The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner

by Bill Rees

  We are up to Lot 30 when a couple of middle aged men push down to near the front where I anxiously stand. Almost immediately one of them begins to bid with reckless extravagance, or so it seems to me. Spending thousands of pounds on furniture, jewellery and old grandfather clocks, his budget seems limitless. He wasn’t at yesterday’s evening ‘viewing’. In his hand is an unblemished catalogue, with nothing scribbled down in the way of notes and prices. I get the impression that he is in the business of making instantaneous assessments. Lot 278, by chance, is displayed on a table within three metres of us. Minutes before the auctioneer comes to it, the Big Spender steps up to give it the once over. The ‘viewing period’ is clearly over but the auctioneer tolerates this minor disregard for convention.

  As with most of the items, the auctioneer talks up the book in his pre-bid spiel. And suddenly, we’re off. ‘Let’s start at £250.’ Nobody bats an eyelid and the price drops to £80 before anyone will offer a starting bid. It is me. Two other people also express interest and the bidding reaches £210 before they drop out. My heart beats hard. The auctioneer is appealing for more bids. ‘This seems cheap to me. Going…’ Damn. The Big Spender lifts up his card. The bidding advances in £10 intervals. Trying to out bluff my competitor, I hold the card aloft, not bothering to bring it down after my bid. But he does the same. The price races to £350, my top bid figure or so I’d thought. Breaking this promise to myself, I go to £420 before conceding defeat.

  The auction ends and the Big Spender is swigging from a can of Coke while counting cash with his colleague. Strangely, I feel like congratulating him. I want to tell him about the book’s history but all I say in parting is ‘That’s a nice book.’

  ‘Aye,’ he replies in a thick Glaswegian brogue. ‘I just liked the look of it.’

  (Distance travelled: 40 miles. Profit: None. Fact learned: Knowledge is power, but it can be trumped by big money.)

  Four Months Later, Another Auction in Colwyn Bay

  This isn’t the antiques sale, rather the general household. They’ve made a mistake. Intensive rummaging of four boxes of mixed books has produced nothing but dust and disappointment. But then I come across Lot 56, assigned to a box of old children’s books, most of which are in a sad state of disrepair. Amongst these and in fairly good condition is the classic The Square Book of Animals by William Nicholson. It is what it says. It has a marvellous symmetry about it, even its publication date – 1900. It is a picture book of British animals explained in rhymes by Arthur Waugh. A £15 bid allows me to leave with the box and all the books therein.

  Later that evening, I type up the following description: William Heinemann 1900, First Edition Boards VG Some shelf wear and corner wear. Complete with 12 plates by Nicholson. Offsetting of plates to facing text pages, otherwise, clean. Two plates with a small brown spot in margin.

  In 1897 Nicholson made a woodcut of Queen Victoria which established his name with the public. During the same year he worked upon An Illustrated Alphabet for the publisher William Heinemann. It was reasonably successful commercially, but more importantly, it provided Nicholson with an opportunity to develop his talents as an engraver. There is something immensely appealing about his work. I’d like to keep The Square Book of Animals but my finances preclude ownership. It reminds me of the format of my first alphabet books. John Burningham’s ABC with an apple, birds, etc., through to xylophone, yacht and zoo. One letter on each page is shown in both upper and lower case, along with a relevant word. On the facing page is a simple illustration in pastel colours. The Square Book of Animals is an ancestral version of the format.

  Its appeal is widespread. It soon sells.

  (Distance travelled: 40 miles. Profit: £400. Fact learned: Fortune can follow a rummage.)

  Closing Down Bangor Bookshop, January 2007

  My retail experience in Britain is drawing to an ignominious end. The philosophy had been the more books the merrier. Nine months ago a shipping container’s doors had been flung apart to reveal 8 foot by 8 foot by 40 foot of emptiness. Drunk on the space and its book hoarding potential, I’d put down the deposit to rent it. I’d filled it with thousands of books and in the course of the last three months, I’ve emptied it of thousands of books. I open shops and later close them. Like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain (whence the stone would fall back of its own weight), I am forever buying and selling. I buy with ease but sell with difficulty, which is why the floor of the shop is now strewn with paper and print. I’ve given up any attempt at classification. People don’t seem to mind the chaos. Over the years I’ve amassed all types of books including those that have little chance of selling. They are getting a last opportunity to find new homes and readers in my closing down sale.

  I’ve also brought into the shop the Headington Circulating Library, with its biographies of knighted naval captains and Sabatini’s and other books popular in the 1930s. Reflecting on the curious charm of the ragged remainders of the ‘Headington Circulating Library’, a customer called Ken, a modern day Socrates, is reminded of a passage in one of Lamb’s ‘Elia’ essays. Charles Lamb, he tells me, was much given to bringing home ‘tattered tomes’ from the stalls in St Paul’s churchyard two hundred years ago.

  ‘How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearances, nay the very odour (beyond Russia) if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old Circulating Library ‘Tom Jones,’ or ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’ How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?’

  An indefatigable reader and collector of books, Ken has a house that has long been considered a hospital for old or unfashionable books. It is having a wing added; a hospice for terminally damaged titles.

  Bangor, 2008

  An English priest with a scholarly obsession with Dickens is inspecting the twelve volume Pilgrim Edition of the author’s letters. Delighted by their condition, the cash is soon splashed and I am informed that: ‘The undertakers still only use cash you know.’

  I feel relief that no offence is taken by a copy of The God Delusion nestling on the bookshelf. I don’t want atheism to scupper the deal.

  Djemea el Fna, Main Square in Marrakesh, 1993

  In Marrakesh a man is shouted at for having the temerity to embrace his girlfriend at midday. He walks off, shrugging shoulders. Ramadhan means that there are no troupes of acrobats. There is, however, no shortage of other performers; a whole carnival of musicians, clowns and street entertainers. In fleeing a carefree snake charmer, I find myself accosted by Ramad who, after requesting and being denied money, is pleased just to chat. Over a coffee he tells me that his father is a maker of djellaba coats. Times are bad. ‘La Misere partout. It was particularly bad during the Gulf war. The poor,’ he says in hushed tones, ‘are completed emasculated and people are wary of openly discussing politics. You end up in a big bag and are never seen again,’ he says. There is a sudden blast of music. ‘Rai from Algeria,’ Ramad explains, gesturing to a nearby hall. We enter, and inside youngsters are dancing as if their lives depended on it. There is a real edge to the atmosphere that is absent from London nightclubs. It might come with knowing true desperation.

  Leatherhead Hospice, 9 June 2005

  ‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Moun
tains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

  When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes”.’

  From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

  Dad is a happy with his new room, especially its large window through which he can see out onto the lawn outside. It makes for a pleasant contrast to the environs of Kingston Hospital from where he has been brought by ambulance today.

  Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in February (following a misdiagnosis of a stroke the previous month), he has rapidly deteriorated; the pace of the disease catching doctors, friends and family by surprise. His mind is unaffected though and he wants to engage in conversation in spite of an increasing inability to make intelligible sounds. We ‘talk’ intermittently for hours on end until his breathing becomes particularly laboured. After re-applying his oxygen mask, I go off for a tour of the town.

  Within ten minutes, I am ensconced in Dandy Lion Editions Bookshop. Scanning the books for likely titles, I briefly forget the reason for me being in Leatherhead. ‘Action gives us consolation for our inexistence,’ opines John Gray in Straw Dogs.

  I turn up a first edition copy of The Selfish Gene, a hugely influential book on evolution by Richard Dawkins published in 1976. Dawkins coined the term ‘selfish gene’ as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes.

  I return to the hospice to show Dad my find. Always having praised Dawkins, he is pleased by both the book’s subject matter and its potential financial return.

  Dad has taken a keen and abiding interest in my efforts to make a living out of books. After his retirement, we sometimes worked in tandem during my bulk buying trips. Dashing across West London it felt like we were bank robbers; he waiting in the ‘get away’ car while I charged in and out of venues of potential pickings, dodging between the clothes hangers in charity shops.

  He didn’t object to his once plush flat resembling a grocer’s stockroom; fruit and veg boxes, filled to the brim with books, piled up high in every corner.

  A nurse enters the room to bring us tea. I hold the cup to his lips. ‘Lovely,’ I hear him rasp. We talk some more before I leave. He gives me, with difficulty, a thumbs up, and I tell him that I’ll see him tomorrow. I do, but not as we both imagine. At dawn I receive a phone call from the hospice; a nurse gently informs me that he died in his sleep in the early hours.

  I learn later that the Motor Neurone Disease Association uses a Thumbs Up symbol as its logo, representing David Niven’s last defiant gesture.

  La Comédie du Livres, Montpellier, May 1994

  Dad has raced down with his car full of books. He excitedly relates his journey along the motorway across the Massif Central, much of it running at an altitude in excess of 2600 feet, with 30 miles in excess of 3250 feet. Concentrating on my stand and rearranging the display of books upon it, I can’t properly follow what he’s saying. My focus is on replenishing the stand with Calvin and Hobbes (the comic strip, that is, not the philosophers) and English language Tintins.

  This is the first year that I’ve participated in La Comédie du Livres, the largest book fair in southern France. I don’t want to blow it. Tents and marquees cover the vast Place de la Comédie. Hundreds of writers, comic strip artists (big in France) and publishers, along with the local bookshops, have assembled to attract an enthusiastic public. The crowds swarm around the tents, seemingly immune to the day’s stifling heat. We have protection from the sun’s fierce rays; the awnings draped generously over the tent’s metal framework.

  Business is brisk for everybody. People are delighted to meet favourite writers and the atmosphere is conducive to book selling. Along with the books hauled in a panic late last night from my shop, the books from London mean that my stand boasts an impressive variety of titles. I’m selling to tourists and locals alike.

  As booksellers, we have only to pay a nominal fee in order to participate in the fair, which is mostly subsidised by the council. The French certainly plough money into culture and they are protective of their book industry, having retained even the net book agreement. Dad is amazed to hear of the council’s generosity and a journalist encourages him to air such views. Next week, a paragraph of his praise is printed in the local paper alongside his picture. ‘Sur son stand de la Comédie du livre, le patron de “Bills Book Company” ressemble a un major… anglais of course! Plein d’humour, sourant, quand on lui demande “ca march?” Il repond immanquablement, “very positive,” et ajoute ‘jamais en Angleterre on imaginerait qu’on subventionne les gens pour ce type d’operation”.’

  Other English people we meet at the event are similarly impressed, including athlete Roger Black, who has been training in the vicinity.

  Towards the end of the day, I meet an American lady called Sophie Herr who has a weakness for Ellis Peters’ novels. She becomes a regular at the shop. I learn that she has famous parents. Her mother, Caroline, was chiefly responsible for bringing the dancer Josephine Baker to Paris. She then met and married Joseph Delteil, a local author and poet held in high esteem. He thus became Sophie’s stepfather. Sophie, it turns out, is a friend of George Whitman.

  Disillusionment, Kingston Nightclub, 1986

  Eddy wants to us to start in The Fox even though we usually drink here only on quiet nights. We find no offence in the slapdash paintings of boats stranded on mud-flats, the gaudily framed portrait of Winston Churchill at his most stoical. We drink, to build up Dutch courage, with dogged determination. A couple of women huddle around a cigarette machine. I feel a sudden attraction to one of them. I follow the play of light as her dark hair, cut in a page-boy style, swings out of synch. Her friend also seems mesmerised.

  ‘Lovely girls. Shame they’re not gonna be going to Pars,’ says Eddy. ‘They won’t let anyone in with jeans.’

  Night has quietly fallen outside The Fox. We are oblivious to the drop in temperature but we notice the altered appearance of the streets under artificial light. The street lamps glow yellow like deformed daffodils on metal stalks. We walk swiftly on.

  The old Palais dance hall has undergone extensive structural alteration; an extra floor has been put in and two ends of the hall partitioned off in wedges to lend the room the shape of a parallelogram. There are four stroboscopes suspended from the ceiling. They shed a dazzling mix of light upon the dancing women.

  ‘Ask her for a dance.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s way too early.’

  Eddy and I hover near the dance floor onto which few men have walked.

  Somebody is pulling at my arm. Eddy is shouting, and through the drunken haze, I can just make it out the words: ‘Is this it?’

  La Comédie du Livres, Montpellier, May 1997

  James Crumley’s books have inspired a generation of crime writers. Over the Tannoy, his French publisher announces his presence on a stand near to mine. Dad agrees to hold the fort so that I can go and meet him. I’ve loved reading his fiction, which is a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. Crumley has something of a cult following of which I’m a fully paid up member.

  Rapt in conversation with an elderly man is Crumley’s agent. Sitting in front of them is the man himself. Near to the table’s edge is a bottle of pastis. And near to the pastis is a pile of books that await signing. My eyes meet his and I’m struck by how bloodshot they are. I strike up conversation after purchasing Un pour marquer la cadence, a French translation
of his first published novel, 1969’s One to Count Cadence, which is set in Vietnam. We chat. I explain what I’m doing here and attempt to convey my admiration for his writing without, I hope, slipping into sycophancy. He inscribes my copy. ‘Bill – See you soon (for a beer) Jim Crumley Mai 1997’. I intend to do just that. But by the time I have packed away my books, he has been whisked away by his publisher.

  Crumley’s books feature either the character C. W. Sughrue, an alcoholic ex-army officer turned private investigator, or another PI, Milo Milodragovitch. In the novel Bordersnakes, Crumley brought both characters together. Of his two protagonists, Crumley says that ‘Milo’s first impulse is to help you; Sughrue’s is to shoot you in the foot.’ In our brief meeting, I detect in Crumley’s character distinctly more of the Milo than the Sughrue.

  Richmond, Surrey, 1989

  Late on Wednesday, the natural light of the day is fading fast. Plumes of cigarette smoke spiral up from the desks. Phones ring intermittently. There are hurried conversations and a frantic finger dance on keyboards. My index fingers, too, contribute to this deadline rush of stories. The screen is lined with sentences I’ve just written. I stare at the green background enveloping the words. Imagining the greenness as an ocean, I wish crassly that the sentences be drowned in it. Jennifer has left. I can’t really take it in. Are these precursor thoughts to a breakdown? Can I get insurance, ‘nervous’ breakdown cover? Crack up and be paid to convalesce somewhere nice? I stare, as if hypnotised by the freshly typed words that await punctuation. Must get going though. I type with demonic vigour, spewing out stories. I correct spelling mistakes before rearranging words, bringing them into accordance with the paper’s style sheet. When using a typewriter, I did this job inside my head. But now I tend to write the first draft of a story in one big splurge of disordered thought.