The Joy of Small Things: the second-hand bookshop
In my lifelong bid to own every George Orwell book — I don’t mean each title, I mean every actual book by or about George Orwell ever published — I found myself in Camilla’s in Eastbourne. Camilla’s is exactly the sort of quirky, independent second-hand bookshop that Orwell worked in and described in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and which is now slowly dying out. A combination of Amazon online and Oxfam on the high street, coupled with the ease of buying second-hand books from World of Books or Abebooks, has threatened the very existence of the dark, overstocked, cavernous second-hand bookshop. Why pay business rates when you can sell online to the world?
They’ve been burning books in Eastbourne. Not as the result of the rise of fascism (although if it’s going to happen, Eastbourne is the sort of place it will kick off), but because of a lone, twisted firestarter. This particular pyromaniac set the outdoor shelves of paperbacks ablaze during the lockdown, and soon the cheap editions of Agatha Christie, Len Deighton, and, ironically, Ray Bradbury were setting the Sussex night sky aglow.
The fire then entered the inside, and destroyed several rows of ancient works before the fire fighters did their thing. When I visited, the ceiling had been replaced but the charred wooden bookshelves remained, with some smoke-blackened books. A small mercy was that the pet parrot, who greets each customer with a cheery hello, was not in residence on the night of the fire.
It will take more than a mere conflagration to close Camilla’s I suspect. But many second-hand stores are closing their doors. Even the epicentre of second-hand book buying — Charing Cross Road — is a shadow of its former self, as the coffee bars take over. I fear for the next generation who will never know the joy of browsing a shelf of books, spotting a ‘find’, or some book with a special meaning known only to yourself.
When I started buying second-hand books in earnest in the 1980s, you could pick up signed first editions, decent copies of the Pan James Bonds, or beautiful books of poetry or novels bound in leather or cloth by Victorian publishers, for a few pounds. I have books signed by everyone from Randolph Churchill to John Betjeman, each purchased for less than a fiver. You can’t do that now. The internet has brought pretty much every second-book for sale to the same virtual marketplace, and the value of each book has been set. It is now virtually impossible to find a book for sale at a price cheaper than it is worth, which takes all the fun out of it.
For example, in 2018 a first edition of The Hobbit sold at auction for £6,000. The book, sans dustjacket, had been donated to the Oxfam in Chipping Norton in a box of unwanted tomes by an owner unaware of the value. But instead of this edition of The Hobbit being put on the shelf for a lucky punter, say me, to pick up for £2.99, it was filtered out by eagle-eyed store manager and sent straight to auction. I mean, I’m glad that Oxfam got the six grand to spend on malaria nets or goats, but imagine the thrill of discovering it on a shelf and taking it home. It’s the kind of moment second-hand book collectors live for.
The perfect bookshop should be a place of discovery, where you can be reunited with the books of your childhood, unearth an unknown book by a favourite author, complete a set by finding the missing edition from a trilogy or quartet, or come home with a book and find something lodged amongst the pages like a newspaper cutting, postcard or ancient receipt which no-one has read for one hundred years.
I bought a couple of volumes of poetry in the Charing Cross Road a few years ago with the name of the original owner inscribed ‘Harold Hoyle Leeds University’ and the dates 1909 and 1910. I took a few moments to research Mr Hoyle and find out he graduated from Leeds University, joined the army during the First World War, and died on the Somme. It was a short hop from there to find his living relatives and return his books to his family where they belonged. I suppose the internet has some uses.
That’s the joy of second-hand books. They connect the present to the past, the living to the dead. They represent snapshots of other lives, a small piece of someone’s soul floating through the universe from owner to owner. One day all of mine will be owned by others, on distant future shelves. This is before you even enter the world of the words within.
There should be a decent second-hand bookshop in every town — ranged over several floors, packed from floor to ceiling, dusty, frustrating, somewhat daunting. It shouldn’t be an easy, quick experience like buying a Big Mac. It should require commitment and effort, coupled with a sense of danger that you might die and be mummified under piles of books.
And the act of going to the counter should require courage, for fear of ridicule and rejection. Bernard Black, the irascible, antisocial, drunk bookseller in Channel 4’s Black Books is pitched perfectly. His shtick is not wanting to part with his stock, or else to sneer at your literary choices through a haze of burgundy and tobacco. The shop is modelled one near Marylebone station, which I visited once and it was so dreadful I doubt it is still in business. The location where they filmed Black Books is Collinge & Clark in Bloomsbury, which deals in fine editions and antique rarities, and is rather out of my price-range.
I left Camilla’s with two long-forgotten books about Orwell in the shocking pink Camilla’s bag *. Camilla herself sounded optimistic about the future, the parrot also. Surely the small joys of an idle hour in the depths of a second-hand bookshop will still be with us in 20- or 30-years’ time, long after the coffee shops have retreated? Let’s hope so.
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire.
* They were George Orwell by Laurence Brander, published by Longmans in 1954, and Orwell by Edward M. Thomas published by Oliver & Boyd in 1965 as part of a series on ‘writers and critics’.
