Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Read Free

working from home … While property prices in Wiltshire cannot compare with (say) London, this marvellous corner site in the High Street is an enormous overhead for any bookshop.’ Beach’s closed in 1999; Weatherhead’s (which had its own printed paper bag) in 1998; the Lilies—which was full of stray exhibits such as John Cowper Powys’s death-mask and ‘the clock that belonged to the people who put the engine in the boat that Shelley drowned in’—is no more. The bigger, and the more general, the more vulnerable, seems to have been the rule.
    Collecting has also been changed utterly by the Internet. It took me perhaps a dozen years to find a first edition of
Vile Bodies
for about £25. Today, thirty seconds with abebooks.com will turn up two dozen first editions of varied condition and price (the most expensive, with that rarest of Waugh dustwrappers, run from $15,000 to $28,000). When the great English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald died, I decided as homage to buy first editions (with dustwrappers) of her last four novels—the four that established her greatness. This all took less time that it would to find a parking space nowadays near the spot where Beach’s bookshop used to exist. And while I could go on about Romance and Serendipity of Discovery—and yes, there was romance—the old system was neither time- nor cost-effective.
    I became a bit less of a book-collector (or, perhaps, book-fetishist) after I published my first novel. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, I decided that since I was now producing my own first editions, I needed other people’s less. I even started to sell books, which once would have seemed inconceivable. Not that this has slowed my rate of acquisition: I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop. The current pressures on both are enormous. My last novel would have cost you £12.99 in a bookshop, about half that (plus postage) online, and a mere £4.79 as a Kindle download. The economics seem unanswerable. Yet, fortunately, economics have never entirely controlled either reading or book-buying. John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:
    For who, in that unthinkable future
    When I am dead, will read? The printed page
    Was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder …
     
    I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers—there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book—even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a ‘smell’ function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox-marks and nicotine). Books will have to earn their keep—and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no Luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father’s school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, ninety years after he first won them. I’d rather read Goldsmith’s poems in this form than online.
    The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: