In this post I'm going to rip into Waterstone's, the chain of booksellers for whom I worked for a substantial number of years. In the unlikely event that this post comes to the attention of anyone at Waterstone's or indeed anyone who has an interest in this kind of thing it's worth pointing out some things. Firstly a lot of what I'm saying is based on hindsight. I left the company in 2003 and have no inside information on how the business is operated today. Secondly, while I do have friends who still work for Waterstone's none of this is based on company secrets they've told me because, to be honest, they haven't. This is all based on my experiences back in the day and conjecture. And while I did leave Waterstone's under something of a cloud I don't hold any grudges against the company as a whole. I'm not one of those romantic idiots who thinks Waterstone's has betrayed the essence of retail bookselling - if anything I'd adjusted to the new regime rather well in my final years. My leaving was more personal involving specific people, which is why I've never really written about it.
So, onwards.
Retail bookselling is doomed. In the UK retail bookselling can be summed up as Waterstone's since that company comprises nearly every chain of the last few decades. Dillons, Hammicks, Ottakars, Sherratt and Hughes, etc, etc - they're all under the W now. (I'm not counting WH Smiths because they sell other stuff and, to be honest, I don't know anything about them.)
A bookshop gets its money from two main areas - bestsellers and backlist. The bestseller market has been eaten up wholesale by the supermarkets who will happily sell a book at 5% margin because to them that's way more than they make on milk. Bookshops are historically used to getting 35-50% and they need this because they have to pay for all those books on the shelves. Tescos will only stock a few books that will sell in days. Waterstone's stock thousands of different books that might sell in a few months. On top of this because supermarkets are buying titles in huge qualities they're able to negotiate very high discounts - over 60% at a guess - so they can undercut the bookshops by a long stretch. Bookshops have to either match these prices or give up selling the bestsellers - suddenly their honey pot has gone dry.
Since bestsellers, especially at Christmas, are what pay for everything else in the shop the range of backlist is going to suffer. Generally speaking invoices have to be paid within 90 days so those books on the shelves have to pay for themselves (and the rent, the staff, and so on) or be returned for credit way before that. This might seem reasonable business sense but it's not conducive to a bookshop that wants to have a deep range of books. Now to the untrained eye 10,000 titles looks a lot like 100,000 titles but to someone who's worked those shelves Waterstone's is not only bare, it's bland. There's no depth there.
This is not a criticism. This is reality. If those huge emporiums of the written word are to survive they have to aim for the lowest common denominator and hold onto it for dear life.
Which brings us to Amazon. I can't say whether Amazon stole the backlist market from Waterstone's or whether they just mopped up after Waterstone's abandoned it but they own the specialist book market now. Yes, they also have a healthy slice of the discounted bestseller market but that's really just the hook. Backlist is where they make their money. To invoke the buzz phrase, it's all about the Long Tail. Waterstone's used to nibble at the Long Tail and, pre-internet, could claim ownership of it, but no longer.
The funny thing is, despite all the hard evidence to the contrary, Waterstone's still trades on this reputation as a depth and range bookseller. Certainly the average punter entering one of their massive superstores would be forgiven in thinking this was true. But it's not. In marketing terms it's known as "a lie". Waterstone's sells books that it knows will sell and returns books that don't sell with ruthless efficiency. This is great if you want a bestselling book, except you can get it at Tescos or Amazon for less, but useless if you want something that isn't a bestseller. You know, something interesting.
You can't blame them for holding to this myth. It's what their customers want after all. That sense that even though they're buying overly hyped novels from the 3 for 2 table they're really partaking in some high-falutin literary scene with sexy black carrier bags and shabbily cool staff. Shopping at Waterstone's lets them pretend they're mixing with the literati while still keeping everything safe and high street. (Which isn't a bad thing as the literati, as evidenced by trade magazine The Bookseller, are tossers. But that's another story.)
So Waterstone's, trapped between a rock and a hard place, is doomed.
[Interesting historical thought: Bookselling as we know it didn't really exist 30 years ago, at least not outside London. It was only in the 80s when Terry Maher bought Dillons and Tim Waterstone started his empire that the concept of a national chain with deep stock really took off. Compared to the long history of selling books going back centuries what we're on the verge of losing is really just a footnote. A failed experiment based on delusions of accessible highbrow ideals and short term Thatcherite economics. Hmm.]
After that extended preamble, to the meat of this post. Waterstone's, I see in the Guardian, has relaunched it's online shop. Presumably accepting that they'll never be able to match the supermarkets they're going for Amazon. Amazon stole their business away from them and now they want it back. Rather amusingly they appear be under the impression that they can do this.
The first thing that struck me about the brand new waterstones.com was rather superficial: the cartoon at the top of the page.
Any bookseller who lets their section get into that state under the current regime would be subject to at least a disciplinary, and yet that's the message they want to put out. Kinda messy, cosy, non-threatening, homey. Where are the bestseller faceouts? Where are the "shelf talkers" pushing bestsellers to the uncertain browser? Where, indeed, are the pyramid tables stack high with 3 for 2 offers? The dissonance between fantasy and reality would be worrying if it wasn't how retail works. This stuff isn't problematic - it just amuses me in the same way people think working in a bookshop must be a doss when it's actually rather stressful and badly paid (though you do meet interesting folk some of whom will be friends for life and you get a decent staff discount, so it's not all bad.)
Other than that, it's a rather nice website, so all credit to those involved because it could have been awful. But it's not.
That said, the actual content is rather superficial, mainly geared around bestsellers and surefire new titles. Editorially it doesn't stray from the mainstream, which leads me, finally, to my big point.
In the advertising for the new site they really push the human element. "Humans make the best search engines" runs the headline. This ties into the notion that all these nasty computers are stripping away the soul from the book buying experience when what you really want is someone with actual knowledge to guide you through the labyrinth. There's a lot to be said for this. If I, as someone who doesn't know contemporary fiction that well, want advice on a new novel to read I'll ask one of my fiction loving chums for advice. This is the great Waterstone's (and Dillons and Ottakars and Hammicks and Sherrat and Hughes etc) way - staff your shops with young arts graduates who don't know what they want to do with their lives but know a fair bit about books - so I'd be interested to know exactly how their online Ask a Bookseller service works.
"Let real people with expert knowledge help you find the best books and brilliant prices" continues the advert. Interesting choice of words there. Not the "book you want" but the "best books". But it's the "real people with expert knowledge" that really has me curious. Who are these real people?
Another somewhat inevitable effect of the supermarket/Amazon squeeze is Waterstone's doesn't have as many staff as they used to. Actually, that's kinda generous. They're running their stores at skeleton levels. Just visit one and have a look for yourself. Back in the late 90s there was a very good case for cutting back on staff. Working for the company really was a bit of a doss. You could spend ages chatting with customers (and each other), pouring over stock sheets to improve your range, drinking coffee with publisher's reps and so on. A cull of, say, 30% was quite reasonable, if a little hard to adjust to. I wouldn't like to speculate what the levels are at now but they're very low. Much lower than in my time. This has partly been achieved by taking a lot of responsibility for stock away from the shop floor and into the smaller pool of managers and head office buyers, which makes sense if your range has been reduced to that which can be decided on cold sales figures. The result is a bunch of disempowered shelf stackers and till monkeys whose knowledge of the wider book industry is minimal at best, not because they're stupid but because they're never exposed to it. On top of this, they don't give a shit anymore. We used to give a shit back when we actually had some control over our departments because they were our departments. That ownership might have been an illusion but it was a powerful one. If a book was sold out from my section, which I knew back to front, I took it as a personal failing. Now, with a few exceptions, working for Waterstone's is like working for any other high street retailers. It's a minimum wage job. If you do get impeccable service at Waterstone's that's because the person serving you is a human being with a soul and you sparked something in them. It's got nothing to do with the company.
At least that's my perception from the outside, based on trends I witnessed in my time there. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
So, who are these human beings doing the recommending if they're not the shop floor staff? Store management, probably, although they won't have a lot of time since they're, y'know, busy managing the store. Which leaves us with the marketing department at head office. Now, they're not evil people - many of them are ex-booksellers - but they're not exactly at the front line.
Meanwhile this website is supposed to grab back market share from Amazon.
Where do I start?
Amazon might be, at heart, a big bunch of computer algorithms but they're a darn sight more interesting that the sales charts and publisher hype that Waterstone's work with. I'm as cynical about these things as can be but having bought a fair few things from them over the years their personal recommendations have an alarming tendency to be unerringly accurate. Maybe Waterstone's will also do this with their online customers, I don't know, but it'll be a catch-up operation rather than anything novel.
Amazon put a lot of weight in their customer reviews. Yes, a lot of them are really stupid, but you can spot the stupid ones and dismiss them. The fact remains that your personal recommendation is there, on the screen, in multiple, for you to take or leave. Amazon leverages its enthusiastic customer base while Waterstone's is relying on minimum wage slaves and managers who are scared not to toe the company line.
Amazon look at sales data and customer behaviour within the site and generate dynamic charts based on all manner of variables. In English this means their results are not stuck in bestseller land unless you want them to be. They'll pick out things that raw sales data cannot find and create new sales from them, as explained the opening paragraphs of the original Long Tail article. Booksellers used to do this when the had the books to do it. How can they when all they have are bestsellers?
Amazon is open. All their data is out there, from recommendations to reviews to sales. In fact if you're technically minded you can even hook into the raw data using their web services. I don't expect Waterstone's to have this kind of technical oomph but will those questions sent to booksellers be published on the site so others can use them? Doesn't look like it. Looks like a glorified email system to me. High street retail is all about secrets. The web is all about openness.
In short, Amazon is an internet company that understands the internet. Waterstone's is a high street retailer that understands the high street. While price has a lot to do with it, the reason online shopping works is because it does things high street shopping cannot. Similarly the high street does things online cannot, like letting you see the thing you're buying first. Waterstones.com, like their glossy magazine, will act as a nice online directory to their stores and give something extra to those customers who want to buy into the Waterstone's myth, but it's not going to take anything away from Amazon. That, frankly, is nonsense.
Comparing Waterstone's to Amazon is like comparing apples and oranges. They're both fruits but they're very different. I keep being drawn back to the history of the company (or companies) in that this sort of bookselling is relatively young. Maybe it doesn't deserve to survive this upheaval? Do we really need these huge temples to literature in every city? In my experience the shops that made the best profit margins were the small ones located where people worked. They were convenient, friendly and reliable because their customers were predictable. The superstores were always struggling to find their niche, like battleships negotiating a winding river, weighed down by outrageous rent and utility bills. Perhaps their time has come.
Oh, and just for the record, Tim Waterstone can fuck right off with his "I wanna buy back my shop from the evil people" bullshit. Bloke never made a profit in the first place and is living in some kind of fantasy land. The only thing he gave the chain of any worth was the Big Myth and that's running out of credibility. Though not, it seems, with journalists.
Alex from the band Devil and Casey Jones emailed a while back ostensibly to tell me about a gig they were doing (which, as usual, I couldn't attend due to work...) and informed me of a book that mentions the Number 11 Outer Circle bus route in Birmingham which, as you know, I'm planning to write a book about.
The book was Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Since I'm on a perpetual budget I was a bit wary about forking out for a novel but I noticed Amazon had it listed as second hand for a quid which, with postage, worked out at £3.75, which seemed reasonable, so I ordered it. A couple of days later it arrived - an ex-library copy with the first few pages falling out but what do you expect for a quid.
And it turned out to be really good indeed. Not much useful Outer Circle stuff (it's more a plot device than a description of the route) but a thoroughly enjoyable read and quite unique. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone, Birmingham based or not.
Having enjoyed the book I starting thinking about the fact that it had cost me a quid of which the author would see nothing. Admittedly if I'd bought it new the author would only have seen about 50p, if that, but those royalties add up over time. Since the book is still in print I've also done the publisher out of a sale which, when you're printing in bulk, can be a significant thing.
Jeanette Winterson wrote an article in the Guardian recently (which of course I can't find online for looking...) the gist of which was how Amazon's listing second hand books was really not a good thing at all and tantamount to stealing. It's not like I stumbled across the book in a dusty shop - I was actively looking for it and contemplating paying full price but was given the opportunity to buy it for next to nothing with the profits going to some dealer in The Wirrall.
But, as usual, while raising an interesting point Winterson is wrong. I probably wouldn't have paid full price (my Amazon basket is overflowing with full price books I'm probably never going to be able to afford to buy) and having enjoyed the book have recommended it to others, including you. Nobody loses, everyone wins.
That said, it would be nice to have the option of financially compensating Morrall for the work she put into writing the book. If Amazon, or someone else, set up a system where I could pay another quid of which a decent percentage would go to the author I'd probably do that. A system, the Public Lending Right, already exists for library books where authors get around 5p each time their titles are borrowed so it shouldn't be too hard to piggy-back this. Make it simple with a link on each eligible title on Amazon, something like "I have read this book second hand and would like to pay the author", and I'm sure a reasonable number of people would be up for it. And naturally the commission on those donations would be another revenue stream for Amazon.
Of course I could send a cheque to the publishers (or just look her up in the phone book and stick a quid through her letterbox) but am I, or anyone else, realistically going to do that? Of course not.
The other obvious place this sort of thing would work is for music, not just CDs bought second hand but for stuff downloaded via P2P. However I suspect the record industry would consider this sort of enlightened initiative akin to negotiating with terrorists...
One of the things I miss about working in a bookshop is having a stash on dumb-assed customer stories. Flatmate Andy had a doozy today which I'm sure he won't mind me nicking.
[Phone rings]Andy: Hello, Waterspoons, how can I help?
Customer: I'm need a book.
A: Yes?
C: I've got a code for it.
A: Okay.
C: It's Eye... Ess...
A: [rolls eyes, waits for actual ISBN number to begin]
C: Bee... En...
[Silence]
A: Um...
C: Do you have it?
A: Sorry, I need the number that follows that.
C: But that's all I have.
A: [Realising that this is a no-hope case] What's the title?
What's genius about this one is the customer had narrowed down her search to every single book ever published since the ISBN system was introduced. I can picture her coming into the shop, picking up two books and realising to her horror that they both have the same code.
Okay, maybe you need to have been a bookseller to really appreciate this...
It's funny how when someone tells me they're going to send me a free thing and I tell them my address and it arrives a few days later I still look at the padded envelope and wonder what the hell it is. Today it was Russell's new book.
It's based on his "award winning weblog" eggbaconchipsandbeans which along with the associated a good place for a cup of tea and a think has been a firm favourite of mine since I stumbled upon it 18 months ago (god, time is flying...) and I'm delighted to say that the book is thoroughly enjoyable too.
This sort of thing is fraught with dangers, however. It's essentially a "Christmas Book" which those in the trade know to be a fickle thing. It'll either be brilliant and sell loads or it'll be shit and bomb horribly or, more often than not, it'll be shit and sell loads. Russell's book is certainly not shit. I hope it sells loads.
What makes it good is how unremittingly positive it is and not in a naive or glib way. This is refreshing as so much of modern "culture" is archly negative, taking the piss to attain superiority over genuine enthusiasm and disguise a deep moral vacuum. Russell likes fried breakfasts and he likes the cafes that serve them. He likes the details which he picks up on and notes with unerring accuracy. He's not a tourist but he has a traveler's eye. And above all he manages to communicate that most elusive of things - the spirit of a place that is in essence a functional thing.
He also give me a credit, which was very nice of him. It's not often I get credited in books, especially when they're not about comics.
Go buy it. You won't be disappointed.
Pictures and Words - New Comic Art and Narrative Illustration by Roanne Bell and Mark Sinclair is a big book with many pictures, the sort of thing you'd find in the art department of a nice bookshop and is published by arts publisher Laurence King (Yale in the US). While some of the artists featured will be familiar to comics aficionados they tend to come from the art comix end of the spectrum. You'll have noticed the repeated use of the word "art". We're in Art-land here.
Art-land is a treacherous place for the comics fan. If you're not careful you can get dazzled by the respectability of it all, of seeing the medium you love discussed in such rarefied and intellectual terms. And then when you see it for what it is comes feelings of treachery and disappointment and a sense that these art folks are missing the point, picking what fits their narrow paradigms and not fully comprehending the medium before moving onto the next trendy thing.
While a lot of this is just a clash of cultures and perspectives there's something fundamental behind it. Art, as in art-in-galleries capital-A Art, doesn't tend to be narrative, or at least not sequentially narrative and, unless I'm mistaken, there aren't that many critical tools for dealing with such crazy concepts as "story". That's for the literature guys and opens up a whole 'nother area I won't go into right now. Suffice to say your Art critic is can cope with comics as illustration but tends to lose it as you move towards comics as comics.
Which is why Pictures and Words is an interesting book because it attempts to tackle the thorny issue of narrative head on yet still come at things from at Art perspective. To this end the focus is on emerging and cutting edge cartoonists with a smattering of non-comics artists whose work could be considered to be if not comics then narrative. The authors also give a good third of the book over to single-panel illustration, in other words gallery-friendly comics, which rather that be a cop out is actually quite revolutionary for this kind of criticism as they look at narrative flow within the illustration or across physically disconnected pieces.
Since this is a review I'd better say a little about the book itself. It's laid out rather like an anthology with each artist given between one and four pages with their art with filling the page or reduced to show two pages side by side. Short commentaries (rather like gallery cards) unobtrusively accompany the art putting it into the context of the chapter often using quotes from the creators.
There are three chapters, "Silent" covering wordless comics, "Single Panel" as mentioned above and "Text and Image" featuring what could be called normal comics. Thirty three artists are featured from around the world with a slight emphasis on the UK: Anna Bhushan, Barry Blitt, Fredrik von Blixen, My Clement, Jordan Crane, Paul Davis, Mantin tom Dieck, John Dunning, Marcel Dzama, Jeff Fisher, Scott Garrett, Tom Gauld, Jochen Gerner, Sammy Harkham, Igort, Benoit Jacques, James Jarvis, Jason, Andrez Klimowski, Simone Lia, Lorenzo Mattotti, Roderick Mills, Ethan Persoff, David Rees, Barnaby Richards, Jenni Rope, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, David Shrigley, Nikhil Singh, Katja Tukianen, Andrew Wightman and Jim Woodring. Of those I recognise twelve as being comics creators in the traditional sense. The rest come from another school, usually fine art or illustration.
This concentration on the bleeding edge of experimental comics and the emphasis on creators who have followed a different path than the norm is interesting and quite valid. It reinforces one of the themes of the book - that the mechanical essence of comics, how they work in themselves, has in recent years influenced non-comics art as never before. It's always been the view of this aficionado that comics are everywhere, that almost everything can be viewed as a comic in some form of other. The landscape that surrounds us, man made or natural, is a tapestry of comic art and can be read sequentially as a narrative, from a countryside panorama to a collage of photographs on a teenager's wall. Everything is interconnected, discrete objects that when considered in connection to their neighbours taken on a deeper, richer meaning, a narrative told by the mind of the viewer as the gaps are filled by the imagination and we experience the world as poetry.
And yes, I accept I'm an extremist in this respect, but I think it's a valid point of view, that an understanding of how comics work can give a fresh and useful perspective on other forms of art. With Pictures and Words, Bell and Sinclair appear to be doing just this. It would be easy to show how comics work using "normal" comics (as Scott McCloud did over a decade ago in Understanding Comics) but to apply this understanding not just to emerging cartoonists but to the work of art school graduates is actually quite daring. (Even if the cartoonists piss all over the "artists", but that's by the by...)
I was also struck by how little art-wank there was in the book. At no point are cultural influences brought to bear or tedious references to popular culture. While in no way dry this is quite a technical book, looking at how the art works more than what it means, or rather, showing that how it works is intrinsic to what it means, or something. This is a toolbox for artists looking to explore something new.
So, as an indicator of where comics are at in the non-comics consciousness this is quite a landmark and while the topics covered might not be new to someone who knows their comics, the application of them should be of interest.
And finally it gloriously betrays its roots by having a kick ass cover featuring a giant robot. What more do you want?
Published in the UK by Lawrence King, ISBN 1856694143, £19.95
Published in the US by Yale, ISBN 0300111460, $26.95
It could be the novelty has worn off but boy was HP6 a slog. I was warned that the action only really happened in the last 200 pages but that was a slight exaggeration. It only really picks up at chapter 26 after an age of drawn out exposition and snogging. Of course it didn't help that it had been two years since I read, and promptly forgot the plot of, HP5 so I didn't have a clue what was going on. Still, given that I was clueless and somewhat bored, it did zip along quite nicely and was finished in the requisite two days. Was quite disappointed with the big plot twist, not who died but who killed him, since if it's revealed to be a big bluff then it's too obvious and if it's not then it's equally obvious. Something major has got to happen in HP7 to top this and I'm not sure JK has got it in her.
Still, at least I didn't pay for it. M&M bought two copies so they could finish it at the same time and gave the spare to me, which I promised to pass on to others on the condition they do the same.
Jonathan Assistant sends a meme my way, which is nice as I was starting to wonder if I'd ever get one of these memes sent my way. That music one just passed me by completely. In fact, I think this is the first time I've ever done one of these which goes to show you can blog for years and there are still new challenges, new adventures. This one is about books. For the record, I'm leaving comics out of this cos that's a whole 'nother medium. This is strictly fiction.
Total Number Of Books I've Owned
Ooh, hundreds if not thousands. I used to be a bookseller and that generally means one acquires books without even trying. That said, I've currently only got about 80 or so after a number of clear-outs. The other side to having been a bookseller is I don't put quite so much value on books as physical objects - it's the words that count.
The Last Book I Bought
That'd be Kafka on the Shore, the most recent novel by Haruki Murakami. I've nearly finished it and it's terrific.
The Last Book I Read
Prior to the Murakami, that'd be Super-8 by Craig Smith. When you get sent a book by your mate that's been published by some teeny little press skepticism about the quality abounds, but it's a really good book, telling the story of four normal teenage lads in the early 80s who go on a canal-boat holiday. Lovely observational stuff.
Five Books That Mean a Lot To Me.
The Wind-Up Bird Chonicle by Haruki Murakami is a really huge book that's quite daunting, especially as nothing seems to happen for the first 150 or so pages. And then suddenly, without you noticing, everything kicks off and your brain explodes. Very difficult to describe exactly what this book is about but it's somewhat perspective-changing and highly recommended.
The Crow Road by Iain Banks was my favourite novel when I'd just turned 20. Not so sure I'd rate it so highly now, but at the time I really identified with it. Of note is the TV adaptation which, unlike so many adaptations of novels, was pretty much accurate to the story, characters and feel of the novel.
The New York Trillogy by Paul Auster kinda sits next to the Murakami in the life-changing stakes. This was probably the book that taught me what fiction was capable of in that it's eminently readable and exiting yet also incredibly experimental and philosophical. Also worth checking out is the comics adaptation of City of Glass (the first in the trilogy) by Paul Karasik David Mazzucchelli.
Stone Junction by Jim Dodge is a somewhat obscure novel that only booksellers, and fiction buyers at that, really know about, but it deserves to be more widely read. It's a speculative account of underground America, brought to life as the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws who do crime but for a higher moral purpose. It's one of those novels you really wish was true, as well as being a fun read.
Finally, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is just brilliant. I was drawn to it because of the comics connection (the title characters are comic book creators in the 40s) but it's about so much more, tying in the Jewish immigrant experience, the notion of myth-making and the practice of stage magic. Above all it's wonderfully written with characters you can fall in love with.
Special mention to Underworld by Don DeLillo, mainly because I was so proud of myself when I finally read it. And then I wanted to read it all over again.
Hmm. All written by blokes with an emphasis on big fat American literary novels. Ah well.
What is the correct terminology for passing this on? I see "batton" used quite a lot but I rather like the image of jumping out of a bush, waving my hands around and shouting "Aha! I meme you!" like some tragic live-roleplayer with straggly hair and a late-breaking voice. And a pointy, yet mournfully bent, hat. So, Marv, Garen, Matthew, Craig and Jeremy, I meme you!
(Names picked somewhat randomly, should you feel slighted, and while I tried to strike a gender balance it doesn't appear that way as the girls are trading as boys. See if you can guess which are which.)
I'm currently re-reading The Music of Chance by Paul Auster and enjoying it tremendously even though I know exactly how it plays out (and boy is there a twist 2/3 through). As I explained to Sam today, reading Auster is like walking down a straight road which looks ordinary but all the details start taking your mind all over the surrounding countryside. The Music of Chance is probably my favourite Auster novel. It's not as majestic as The New York Trilogy but there's something about it that appeals, probably the opening 50 pages with a man finding himself free to do anything at all so he just drives aimlessly around America not looking for something but welcoming whatever comes his way. Another reason I like it so much is that it's represents the first time I came across Auster, not with this book but with the film version which I'd rented on a whim back in 1994 and loved. Reading it again now I had the desire to see the film again to see if it holds up (I suspect it does) and what it adds, if anyting (Auster was involved in the production). And I thought it would make a good 30th birthday present for Sam as it's her kind of film. But it's not available. So much for the Long Tail.
Smoke, however, is being re-released in January so there's hope.
Oh, the irony. Maybe.
As a bookseller I got a lot of advance proof copies of forthcoming titles which meant I would read books months before they came out or, more often, sell them on eBay for silly money. One of the proofs I got was for Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club which I didn't sell and enjoyed a hell of a lot. The sequel, The Closed Circle is out in six weeks and I want to read it so much I'm not going to wait for the paperback.
Now, because I got a proof copy of Rotters' I really wouldn't mind a proof of Circle to go with it, mainly because it'd be nice to have them both like that but also because a hardback is an arse to lug around on the bus. There's one on eBay currently at the reasonable price of £4.99 plus postage. No doubt it'll rocket up in the next week to something silly but I'm prepared to go to £20 including postage. The silly thing is the hardback will be discounted down to about £13 in the shops so I'm probably going to pay over the odds. And all because I used to get books for free.
I bought this in 1998 (August 29th at 5.54pm in fact - I have the receipt) on recommendation from a fellow bookseller but it didn't rally grab me so I put it to one side. The irony was just too thick for me - bear in mind it was written in 1984 when this irony thing was new - and I just couldn't be arsed with what seemed to be clever-clever for the sake of clever-clever. Six years later, and having enjoyed Underworld last summer, I figure I'll give it another go. It's bloody excellent. Not sure why the change of heart, maybe I'm more open to irony these days. Anyway, this quote had me pondering for many days:
"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can't possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it's true." © Don Delillo
Currently half way through. Highly recommended.
One of the advantages of being a bookseller was you got to know all the tricks, trends and suchforth of the book publishing trade, so that when a rep showed you a hot new title that was going to sell millions you could tell just by the jacket that it was a mainstream piece of LCD garbage not worthy of your attentions. But it probably would sell millions so you'd take fifty. The downside to this is that you turn into a cautionary cynic, not trusting anything that comes out of a publisher's mouth and avoiding anything with a sniff of hype. (You can divide booksellers into two camps, those who heard of Harry Potter before it went huge and think it's great and those who didn't and think it's overrated twaddle. I just lucked into the former by the skin of my teeth thanks to a girlfriend in the kids department.)
Magnus Mills came on to the market before I was a fiction buyer and by the time I was he had a couple of books out, had been shortlisted for the Booker and and garnered serious amounts of hype. Since none of my coleagues recommended him to me I, of course, ignored his works. After all, a thin literary novel called "The Restraint of Beasts" by someone with a name like Magnus Mills in the Booker shortlist? You know it's going to be tedious incomprehensible lit-wank. How wrong I was...
Last month I was checking out the fiction section of the Birmingham central library with a sinking heart. It's a depressing place, stuffed with decaying hardbacks and a splattering of the season before last's "hot" paperbacks. After half an hour I'd managed to find four things I thought I might possibly enjoy, one of which was Magnus Mills' "All Quiet on the Orient Express". What the hell, it's only short and I did have a soft spot for the cover when it came out. It was brilliant, so much so that on Monday I paid full price for a copy of "Beasts", which was also brilliant.
What really grabbed me about both books was the subject matter, essentially a pretty normal intelligent but reserved English guy finds himself, with no explanation or back story, in the middle of nowhere doing manual labour. Obviously Mills has lived this life and the characters he draws rang bell upon bell, not only from my time on the farm but also from the last year of temping.
The only problem I have with the novels is that they're so short! It doesn't help that Mills' style is deceptively simple and that his stories rock along with a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. At the end of both novels I wanted what I'd just read to be the first chapter that would lead to these incredibly realised worlds opening up into some sprawling epic, but of course that would ruin it. Of course that I'm left wanting more is a good sign. And I really want more...
[BBC Author Profile | Google search for Magnus Mills - lots of interviews and reviews]
When I was a bookseller I often had to explain to people that the Amazon website is basically the Books In Print database with a shop pasted over it, so finding a book on there doesn't mean it's necessarily available and if it is it's not necessarily going to turn up in a reasonable time. But on the positive side having the BiP database out there for everyone to use was interesting as suddenly the general readers became aware of the millions of books in the world rather than the usual 100,000 or so you find in a smallish bookstore. Amazon wasn't the competition - it actually did us a favour as customers would come in with printouts from the Amazon side complete with ISBN, etc for books that quite often were off the core-stock radar.
Now Amazon in the US are starting a new service where you can search inside certain books, which is something booksellers haven't been able to do before. And it would be utterly invaluable. An obvious and frequent use is finding which edition of 'Selected Poems' by A. Poet a certain poem crops up in - that was always a bugger to find. Once this service is up and running properly (only 120,000 books so far, which is a tiny smidgen of what it should be) and operating on the UK site I'd imagine many bookshops will be using the Amazon site on the shop floor. But not Waterstone's because they don't have web access.
Via Ben H
Just finished Stone Junction by Jim Dodge, a nice thick-ish book that was supposed to last a week's worth of bus journeys but it was too damn good. Highly recommended though I can't really do it justice in a paragraph. All I'll say is it's up there with the very few books I rate very highly (Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Underworld, New York Trilogy to name but three). The other nice thing about the book was how I came across it.
Permalink | Posted in Books on Tuesday, October 7 2003 | Comments (2) ?subject=[Weblog] 071003: Stone Junction" title="email me about this specific post">Email
On the stairs leading up to the attic where I'm typing this are small piles of children's books. Most are from the late 70's when my sister and I were kids with a few of Mum's from the 50's. It's odd seeing them there, like distant echos of history. Even odder reading some of them for the first time in over two decades. I've scanned in 23 of the more interesting covers, some you'll know, some are just odd, all have that look of an era.
Permalink | Posted in Books on Tuesday, July 29 2003 | Comments (14) ?subject=[Weblog] 290703: Old Kids Books" title="email me about this specific post">Email
Following on from the Boing Boing link, I figured I'd download Cory's book and see if I could read it on the PDA while I'm away. And he's got a Palm OS Reader file there ready for me! News to me, so I go a grab the reader and wonder if there's anything else out there for free (Palm sell ebooks but they're the same price as paper novels near as much, so no point. I'll pay a couple of dollars but not $7.99). Googling around I find Pluckerbooks who are converting public domain texts into this and other formats. Bingo! So, I'll be reading classics for a bit then!
[Update: The Pluckerbooks books don't work with the Palmreader for some reason, but they do work with Plucker which appears to also be an Avant-go type set-up. Currently downloading...]
To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I was certain that Fern, unlike my mother, had never hurled the Christmas tree off the deck. Furthermore, there was no doubt in my mind that she never craved a cigarette-butt-and-canned-smoked-oyster sandwich. In some part of my lower brain stem, I recognised these people for what they were: normal. I also recognised that I was more like a Finch and less like one of them. It was difficult to imagine handsome, preppy Daniel sitting in the TV room at the Finches', pointing at the dog and laughing because Poo was lying on the floor in a fit of giggles with his pants pulled down and the dog licking his erect penis. It was hard to imagine Daniel seeing this and then shrugging and turning back to the TV. Because he'd gotten used to it.
It's also a fascinating exercise in fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature. Oh, and we should mention, it's absolutely free and absolutely private, too. So go grab a book or two from your shelves now (they're not doing anyone any good there, are they?), register them here, jot down our URL and the BCID we'll give you inside the covers, and then give them away or leave them where someone will find them.Hmmm....
On the road - Iain Sinclair on his "parallelist performance in three-lane theatre" at the Barbican this Friday.
Ballard has never, before this event, visited the Barbican. In some senses - think of High-Rise - he can be said to have invented it. But he didn't need to see it, the tropical jungle under glass, the labyrinthine walkways, comfortable hermiticism. The Barbican exists to express a classically Ballardian paradox: being in the city but not of the city. With its postwar utopianism, climbing out of the ruins, it belongs to the era of Abercrombie and his County of London Plan, all those benevolent impositions, parkways, garden cities, orbital highways linking inner and outer boroughs.
So, this book by Prisoner FF 8282 comes into the shop which we put on display everywhere. And we sell one copy. One copy in the whole day. And it's discounted.
Oh YES!
