Discount Guilt

We had a visit last week from an old friend, an American married to an even older friend from our student days.  Jim is an interesting guy with a complicated story.   He has gone from abandonment at age 8 in Alabama, through foster care, drifting and working on the railroads of the South West, to the salvation of Higher Education and -- 40 years later -- is now a professor of anthropology and linguistics within the State University of New York.

As you do, when the conversational flow ebbs,  I got out some toys.  One of these was my Kindle.  I had noticed the preposterous bulk and weight of Jim's baggage (not clothes; being an academic travelling between conferences, he was lugging several hundredweight of books and papers) and I was amazed to discover he had never considered using an e-book reader.

I was even more amazed to discover he didn't really use Amazon.  He was eloquent about his desire to support his local independent bookshop.  I felt a familiar rush of guilt:  by buying so many books from Amazon was I, unthinkingly, driving small bookshops out of business?

Then I read this week's NB column in the TLS, in which the closing of the Village Voice bookshop in Paris was remarked.  I knew all about the legend of Shakespeare & Co., where impecunious expat writers in Paris could bed down under the shelves at night, but didn't know there was a Village Voice in Paris.  Well, soon there won't be.  The column concludes, "There are plenty of book-buyers ... with a love of independent bookshops and discounted mail-order books on their consciences".

Argh, more e-guilt!

But then I thought, hold on, when have I ever lived near, or enjoyed the services of, one of these legendary independent bookshops that I seem to have been driving out of business? A place where the owner, like the owner of the Paris Village Voice, "knew her customers' tastes and was able to point out books they would want to know about"?  I think I'd have noticed that, surely?

No, never.  I have spent many thousands of pounds in bookshops large and small, independent and chain, specialist and generalist, in a number of towns, small, large and global, and have never, ever, not once been guided to a book I hadn't asked for, or exchanged anything other than transactional words with the owner (or, more usually, the till operator).  Perhaps, despite repeated visits and multiple purchases in the same shops over many years, I looked more like a sociopath or shoplifter than a valued customer.   Above all, with the notable exception of a very few specialist shops like Zwemmer's late-lamented Art and Photography bookshops on Charing Cross Road, I have hardly ever entered a bookshop selling new stock and thought:  "Such riches! I had no idea! Can I afford this?"  Second-hand shops, of course, are a different story.

So, enough with the guilt!

Small, independent bookshops had already started to disappear in the UK in the 1980s, when small business rates and rents became prohibitive, and had all but gone from most towns before 2000 -- long before Amazon began to dominate the scene.  They went out of business because there wasn't enough money to be made from selling books.  The profit margins are too small, the turnover is too low: the genius of Amazon is to turn a loss-making hobby into a thriving business.

I know, I know, minimally-waged slaves toil in the Amazon book-mines, starved of daylight and bruised from falling hardback cookery books and bleeding from multiple paper-cuts inflicted by folding cardboard mailers.  But, ditto Tesco and every other profitable business in the land.  This is what trades unions are for, isn't it?  And how much was that till-operator being paid by the sainted independent bookshop owner?

I'm inclined to think that not buying books online is now less principled resistance than nostalgia.  Booksellers seem to me less important to support, these days,  than the small publishers and galleries who take the risk of producing books by unprofitable unknown artists and writers in the first place.  If I want to feel virtuous I like to buy direct from their websites: for example, I've just ordered a copy of Garry Fabian Miller's Home Dartmoor from the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, and a copy of In the Fields of Gold by Miquel Llonch from the publisher Poursuite in France.

But, if anyone knows a bookshop within 25 miles of Southampton owned by someone who could have pointed me at those two titles, I'd be very glad to hear about it.  I do know a bookshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which can, however that one is approximately 4900 miles away.

It's called Photo-Eye, and luckily it runs an excellent and informative "current awareness" service and mail-order website.  Out the back, there's quite a nice gallery of photographic work, too.  The staff don't care how weird you look (I often drop by in my pajamas*) and they never close.




* I keep meaning to post about this:  do you, too, keep seeing people, usually women, on the street in nightwear and slippers?  When did this start happening?  It's as if they have decided to live out in real life those unsettling dreams of, um, being on the street in  nightwear and slippers.