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.
I remember cutting my literary teeth on the early novels of Russell Hoban. I joyfully discovered his expert blend of realism, myth and humour, while having it confirmed that I prefer fiction which walks a few steps to one side of realistic representation (wearing its hat at a jaunty angle and whistling something in a tricky time signature). In The Lion Of Boaz Jachin And Jachin Boaz, for example, Hoban plays beautifully with the idea of a vision (the eponymous lion) which only certain characters can see, complicating the device by situating it ambiguously in the real and mental worlds, and imbuing it with a dangerous physicality. The novel also skilfully uses a setting of unspecified place and time, and one of the book's fascinations lies in the ways this world overlaps, or does not, with that with which we are familiar. Successfully realised in this way, this kind of anonymous, atemporal environment is at once satisfyingly credible and compellingly exotic.
I lost track of Hoban's adult work, but when I heard, late last year, that he had died, my curiosity was piqued by the news that two of his children's books were being posthumously published. One of these - Soonchild -was released this year, and is an astonishing, magical and potent blend of Hoban's words and Alexis Deacon's drawings. The book describes an archetypal quest, that of the brilliantly-named Sixteen-Face John, an Arctic shaman, whose wife is about to give birth. The child, however, will not emerge, because it cannot hear the World Songs that call children from the womb. John's search for the Songs entails meetings with a series of mythical and other creatures, some dangerous situations and the requirement to solve problems, and also involves him in the discovery of a vital but lost connection with his past, about which he is only dimly aware. Hoban sidesteps the dangers of banality, bathos and cliche with which this kind of story is beset, and produces a rich, compassionate, mystical and very funny fable. In fact Hoban's uncanny ability to deploy humour in this kind of narrative, without disrupting the tone or content of the more serious matter, is for me one of the things that mark him out as a writer of genius. As for the pictorial element - I have seldom seen a book in which the illustrations were not only of such stunning quality but were so well-integrated with the text. The design and production staff involved in this publication ought to be applauded, alongside its creators.
I've been inspired by Soonchild to repair the considerable gaps in my wall of Hoban, and hope you will speed to your nearest independent retailer to scoop up a dozen or so copies of this book to give at Christmas. Keep at least two for yourself; it's always good to have a spare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While reading this weekend what seemed like the fifty-fourth round-up of the year's best books (and discovering, sarcasm aside, some enticing unknown titles to pursue), I thought I'd present a few of my favourites, opting for a range of genres and styles.
I hope you agree.
LITERATURE
Sebastien Flyteworth
Hurrah for the tiny Abstruse Press. Their new parallel-text translation of Zolgy Floxen's medieval Hungarian Epic, 'The Not Inconsiderable nor Dissimilar Journeys of Napkirály' cuts like an ancient but still formidable scythe through the vapid floss of 'Christmas' publishing to remind us that the dark and mysterious sap of great literature still courses vigorously through the tree of human culture. To many modern readers this repeated description of the mighty sun god - as he drives his steed from East to West each day, again, and again - may seem lacking in those relatively novel and tawdry effects on which the modern palate has come to rely for literary stimulation: character, plot, style and so on. To anyone with even the faintest smattering of 12th-century Hungarian, however, the subtle, one might almost say microscopic variations across the two thousand pages, gamely realised by Abstruse's translator, are a delight in themselves. Lest ye doubt, I can bring no more formidable persuasive power to bear than by quoting this section from the nineteenth canto:
'For lo, full Westward he travelled
Neither was it true that Eastward lay his goal
(And that of his horse),
For the West it was that constituted his destination,
I fail to speak untruth in this regard.'
COOKERY
Tobi Smecel
Just at the point when our weary, disillusioned heads had slumped onto the gleaming worktops of our Colosseo Oro kitchens, and we despaired of ever again encountering a genuinely new and exciting culinary trend, this book came as our redeemer. The ear-lobes of a select few had been set twitching by vague rumours that Alessandro di Corta had developed an entirely new cooking system, but none of us were prepared for the full and devastating impact that the resulting book, 'Alliterativo', has had on the entire culinary world. Creating dishes using only ingredients that begin with the same letter is one of those ideas that, once expressed, seems so simple and obvious, but it often takes true genius to see the precious jewel gleaming in plain sight. Without this radical yet childlike approach, we would have been deprived of - for example, the sublime dish of Ricotta and Radish Risotto, nor would our palates have been transported to nirvana by his intoxicating range of Yam Yoghurts. Di Corta lays out his recipes with admirable clarity, and is always, even from his lonely pinnacle of gastronomic eminence, fully aware of the possible practical obstacles his less well-resourced readers may encounter. Hence his frequent suggestions for alternative ingredients, and his indispensable notes on sourcing (the latter especially useful for those ambitious enough to tackle his Zebra and Zucchini stir-fry). Buy and give this book abundantly - the results will be indescribable.
CHILDREN'S
Sandra Samson
Thank goodness we no longer have to apologise for young adult novels which recognise and face up to the less fluffy aspects of contemporary reality. We have moved on, at last, from when the merest mention of illness or accident would cause the Daily Mail nation to fling up their hands in collective despair and bemoan the passing of some mythical golden age, when readers of eighteen or under were fed a stream of bland, optimistic scenarios in which every character possessed two fiercely heterosexual parents (married, naturally) and in which swearing was unknown and suffering more so. Dixon Malachi's incredible new teen novella, 'The Blacker Blackness of Stephen McDonald' treads boldly into this hard-won territory of honesty and relevance. Without revealing too much of the extraordinary plot, suffice to say that the titular 'hero' (such concepts are interrogated to impotence by the sheer, persistent malevolence exhibited by the universe in this work) struggles against emotional and physical odds that would render most adults - let alone teenagers - helpless. His trials include include his parents apparently going missing, a sinister and possibly mystical entity that haunts his house and a burgeoning bisexuality which makes him an easy target for school bullies and damages his relationship with his girlfriend, Susan, who herself has profound gender identity issues. Winnie the Pooh this isn't, but as a compelling and necessary road map to the fraught mental landscape of today's youth, it cannot be bettered.
FICTION
Sara Frobisher de Beaufort-Smythe
I simply don't know what my dad would say about me choosing my sister Clara's delightful romp 'All's Mayfair in Love and War' as my book of the year. Not, mind you, that he has any time to say anything in between his author signings for his absolutely riveting memoir, 'The Accidental Ambassador' as recently reviewed in this paper by my third cousin. 'Mayfair' is simply stuffed with delightful and hilarious incidents and characters, as Fate leads the inhabitants of a particular mews on a merry dance of romance and adventure, but the book doesn't shy away from the more sombre aspects of life, such as the frightful complexity of property taxes on third homes. Do pop down to my nephew's bookshop and buy a copy.
