Speccie Bookish by 21st August
 

Welll really we ought to be able to do this. Though I don't think I have anything in the locker, as it were, and will have to write it from scratch, as it were.

No. 2812 BOOKISH

You are invited to submit a poem celebrating bookshops (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 21 August.

That's almost a direct dare...

Between Dryden and Duffy

That’s where I look in every one of them -
Ottakar’s, Hammick’s, Hatchard’s, Waterstone’s.
Finding my books displayed in none of them
Do I descend to star-defeated moans?
Not I! With an assumed shortsighted stoop on,
I check the coast is clear to right and left.
Then, with a Waitrose bag held slightly open
As if in readiness for petty theft,
I make my hand into a living axe
Which parts the volumes at a single stroke.
Then, with my fingers, I enlarge the cracks
And slip one in, like an unscripted joke.
Booksellers do not view this with delight;
It wrecks their paperwork. And serves them right.

I always liked that one, Ann. A winner.

Now here, absolutely new...


Bookshops

In Whitstable there is a shop.
I pass it every week,
Yet do not pass. I pause. I stop.
And some humungous lollipop,
Candyfloss cloud or acid drop,
At just a pound or two a pop,
Is never far to seek.

Second-hand books – bizarre bazaar
Of well remembered names!
I riffle through your repertoire,
My marzipan, montelimar,
Vast, everlasting chocolate bar:
Robert Graves, Idries Shah,
Ruth Rendell, P.D. James,

P.G. Wodehouse, J.L. Carr
And all the long etcetera ...

Ah, yes, J L Carr ... but that was York, not Whitstable. Forgive an old woman her treasured memories...

Good ones, Ann & John.

Speaking of theft (as Ann was), here's me own stab at the thing. (Yes, there are a couple of off rhymes, but something may come to me.)

An Oxford student, hungry as a horse,
I needed ways to supplement my grant.
The bookshop in the Broad became a source
Of more than intellectual nourishment.

I’d loiter there, just browsing, and pull down
The most expensive book that I could see,
Then, tucking it beneath my scholar’s gown
I’d leave the building, whistling casually.

Outside, I’d nip across the street as planned,
And sell it for a quarter of its price
To what’s-his-name, who bought books second-hand,
And have a more substantial meal than rice.

But fifty years have passed; I’m not surprised
To learn the book emporium has gone,
For now that everything's computerized,
It’s hard to steal a book from Amazon.

Well, it's a start while they're having tea at Chester-Le-Street.

Mourn those bookshops, second-hand,
Closing down across the land
As the pull of paper dwindles
Since the birth of things like Kindles.

Mourn each one that disappears
Fragrant with the print of years,
Wood engravings, wormage, wrappers,
Milnes and Mortons, Sakis, Sappers.

Mourn, too, works the world ignores,
Creaking yarns by crashing bores,
Sermons, studies of Siddhartha,
Cranky theories re King Arthur.

Mourn old markers found inside
Bloated volumes bound in hide,
Shelves that beg the browser ‘Try one!’ –
Some day, I must really buy one.

Bookstore Poem

I walked into a bookstore
and I found a big, thick book,
and after I had given it
a thorough, thoughtful look

I told the clerk, "I'll take it,"
but I heard the poor man groan
when I told him, "I won't need a bag,
just put it in my phone."

Nice ones, Jerome & Roger.

Jerome, in line 9 you need "Authors' names".

Thanks, Brian.

Re yours, trying to remember where the shop you (or the N)
sold them was. Seem to recall a couple not there now, one speciaiising in second-hand textbooks.

I can't remember the name, Jerome, but it was the other side of Broad Street from Blackwells, going towards Cornmarket. Actually, for all I know, it may still be there - my saying otherwise was just a bit of poetic licence.

P.S. I've since done a bit of searching. It was Thornton's, and closed in 2002, although they continue to sell books ... on the Internet!

Ah, thanks for pandering to this inveterate loose-endist, Brian. Shops seem to be things that pass in the night these days. I think I remember Thornton's and its used coursebooks. Can't recall if it was there or another bookshop in the Broad, now gone, that had a very low doorway over stairs down to the basement with a sign reading Mind your (egg) head

Yes there was. I can't remember its name either but I remember the notice.

Zugzwang...

I'm struggling with this one, probably because - much as I love books - I never liked bookshops. From the Arts graduates in Waterstones who would sooner continue talking about 'Toby's, like, fantastic Barcelona stag weekend' than actually serve customers, to the cravat wearing Charing Cross Road huckster who charged me £50 for an English / Albanian dictionary, my experience has not been happy. Hooray for the internet, even amazon, say I.

If that's the Gower St Waterstones that used to be Dillons then it's a case of plus ça change...

Second hand bookshops are the ones. The one in Whitstable I've already mentioned. There's another in Faversham presided over by a man with a splendid beard. I got De la Mare's 'Peacock Pie' there, the one with the illustrations by Heath Robinson. Didn't cost much, either. Amazon's all very well, but you have to know what you want and I never do. One thing I really liked about New York was that big bookshop with the second hand bit. London used to have lots in the Charing Cross Road but I don't live there any more and I don't know how many are left.

I came across second hand books in Amsterdam in one of those flea markets.

There are still some browsable ones in Devon, John, though fewer than not many years ago. In one, in a non-tourist town, you have to literally climb over heaps of books in a huge steel shed in a back garden to get at some of the shelves. (Those in the main shop are more accessible.) However, all on the computer and a touch pricey.

Found one still going in Dartmouth the other week with the proprietor listening to the Ashes on a small radio. Interesting verse section which had J.B. Morton's 'The Dancing Cabman'.

Ah! That masterpiece. I have it in a selection of the divine Morton I picked up.... in Faversham.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I've actually done that. It's better than nothing.

Oh, so have I. There are several in circulation, signed and inscribed "see page 25" which is where the poem appears in the volume of that title. That's where John knows it from... (doubful grammar, that, but what the hey!)

Not cost-effective but good fun.

One of the most exciting instances was in Borders on Charing Cross Road. The poetry shelf was high up and I was searching for one of those rolling stepper-uppers so I could reach to do the deed. A beautiful young assistant came over and asked, not what I was up to but whether he could help. So I handed him the book and said I was trying to put it "up there, between..." and he parked it perfectly.

Borders, alas, is there no more. I am trying to write an elegy for it.

You know, I could swear I've read that before somewhere...:)

Added in, wrongfootedly:

ZUGZWANG 2

That's the second time in this very thread that a post has disappeared - just bloody vanished - making nonsense of my subsequent post so that I am forced to take action.

How does this happen?

Not even the decency to replace it with a Nevermind or to remove mine as well so I don't look like a pr@.

Gorn, I tell you. Gorn - and never called me "mother"...

I peruse pages, person frozen,
Somnol-int-ent on my feet,
Solemn also; apt to not note
Chance known faces who may greet,
In the bookshop - den of treasure!
Badger-like, I settle there,
Passing unknown time in browsing -
Mundane world? I’m unaware,
Drifting through fantastic landscapes,
In converse with types outré !
Thrilling risks and skinned-teeth escapes
So displace the everyday.
Tomes, too, factual and varied
Keep me rapt as text informs.
Here I stand, a Donnish island -
Book-thralled, beyond social norms.