. I didnt charge him 5p for the plastic bag either. I was sick of putting out fires.

At Borders all the staff wore lanyards that said Happy to help. I was not happy to help. I worked at Borders because I wanted to be a writer. I stood behind the till dressed in a red Borders sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. My fingertips were sore from entering reduced prices into the tills. My wrists ached from bagging. My shoulders were tense. I watched customers strip books from the shelves. Pages curled at their corners and crumpled. My face felt scorched. My smile had long since melted away. A conga line of crazed shoppers wound around the ground floor. I turned towards the front of the queue. Next.

I picked up the scanner. Beep. Beep. I had been with Borders UK for seven years by the time it was placed into voluntary administration. I was originally hired as a part-time Christmas temp at Borders Islington in 2002, but the job had stuck. I transferred to Borders Norwich in 2005 and was part of the team that opened Borders Dundee in 2006. Id started thinking about Fahrenheit 451 during those last critical months when I was the sales manager at Borders Kingston-Upon Thames. In the wake of Amazons Kindle it seemed unlikely that books would ever be banned: instead books are commodified, turned into movies and TV series, rated and recommended in Goodreads, their individual sales histories quantified on Nielsen Bookdata and in the fathomless depths of the Amazon Sales Ranking system. Even the Kindle was named by a branding consultant who suggested the word to Amazon because it means to light a fire. The branding consultant thought that kindle was an apt metaphor for reading and intellectual excitement.

I bet Ray Bradbury would have agreed. The book people at the end of Fahrenheit 451 wouldnt need to memorise volumes of literature anymore. Now they could store their libraries on their Kindles or iPads. Project Gutenberg has been in the business of archiving classics since 1971. There are currently over 42,000 e-books available in the free domain. Fahrenheit 451 is not of them. Not because it has been banned. Quite the contrary. Ray Bradburys sci-fi classic has not been out of print since it was first published by Ballantine Books in 1953. The novel is still protected by copyright. If Id thought about that more at the time I started writing it might have scared me.

I remembered the mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451, the watchdog of the firemen, who hunted down the literate like prey. I wondered if the mechanical hound was as shonky as the Elonex e-reader wed been selling at Borders for the past couple of months. Our slow-witted display device was fixed to the main information desk on a long plastic lead. All I needed to memorise was its unique selling points. It had five adjustable font sizes and a built-in dictionary. The Elonex e-reader also came pre-loaded with one hundred classics. As a selling point this was not unique. The books cost nothing because the authors were dead and the works had fallen out of copyright.

Does it have a reading light? Customers came pre-loaded with their own set of great expectations that the Elonex e-reader could not always fufill.

The future arrived and it was not science fiction. On Christmas Eve Borders UK was liquidated, forty-five stores were closed and over one thousand employees were made redundant.