Bookist

You know how sometimes you're talking about a cheese burger, or a slice of Stilton or a rice crispie square and you just suddenly have to have one?

Well, I picked up a copy of the Penguin edition of Orwell's Essays yesterday. (£13!! for a frickin' Penguin! When did they start using gold leaf in Penguin editions?!)

Bookshop Memories:

It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, 'Oh, but that's old!' and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the 'back parts' of the Lord.

Unless one goes in for 'rare' books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.)

I was sitting in the Cafe Nero ("best cappucino this side of Milan") and just about snorted my tea at this last.

Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.

Good thing he only lived to 1950.

And yes, like a big Gurl, I cried when the elephant died...again.

But I had just come from Choral Evensong at Chester Cathedral and was feeling morose anyway.