Blasts From The Past

I used to work as a bookseller years ago, while I was a student. And, like most booksellers I know, I dreamed of owning a second hand bookshop. Playing fantasy bookshop is, I suppose, a niche activity, which is why there isn't a Nintendo version available. Shame. Luckily, it's one game you can tip, if only slightly, into reality. While I might dream about my specialist shop, with its bow windows, creaky door and gently-tinkling bell, its framed photos of Virginia Woolf and HD, its marmalade cat and its chintz fireside chairs, the joy is that I can start to buy the stock, book-by-book, now. And if my lovely specialist poetry/twentieth-century-British-novelists bookshop fails to materialise, there will still be the books on my own bookshelves at home. Win-win situation.

There is something thrilling about a second-hand bookshop that new, glossy bookshops lack. Big chains are efficient, perfectly pleasant and usually have the book you want in stock, but lack the cosiness and quirk value of little shops. Tiny independents are fabulous - our local one does have a fire, and a chair, and a bookseller who will read stories to The Babe while I browse (heaven) - but they still have an order and a logic to them necessitated by ordering/marketing/best-sellers.

Second-hand bookshops are a glory of randomness. From the distinctive smell of warm paper as you open the door to the stained old chairs and booksellers (the only uniform is a knitted waistcoat or tank top), second-hand bookshops are the nearest thing to a time-machine that exists. Step across the threshold and prepare to be transported to any era you choose. Tat nestles happily with out-of-print wonders, and there is nothing more exciting than opening a musty book to find an enigmatic dedication written in copperplate on the inside cover, or following a trail of pencilled notes throughout the book - these are often stories in themselves, and a testament to the many lives of the book. Or, even more excitingly, as in a recent 1919 campus-novel find of mine, a ticket to an author event, with the inscription in the front of the book revealing that it's first owner was indeed the author himself. You don't get that with a kindle. Or indeed a new copy of the latest Martin Amis.

I live in a big city where second-hand bookshops abound. But the Pram Grandparents have just moved to rural Wales, away from the centre of civilisation. Yet, joy of joys, in the one-street of their new town is a brown cafe with a used books section above. Oh wonder! Upstairs seems to run the whole length of the street - a higgledy-piggledy, up-and-down-steps depository of thousands of books, in shelves that stack high beyond reach.

I have found ancient Tintin volumes for Little Boy, Greek primers from 1904 for First Born, and, ultimate pleasure, two corridors of old Penguin novels for moi, where I bought a whole run of Alice Thomas Ellis novels. The shop is bigger than the town itself, or so it seems, and I am able to leave The Babe and Little Boy happily playing with the Pram Grandparents while I set off to make my way through the maze of tottering books there for an hour or two.



The serendipitious nature of second-hand bookshops never fails to work like a kind of literary I-ching, so that whenever I'm in need of direction or solace in life, I manage to find the book that's been looking for me, virtually glowing on the shelf so that I can't miss it. Last week, feeling burdened with the cares of housewifery, a little book stumbled into my path - an unassuming, slim, plain-bound volume that could easily have gone unnoticed among the bigger, more colourful books at either side. And yet it didn't. It found its way into my hands, weighing no more than a prayer-book. And indeed, that's kind of what it is - a post-First World War book of poetry: The Verse Book Of A Homely Woman by Fay Inchlawn - a Persephone Book in-waiting if ever I've seen one! Ah, the smell of it!

With poems entitled "The Housewife", "On Washing Day" and "To An Old Teapot" it had just the mix of domesticity and transendence that this trammelled housewife needed - a sisterly pat-on-the-back and "chin up!" from across the century, held in the roughened hands of housewives down the years. Beat that Waterstones!