On me book, Alan

For me, the day of our Alex Fynn / Alan Smith signing of Arsenal - the Making of a Superclub began ominously.  I arrived at Hitchin train station to be greeted by the sight of half the town standing in the forecourt. Dismissing the notion that these people had been gripped by a spontaneous mass outburst of festive bonhomie and were comparing basting methods, my razor-sharp faculty of deductive reasoning reached the conclusion that yesterday evening's problems with unsteady Flange Capacitors in the King's Cross area had been granted an extension.  Sure enough, the station was full of no trains in both directions, which necessitated my walking back home and driving to Welwyn Garden City.

Once I arrived at The Bookshop, however, a more positive mood was discovered.  Inspired by the imminent appearance of their former stalwart Alan Smith, Arsenal had walloped in an unfeasibly large number of goals against the hapless Reading the previous evening; the books had arrived in timely fashion, (we believe in the old-fashioned virtue of having books at book signings) and the advance orders with special dedications were neatly arranged for the pre-signing signing session. Even the potential and dangerous distraction from our event which manifested itself in the form of a children's choir on the ground floor proved futile, especially when our science-fiction obsessed colleague walked past them several times in the highly realistic zombie costume he had acquired at his last convention.

Soon, a spirited crowd had formed itself into a more or less orderly queue outside the shop, (although things did get a little edgy when someone suggested that Arsenal should be playing with a roving midfield sweeper behind a sagging diamond formation) and I had to suppress the urge to walk past them chanting Tottenham Hotspur slogans, which, I can assure you, required considerable effort.  Messrs Fynn and Smith were friendliness and charm themselves, as they signed for and were photographed with a steady stream of delighted pilgrims from The Emirates.

Smith (left) and Fynn

The business of converting the shop into a signing-friendly zone and then reversing the process, while the Christmas buying frenzy raged around us was a stimulating challenge. We've gone beyond multi-tasking, and have developed numerous astral projections of ourselves which can: simultaneously attempt to look up books described as being 'Blue' or 'About something'; diplomatically urge parents to intervene in the process of their child eating the stock; replace books on tables and displays as they are (increasingly rapidly) snatched up and reassure persistent customers that we're not keeping 'the best books' behind the counter for specially favoured patrons.  Late entrants into festive popularity, by the way, include Alys, Always and (perhaps boosted by Marina Warner's broadcasts) Philip Pulman's Grimm retellings.

In the end, all went well, star guests and customers alike were satisfied, and it was with good cheer that my colleagues boarded the special yaks, thoughtfully chartered by the rail companies, to travel home.

Yoga for booksellers (with apologies to yoga)

I firmly and proudly belong to that section of the population which celebrates (in all senses) Christmas, and am irritated by those who seem to derive a perverse pleasure from sniping at this merry institution.

I recognise, however, that the season carries, like sinister baubles, its peculiar stresses and strains, not least for those of us in the business of handing Christmas over the counter to eager shoppers. I thought, therefore, that I would make the gift of sharing with you the unique, holistic system we have devised at The Bookshop in Welwyn Garden City, to ameliorate these pressures.  We have adapted certain classic yoga postures and blended them with key variants in order to combine and unite the manifold duties involved in modern book relocation with the physical and spiritual benefits of the ancient discipline.  A few examples are:  

Yogic name : Ardha Candrāsana (Half-Moon Pose)

The Bookshop name: Reaching For The Shutter Switch At Closing And Opening Times, Avoiding The Rather Large Number Of Books Thrust Manically Into The Window Space To Entice Customers Across The Threshold.  GREAT CARE must be taken when withdrawing from this posture to ensure: (a) the correct breathing and alignment are employed and (b) that you avoid treading on the nice Peter Rabbit gift set.

Yogic name: Balasana (Child's Pose)  

The Bookshop name: Dignified Apology To Customer For Failing To Have Latest Jamie Oliver On Shelf, While Humbly Reassuring Them It Can Be Ordered Rapidly.  Note the alternative name: Explanation To Manager For Omitting To Toggle F9 On Epos System Then Pressing Enter Three Times And Facing West While Selling Book Tokens (see previous blog posts).

Yogic Name: Spinal Twist 

The Bookshop name: Rapid Swivelling Of Head While Tidying Children's Section For The Fourth Time This Day To Maintain Vigilance Over Customers Waiting At Till, Looking Bewildered Or Muttering About Latest Jamie Oliver Not Being On Shelf.




Namaste.

In search of invisible books

Time, I think, to open another window in the advent calendar that is Christmas life in a modern independent book emporium.  I mean, of course,  The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City (it does what it says on the fascia).

We are, (need it be said?) on close personal terms with most of the titles in our shop, but to enquire about the few exceptions, we rely on our EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) system.  This, as any (retailing) fule kno, is a suite of linked computer programs that records and analyses the flow of stock in and out of shops. It cannot, of course, be relied upon unquestioningly, but is in most cases preferable to that combination of neglected stock cards, faulty memory and voodoo that pertained before the advent of affordable I.T.  

Every so often, possibly because it has downloaded 2001, a Space Odyssey during closing hours too many times and adopted HAL as a dubious role model, it likes to amuse itself by pretending that a book is in stock when the opposite is very much the case, sending booksellers hurtling vainly around the shelves while it sniggers electronically in a corner. The three titles that our Enumerating Phantoms on Shelves system has selected recently are a football book about Crystal Palace, Conference of the Birds (a Persian epic poem) and The Book Thief.  If, in fact, the stock discrepancy is due to eccentric shoplifting, we must alert the North Hertfordshire constabulary to be on the lookout for a Crystal Palace supporter with a taste for ancient literature who - probably due to a psychological quirk arising from childhood trauma - always betrays his or her activities by liberating an appropriate object.  I expect they're very erudite people on the Crystal Palace terraces, and can imagine  them using allusions to Plato's cave allegory to cast doubt on the referee's interpretation of his sense data, before hurling withering insults in rhyming Persian couplets at their visiting counterparts.  It's a funny old game.

The major event of the day was a very substantial stock delivery of Wordsworth Editions, an imprint that combines budget price points (from £1.99) with attractive, elegant designs, highly readable fonts and good quality paper; (and does not sponsor this blog).  We've been doing very steady trade with their adult and children's classics and poetry, but have now branched out into larger format hardback collections, non-fiction and supernatural classics, the last genre including many authors whose work prefigured the current supernatural literary crime wave.  The hapless colleague who was attempting to tell our Eccentric Piece of Software system about the arrival of these goodies was not assisted in her task by the rest of us wandering in every few minutes and snatching up the books which particularly took our eye, and cradling and cooing over them in a manner that wasn't in the slightest bit peculiar.  That any of the books made it to the shop floor was a minor miracle. How Wordsworth achieves this, I'm not sure.  Their website offers some explanation, but I think they've read some of their own more esoteric publications and have Employed Dark Forces, probably including a Satanic printing press staffed by doomed souls.


Lastly, it's good to see that the notion of supporting one's local book boutique (and other shops) is being given noticeably more frequent and more overt expression by our customers, who often engage us in detailed and interesting conversations about this phenomenon.  For many of our regulars, indeed, a 'reverse showcase' effect is in place, whereby they may come across a book on-line and then choose to buy it through physical means.  This wouldn't be the case, of course, if we didn't include excellent service, literary knowledge and (occasionally) the slapstick  entertainment of running around the shop chasing invisible books.

Time of the Signings

Christmas at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City has stopped taxiing and is now soaring majestically through the winter sky.  Customers' voices are noticeably more anxious; they fix us with their glittering eyes and 'There is a book....' quoth they.  As if the exquisite pressure of finding, selling and ordering books and rebuilding the children's section every half hour were not enough, we are hosting an event next week with the sports writer Alex Fynn and the Arsenal footballer turned pundit, Alan Smith, who will be signing copies of the former's book: Arsènal the Making of a Modern Superclub.  Note - the latter is not to be confused with Alan Smith, the Leeds footballer turned ex-Leeds footballer.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote (so it must be true) that 'No American is so old and poor and friendless that he cannot make a collection of some of the most exquisite little ironies in town'  and, (transposing this sentiment across the Atlantic and diminishing it in scale somewhat) it seems my ironic lot (as a Tottenham Hotspur supporter) to be involved with Arsenal book signings.  For those blog visitors less familiar with the tribal allegiances that pertain in the world of association football, I should point out that far from there being a feeling of chintzy neighbourliness between fans of the two North London clubs, they view each other with a kind of pathological, drooling bigotry that is beyond rational explanation, and almost never lend each other a cup of sugar. Some of us, however, are immune to this phenomenon, and are probably equally despised accordingly by many Spurs fans (no, it's alright - you're not getting confused, it's an affectionate diminutive for 'Tottenham Hotspur').

My last experience in this category involved a signing by another Arsenal footballer turned pundit, Ian Wright, over a lunchtime in a St Albans bookshop.  We knew, of course, being booksellers finely attuned to the cultural and emotional landscape of our community, that Hertfordshire was a veritable nest of Arsenal (and Tottenham) fans, but the sheer size and emotional intensity of the crowd who turned up were astonishing.  This was the only occasion on which I saw a queue for an event snake round the entire shop perimeter, go out of the door, round one side of the large shopping centre wherein we were located, and head down the hill a good way towards Harpenden, thus alarming citizens of that peaceable market town with fears of an invasion.  The demeanour of the people attending betrayed awe and excitement in equal parts, and one couple even brought their baby, so that it could be photographed being cradled by Mr. Wright. At this point, I swore I saw two angelic figures hovering over the Arsenal footballer turned pundit's head, with footballs where their haloes should have been (they had a deft touch and showed a good awareness of where the goal was).

Anyhow - if you're (a) local or (b) an Edinburgh-based Arsenal supporter with sufficient motivation, we'd be glad to see you next Tuesday, 18th December, from 12.30 - 1.30.

Internal promotion

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.

Dead good books

There was a recent outbreak of polite, mild excitement at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City,** when the Book Fairy delivered a number of titles from the '1001' and '501' range. In a burst of creative frenzy and lateral thinking, we put them all together on a display table.  Never, surely, was a retail envelope so ferociously pushed. In an inter-surge period, a colleague and I naturally gravitated towards, and began interrogating the volume entitled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. We began making a tally of, as it were, how close we had come to death, but abandoned the effort on the grounds of embarrassment, and then agreed how we hoped to find even less correspondence in 501 Most Notorious Crimes.

This led me to think about a sequel which might appropriately accommodate one's post-life needs, hence my working title 'A Small Handful of Books you Really ought to Read After You Die'.  If the vision of Heaven on which so many Christians were sustained through their formative years is accurate, then surely a copy of Cloud Atlas will be a necessary tool to navigate this realm, so that the trauma of parking one's harp in a reserved space could be avoided.  Assuming that another famous tome offers guidance on etiquette, and lists appropriate subject matter for small talk, then Conversations with God may well ease what could be an awkward introduction to the Supreme Being.  It might be imprudent to mention beetles, for example, the creation of which caused God to get notoriously carried away, and about which It is probably still embarrassed.  If, however, the Buddhists have got it right, you might wish to switch to The (Re)Bourne Identity or even Bringing up the Bodies.

I am resisting the temptation to buy this book as, beautifully-produced 'though it is, and despite the alternate frissons of vindication and outrage I would enjoy as I identified the inclusion and exclusion of pet authors, its girth would finally unsettle our domestic book-to-space ratio, and we would be obliged to move house, which would upset the cat no end.

More on our exciting stock range later.


**Never knowingly mistaken for a haberdashery.

Cold selling

Hertfordshire this morning lay besieged and helpless, like a county-shaped trembling animal, under the indomitable and relentless grip of winter.  Until it got sunny a bit later.  This meant a slow start to trade in The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, (whose annual 'guess what we sell' competition attracts many correct entries).  During this temporary lull in retail hostilities, I wandered over to the Poetry section and was admiring, if not drooling over slightly, its tightly-packed shelves and strict alphabetical organisation, when I was suddenly possessed by the spirit of John Keats.  This is an occupational hazard in bookshop work, which is why you should never spend too long in True Crime without having an exorcist on standby in the staff room.  In no time at all, I had extruded, like verbal ectoplasm, this version of a well-known sonnet.


When I have fears that books may cease to sell
Before, on Christmas Eve, we close the doors,
And that my till will toll its blithesome bell
No more, because the pestilential claws
Of on-line sales and e-books have embraced
The bookshop in a fatal grip at last;
Then I recall each customer who's graced,
With compliments, our service and held fast
To notions of supporting local trade
And browsing and conversing over books;
To viewing what has newly been displayed
And, as a pilgrim, threading through our nooks.


Should all else fail, and gloom persist, in spite,
I place a book on cats in plainer sight.

Be assured, gentle blogee, that shortly after I had resumed my quotidian identity, trade became brisk and merry, and do look out for this poem in the revised collected works.

Monster mash-up

Today, while herding back a few children's books which had been making a break for Mind, Body Spirit, (at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City), I noticed a cunningly-titled series; Vampirates.  See what they did there?  This naturally led me to wonder what other supernatural tribes could be thrust into a blender and mixed with various cultural elements, and what the results might be.

The leading contenders are:

Frankensteinway: a blood-curdling gothic tale of a deranged piano-manufacturer, who creates a monstrous instrument, comprising the crudely-joined parts of several dead pianos.  His monstrous progeny will only play pieces by Boris Carl Orff, Benjamin Bitten, Clawed Debussy, etc....

Shaman Andrews: the eerie adventures of a much-loved TV presenter with mystical powers, best known for hosting the series on reincarnation; Those Were Your Lives.

Zombieatitudes:  this mystical tome contains the eight sacred blessings of the Zombie race, held by many to be among the finest pieces of Undead scripture in their elegance and simplicity.  They include 'Blessed be they who they who hunger and thirst for brains: for they will be satisfied'.


This has to be a relatively short blog, as I head now to our Christmas meal, where we will, after a few tumblers of vintage Chianti, discuss the semiotic subtext of Thomas the Tank Engine.  We are such crazy guys.

Da da da da da da da da - Bagman!

A local author visited The Bookshop today, and asked us if his publisher's sales representative had advised us of the former's new book.  This encounter tipped over a fence in my past experiences enclosure and caused a stampede of memories - relating to when I carried out this role for various publishers - to trample over the plains of my consciousness, until they were rounded up by the lassos of (you're quite right, this metaphor has overstretched itself already, and needs urgent physiotherapy).

This strangely persistent species - (Venditionesque Repraesentativum Publica, as it's technically known in Google Latin) - continues to flourish, despite having in recent years come under increasing threat from a number of factors, including centralised buying, the closure of bookshops, diminishing sales budgets and a peculiar mutated virus whose sole target is large black pilot bags.  Still these brave crusaders for literature stride forward by car, train and on foot, undaunted by the thousand rebuffs that their profession is heir to, their eyes glowing with the quenchless  desire to sell that burns deep within their souls.  One of the most formidable types of sales rep. is The Freelance, who often works on a commission-only basis, representing a myriad small publishers and wielding almost as many black pilot bags. The distinguishing features of this creature include hideously lengthened arms and a basilisk-like stare from which, once it is met by a hapless bookseller, there is no escape.  Before the victim fully realises what is happening, they have sat down with the rep., gone through fifteen folders of badly-produced information sheets and ordered books on modelling historical figures with tapioca and epic poems on the history of snuff.

One of the fondest memories I have of sales repping is visiting thriving, intelligently-run independent bookshops, and (these being generally staffed by fewer people) meeting the challenge of performing one's duty on the shop floor.  At Newham Bookshop (hello Viv, hello Jon), I would often find myself balancing a sales folder in one hand, stroking one of the shop's cats that had decided to perch on my shoulder with another, and wishing I had a third to fill in my order form, all this while Viv served customers, answered the 'phone and arranged one of the phenomenally successful author events for which the shop is renowned.

Another experience that comes readily to mind is selling in a particular title from Zed Books on the Taliban, during one of the early modern Middle East conflagrations.  As this book was then the best intelligent short introduction to the subject, I was kept very busy with stock-checking and taking orders from many of the bookshops in my patch, and could often be found in a quiet corner of such an establishment saying, with great intensity - 'Hello, this is David - I have some urgent orders for The Taliban'.  I was never once even slightly arrested.

I could speak of hiding behind pillars in Foyle's, wearing deep camouflage and waiting to ambush elusive buyers, or the many happy hours spent turning my publishers' books face-out on shelves (although, need I add, never, at all, on any occasion whatsoever, concealing those from rival houses) - but I will save these and their ilk for another time.

A day in the death

Christmas, like an entity being beamed aboard the starship Enterprise, is shimmering into ever greater definition at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City.  When last we visited this jewel of literacy in the Home Counties, customers were occasionally brandishing lists; now these pieces of paper are near universal, with children's books, and enquiries about children's books, being the most popular subjects.  Luckily, we as a team are pretty darned clued-up on this subject and - if I had ever felt that the hours I've spent reading junior fiction were misplaced (which I haven't) - being flung back into the front line of Christmas book retailing would have reversed this opinion.  It's heartening to witness that, as our customers pursue their individual quests for the Christmas shopping completion grail, they remain - despite their arms being encumbered by several gaily-bedaubed carrier bags and their ears likewise by the Howard Centre's incessant pop music soundtrack - of good cheer in their dealings with us.

My first task each morning has to do with a serious overflow of crime in our neighbourhood.  A large influx of new titles meant that some copies of books which were multiply stocked had to be rested on a trolley until sufficient spaces appear to re-shelve them.  Thus, ironically, this person, who finds the genre eminently resistible (see this post), is obliged each day to scan carefully each single title on the criminal trolley** and correlate it with those on the shelves, replacing stock where able.  It's a peculiar way to start the day, as if with some dark, perverted catechism, as I look along the rows of titles and murmur: Death in the Morning, Death in the Evening, Death a bit Later, Deathly Death, Look at all the Dead People, etc.

My colleagues and I have devised a devious stratagem to hasten the acquisition of crime fiction by our customers; in a simplified version of subliminal advertising, we hold up a piece of paper with appropriate novelists' names written on it (in a seductive font) and then lower it again, really, really quickly.  It's working a treat.As an antidote to this ritual, I was today imagining a new genre - crime blanc - in which concerned citizens report apparent minor misdemeanours to honest, emotionally stable police officers and are reassured that, in each case, there was a perfectly simple explanation and that no infringements had actually occurred.  Mightily relieved, all the protagonists, gather after the working day and share excellent home-made cakes and a variety of delicious hot beverages.  Each book should start: 

'Down these well-maintained streets - admire in particular the imaginative use of tree varieties - a man or indeed woman must go. To do some shopping, probably. Or just potter about'.

**You're right - it doesn't squeal.

Do not go gentle into those good shelves

Herein are found further meandering remarks occasioned by the delightful experience of being a born-again bookseller in The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, (winner of the Doughty Tradespersons' Least Deceptively-Named Retail Outlet Award, 2011) (yes, there was a statuette).

The Shredded Wheat Factory; from Audrey  Bassingthorpe's Book:
Buildings of Welwyn Garden that are not  The Bookshop

There has been a certain amount of shuffling and creating of sections within our word emporium, with one of my intrepid colleagues causing to exist - by means of arcane ritual, esoteric incantations and - most importantly, a good, sturdy trolley - a Dark Romance department within Horror.  Unfortunately, because of a delay to the re-supply of our blank shelf labels (which has transcended epic proportions), we are unable to indicate this new area overtly, so we have drafted a new rota ensuring each of us in turn stands near the appropriate area looking pale and sensitive, with a faint aura of supernatural menace.  I dare not tell you how we're flagging up the new Erotica section.

Booksellers tend to have favourite sections within shops, (usually, but not always determined by personal interest) and the bond that subsequently develops is usually of a fiercely parental nature; a mixture of unconditional love, concern and jealousy whenever a threat to the size or position of the section is perceived, or - in pathological cases - whenever another bookseller attempts to shelve some stock in it, tidy it up or even approach within fifty yards of it.  An amusing consequence of this custodial relationship is the inappropriate championing of books to customers. When you hear a phrase such as:

'Yes, Sir or Madam, that 4-volume Oxford Latin Dictionary would be a perfect christening present...it's never too early....'

you know that someone has become a little too keen to boost the Language department takings.

Conversely and, so to speak, on the other hand, I have known booksellers who would tremble with apprehension when they were required to enter certain subject territories, the usual suspect here being 'Mind, Body, Spirit' or - as its known by its less spiritually-inclined detractors - the Miscellaneous Books Section.  This fear tended to be based on the difficulty of organising and therefore navigating the section (arranging it in ascending order of strangeness, for example, seldom works well) and of the subjects contained therein.  Often this led to the pitiful scenario of the bookseller who ran MBS being dragged out of their tea break by a whimpering colleague who would be told by the former, not for the first time, that 

'Astral Phenomena comes straight after Alien Encounters; it's obvious, for goodness' sake'.

My own spookiest experience in this category occurred many years ago when I telephoned an esoteric publisher to enquire for a customer about the availability of a certain title.  I was informed that the person who dealt with that particular series would be out of the office for some time.  There then followed an unconventionally long pause, which terminated in the revelation:

'He is a student of the Fourth Way'.

I confess, dear reader, that I was too discomfited to ascertain if and how these two statements were related.

Purr ardua ad astra

Trade was reasonably brisk at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden, today. That ancient bookshop manager's cry, which has for countless ages rung out across the shelves in hope and apprehension: 

'Any sign of Christmas?' 

was answered with at least partial affirmation: 

'Yes, I think I saw a bit of it at lunchtime.'

Moreover, somebody bought my favourite novel, (and the best ever written, according to page 47 of the Book of Stuff that Just Is) The Third Policeman; 'Is it about a bicycle?' yes, and everything else besides.

One of the titles that has found particular favour with our customers is A Street Cat Named Bob, which seems to belong to a trend of cat and dog-based animal biographies.  I'm not going to wax cynical about this - frankly, compared to other such waves of books I've seen roll onto the shore of popularity in my various book-selling incarnations, such as Magic Eye and Irish misery memoirs, it's quite refreshing.  This phenomenon also lies behind the several recent prolonged absences of our own domestic goddess, Sally the Cat, (pictured below, impersonating books) from her hearth and home.  We discovered recently - by fortunate happenstance - that she's been meeting literary agents along our alley attempting to persuade them that her past conceals untold hardship and deprivation, and that they really ought to sign her up for a three-book deal with a 15% royalty on rrp globally. This is of course a piece of childish whimsy on my part; no publisher would actually countenance such terms.

Which brings me by a leafy, picturesque but indirect route,  containing many suitable areas for picnics, to my list of favourite literary cats.

Poetically, these have to be the enigmatic and eerie Minnaloushe, in Yeats' poem The Cat and the Moon: 

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon...





and Jeoffry in Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

It's harder to select from novels, as the genre is benignly infested with them, and they seem to be a particular favourite for the anthropomorphically-inclined scribe, so I have nominated one each from the following categories:

Most compellingly unsettling:  the god-like primal entities Mogget and Kerrigor in The Old Kingdom trilogy, by Garth Nix, which are bound into the forms of a black and a white cat;

Most silly (but enjoyably so): the cats in Felidae, a crime novel in which the victims, perpetrators and investigators are all...well...cats, albeit of the rare variety that are capable of speech and inductive reasoning and handy (pawy?) with computers;

Most romantic: a long out of print novel by the gloriously-named Dolf Wyllarde, called: Felise. A Story About a Cat By a Cat For Cats to Read, in which episodes in the titular cat's life, and especially her amorous adventures, are mirrored in those of her human companion (they both enjoy what is I believe in popular parlance termed 'a bit of rough' at one point).

I hope that among the countless works I have omitted to mention are favourites of yours about which you will evangelise in response.

Paws for thought?

And would you like a bag, sir/madam ?

Today I completed my first new day as a born-again bookseller, in The Bookshop (does what it says on the fascia), Welwyn Garden City.  This is a modestly-sized establishment which is cleverly stocked (without ignoring each crop of bestsellers) with a range of mid and backlist titles, with all the books being discounted.  When I say that the first eight hours of facilitating the exchange of literature for various forms of legal currency exceeded my expectations, you have to understand that my expectations were so high as to be a slight nuisance to low-flying aircraft.  The pleasing quality of my working day is party explained by the staff, who - while outlining the necessary procedures and activities to me with admirable patience and calm in the face of my natural resistance to learning - displayed a level of customer service and attention that left the patrons almost visibly glowing with satisfaction.  This applied particularly to how they dealt with that thorniest of bookshop customer requests, suitable reading matter for younger children.  It's a far cry from shopping on-line.

Alongside this, however, was a rediscovery of the sheer joy produced by being around and working with books, such that even those tasks positioned in the less obviously glamorous section of the literary spectrum (polishing, tidying, shelving) are rendered interesting and satisfying.

Annoyingly, I forgot to notice the first book I actually put through the till, but I do remember assisting a customer to order The Screwtape Letters and having an interesting conversation  about the shorter novels of Thomas Hardy.

Christmas fever was well established, with shiny new children's books and a range of advent and standard calendars having just arrived, and I look forward to the increasing intensity of festive shopping, culminating in the Christmas Eve bacchanalia, where the last few desperate customers will exchange vicious blows for the right to buy Scroggin's History of Pipe-Laying, because they haven't yet got anything for Uncle Alfred.

If you are blessed enough to inhabit or work in Hertfordshire, or within physically bridgeable distance, come and browse and say hello. I'll be the one being gently slapped about the head by a colleague who is repeating 'Press F7; it's the one with an F and 7 on it; next to each other'. It will be for my own good.