How To Buy A Book
Thursday, 27 December 2007. Literature.
Christmas is over, and we can at last return to normality. I was working the whole of Christmas week, which is a story for another time. However, in the week prior to this years commercial pagan festival I was out doing the Christmas shop, which means trailing round the fairly poor selections of shops in my home town looking for gifts.
We have no bookshop... I'll repeat this, (with capitals), because it is a fairly important point, We Have No Bookshop. W.H.Smiths, is not a bookshop. Unless you stock all published works by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, you are not a bookshop.
Whilst browsing through the shelves of W.H.Smiths I was also unable to find the complete Sherlock Holmes, Douglas Adam's Last Chance to See, or any books by Christopher Hitchens. (When I checked Waterstones in Guildford they had all of them- multiple copies too!) In W.H.Smiths however, I was able to find a huge amount of stationary, leaver-arch files, pencil cases, magazines, newspapers, drinks, ice creams (in December- why?), and a huge selection of overpriced computer games.
Here's the thing, computer games should be bought online or from a shop where the guy behind the counter is high on Benzedrine after all-night sessions playing Halo 3. Stationary comes from a shop where they have pens and pencils of every variety known to man, the place smells of poster paint, and the leaver-arch file dividers come in all colours of the full visible spectrum, including Octarine. Food and drink comes from supermarkets... I think you get the idea. A 'true' bookshop does not sell anything other than books.
W.H.Smiths can sell newspapers and magazines, I don't have issue with that it is after-all where their business started. However, as the founders of the Standard Book Numbering system, now known as the ISBN scheme, they should be a proper bookshop. What is a proper bookshop? It is a place that sucks you in, smells slightly of old leather, and has the TARDIS peculiarity of seeming bigger on the inside than it looked outside. As the aforementioned Terry Pratchett put it;
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. - Terry Pratchett | Guards! Guards!
Now maybe I am being harsh, and W.H.Smiths would like to stock more books, but have simply run out of space. If that's the case, I have a few suggestions... Get rid of the 'Spiritualist' section; ghosts do not exists, you don't need books about them. Mediums, palm reading, crystal healing, chakras and all of the Easten mystical bull shit are unproved, unscientific, and unbelievable to anyone who cares to think for a second. For more on this, I highly recommend the Richard Dawkins documentary, Enemies of Reason.
Hilarious books like, '101 Uses for Poo', and 'My Little Book of Knob Jokes' can be removed. You can also turf out all the baby name books- look, if you can't think up a sensible name for your child, you probably shouldn't be having one. On this subject, I should say that by 'sensible' baby names, I mean that if the moniker you are considering would have looked out of place as the name of one of the Pevensie children from the Narnia books, think again. Peter, Thomas, Lucy, Timothy ... good names... Grace, Brooke, Blade, Elijah ... not so good. Finally, (for obviously reasons), Biblical names like 'Adam' and 'Mark' are perfectly respectable, but best avoid Herod or Judas. Please feel free to name your faeces Allah, mostly because this will annoy the same nutters who got cross about the Teddy naming, but also if you study Islam, you will realise that it is a factually accurate name.
Where was I? Oh yes, W.H.Smiths. Turf out the rubbish, stationary, computer games, DVDs and music, and use the space you now have for stocking genuinely interesting and entertaining books. When you walk into a Waterstones, you know you are going to be coming out with something worth reading.
Finally, back in September last year, I wrote that I wouldn't be buying any more books, and would instead be using public Libraries. I tried that for a bit, by after I started getting a succession of books that smelled suspiciously, were sticky and/or slimy, and more than once contained several pubes of various lengths, I gave up and went back to buying them.
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