The usual euphoria induced by working at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, was made more intense recently by the news that one of our co-proprietors had been interviewed on BBC Three Counties Radio. If you visit this link, and slide the timer to 34:50, you can listen to this exchange, which was inspired by the sad news that Waterstone's has closed its branches in Stevenage and Watford. Alternatively, you can listen to all the preceding pieces and become acquainted with the yodelling puppy of Baldock and Amersham's largest rawlplug. I'm not entirely clear about these things, but I understand that if you don't visit the link within 72 hours, it will have turned into a digital pumpkin, or have exploded. In any case, our man offered some interesting insights into the challenges of running a modern bookstore and into the trade in general.
Things became even more giddy when it emerged that - because we had sold nearly all our advent calendars, and the non-advent calendars could be moved into the space thus created, and that the requisite special shelf label-holders had been reclaimed from the warehouse, (where they had been languishing in a box clearly marked 'Tinsel') - our beloved manager was introducing a 'staff recommends' display. She Who Is Spontaneously Obeyed sat us down in the Staff Training corner and slowly and patiently explained that we could choose our two bestest books and write ever so much nice things about them on special labels. A period of brief cogitation produced the selections, the descriptions of which had then to be expressed in about five lines of text; a demanding exercise which must have been performed hundreds of thousands of times in bookshops and which might provide the contents for one of those quirky anthologies that emerge only at Christmas, and cause department allocation anxieties to already overwrought booksellers. My brace of titles is Donne's Selected Poems and Philip Reeve's wonderful Mortal Engines, and I was delighted to see a colleague had selected the excellent The Night Circus.
I became something of a veteran of these efforts during my first eight years in bookselling, and have often been amused to see the minor disputes that arise. I have seen beleaguered managers calmly but firmly explain that the resident shop revolutionary couldn't choose 'Easy bomb construction Illustrated', or be obliged to devise a spreadsheet of NASA-boggling complexity to ensure that the books' sales could be fairly compared, taking into account the average number of copies held, the position in display (rotated according to another spreadsheet), the average national popularity of the genre, the current astrological alignment and the prevailing wind direction. Surreptitious re-positioning of books - sometimes without opening hours - was also not entirely unknown.
In the Spaghetti Junction of modern publishing, helpful road-signs are one of the things a good bookshop can provide, and booksellers' choices are an interesting way to do this. Do come and view the full range - trains from London run regularly, and you will get to see the Shredded Wheat factory, which only heroic restraint has prevented me from mentioning much more often.
It was with some excitement that your blogger learned that next spring will see the release of JRR Tolkien's epic poem on the Fall of King Arthur. As any fule kno, said fall was somewhat more significant than sliding off a bucking palfrey, and has, along with the rest of the legend, occupied artists in all media since the middle ages, from epic poems through to one of Rick Wakeman's concept albums, the main theme from which still resounds through my mind (you know, the bit that goes da da da, da da da, da daaaa). Wakeman's work draws on, among other things, what is for many people the most familiar modern prose interpretation, T.H. White's Once and Future King, the first book of which was adapted by Disney into The Sword in the Stone and the entirety of which (and it must not be held culpable for this) spawned the musical Camelot (I refuse, with quiet dignity, to post a link to the last phenomenon). This is not to mention (although clearly I'm about to) the whole sub-genre of non-fictional, esoteric and spiritual writing that deals with the Matter of Britain, and especially the literal and symbolic significance of the grail.
I'm in awe of how the Arthurian legend has proved versatile and malleable enough to not only be represented in a number of forms and genres, but also to be clothed in particular perspectives and agendas, be they feminist (Marion Zimmer Bradley) moral and patriotic (Mr. White) or just very, very silly (for me the most satisfying and coherent Monty Python film). Of course, the deep, fundamental themes of spiritual quest, sacrifice, love and betrayal have assisted this versatility, but there seems to be a deep appeal beyond any easily categorisable aspect. Two of my favourites are the relatively unsung trilogy by Gillian Bradshaw: Hawk of May, Kingdom of Summer and In Winter's Shadow, and - in the young adult camp - Philip Reeve's recent tour de force of a novel depicting Merlin as a proto spin doctor, Here Lies Arthur. I was for many years besotted with the T.H. White books, but now find the learned, avuncular tone somewhat grating, although I think the animal and bird transformation passages will prove timeless.
Tolkien opted for a robust, alliterative non-rhyming verse form, and segments can be read in an excellent Guardian piece. I hope it does well, and it will be interesting to compare it to Simon Armitage's similar approach. The real question is, will Peter Jackson get the film gig? I can see Andy Serkis as Mordred, and am scared already.
