Lynne Patrick
I’m not safe to be let loose in a bookshop. If you ever see me there, confiscate my Visa card immediately, before I spend next month’s supermarket bill. Or do something dreadful.
Like last week. It’s confession time. One day last week I came out of a bookshop hefting a bag which contained ten books – but I only paid a quarter of the cover price. It was that bane of small bookstores’ lives, the remainder shop. Not only that: they were having a sale. Paperbacks were crammed too tight on the shelves, stacked on the floor, piled by the cash register, and they weren’t even the usual remainder shop fare of out-of-date cookery books and biographies of minor celebs. Fiction was in the majority, crime fiction accounted for well over half, and we’re going on holiday in a little over a week. Well, what’s a girl to do? Reader, I bought them.
But not without a certain sense of guilt. Actually a very strong sense. Having lived in that world for seven years, not only do I know what a publisher pays out to turn a pile of manuscript into a glossy-covered paperback, so I bought those books for only pence more than it cost to produce them; I also know the real bookshop a few streets away was losing sales, and the authors made peanuts, if anything at all. I’m really, really sorry about that; I’ve been on the authors’ side of the fence as well, and the last thing I want is to make little of the effort and energy that go into writing a novel. I think it was the lovely Keith Waterhouse who said writing a book is akin to digging a small quarry with a teaspoon.
But... Yes, here come the excuses, I’m afraid, though I don’t expect you to be any more approving of my behaviour.
1. A market stall in my local town also sells cut-price books and I don’t have any problem giving it a wide berth; the books have flimsy covers and no prelim pages, and are poorly printed on low-quality paper. Go figure. But the books I bought were not pirate editions; they were the real thing, with covers, information pages and the whole nine yards absolutely intact, the production values comparable with anything on my shelves. So I wasn’t contributing to a major rip-off business.
2. What had clearly happened on this occasion was that a publisher or six had decided to offload some of the stock that had lingered in the back of the warehouse for years. (Though why they can’t offer genuine bookshops a good deal on them is a mystery to me.) I found eight- and nine-year-old titles by a couple of my favourite authors for which I’d previously trawled new and secondhand bookshops in vain. (Yeah, OK, I know Amazon can usually deliver those particular goods, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool bookshop person with an acute and ongoing allergy to putting my Visa details online.) At some point in the past I must have added my grumble to the many, about the difficulty I’ve had getting hold of early titles by authors who have been around for years but whose work I’ve only just discovered. This was treasure.
I know I’ve been a bad person, and I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I’m truly sorry. I promise I’ll try not to fall into temptation again. Well, not for a long time. And I also promise I’ll only buy cut-price books by authors who have made the big time and aren’t trying to scrape a living without resorting to punching a supermarket till.
