I love serendipity. I happened upon The Bookseller’s Tale by chance. At first the title did not elicit great interest, even though I fancied myself a bookstore junkie. The first chapter, Comfort Books, drew me into its seductive orbit. By the time I finished reading all thirteen chapters, and I took my time enjoying the prose as well as marvel at all the gossipy details and informative anecdotes, I was fully and happily enthralled by the book. This is a book that I will keep around in my box of already read books to consult occasionally renew the feelings of adventure and history.
Martin Latham is an actual bookseller, he manages Waterstone’s
Canterbury store. He writes as someone
who has the solid and unique knowledge of his trade, while also having the
curiosity to assiduously dig deeply into the history of books, book selling,
libraries, book sellers, the famous and infamous bookstores, book collections,
book collectors, and everything that is peripherally related to books. Indeed,
this could be a bookselling encyclopedia, except that the prose is much too
good to be a sterile accounting of books and bookselling.
The salient chapters — at least to me — are the ones
covering both ends of the spectrum of book ownership and the book trade.
Starting with small: the book peddlers in history, the bouquinistes from
the left bank of Paris, and the numerous stores from around the world. While ranging
to the very large: the massive libraries, unimaginably diverse book collections,
and the imaginative and resourceful people who built these collections book by
book. Ultimately, it is the stories from each of the subjects that nourished my
imagination and curiosity. We humans are, after all, suckers for a great story,
and Latham has a backlog of great book stories that fits into each of the subjects
of his chapters.
A chapter that I did not expect to draw my intense interest
is the chapter on medieval marginalia. The stories of the marginalia of ancient
books and the scholars who study marginalia to gauge reader’s feelings and
thought as they read the material was surprisingly inspirational. It also
selfishly assuaged my own guilt at making margin notes in my own books. I am
not Pierre Fermat by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope that my notes
may someday inspire others. Or not. Either way, I feel much better about my own
scribblings in my books.
Even though books are a ubiquitous part of my life, I have never
stopped to question how books came into being, how the book trade became what
it is. Latham gave me a history that
elicited forehead pounding moments followed by my own excited: “So THAT is how
that happened.” The things that I learned from just reading one book about
books and booksellers is astounding.
I have, however, thought about independent booksellers
around the world, their lot in society and the ebb and flow of their fortunes.
I had assumed that there would always be used book stalls because there had
always been used book stalls. It is a part of my DNA as my father was an inveterate
used book peruser and buyer. He would bring me, when I was knee high to a bug, with
him to rummage through the book stalls surrounding the universities and market
stalls in Taipei searching for books, all kinds of books. These were my first happy
memories of time spent with my father, so I have a very romantic notion of used
books, tiny used book stalls, the smells of the pages permeating the air in
those stalls, and everything goes along with the used book browsing experience.
Latham nicely and comfortably recreated that experience on paper for me; he
took me to places around the world that I had never been and placed me into an
unknown happy place, firmly ensconced in a place that I had never been before.
It is amazing what abundant memories, a vivid imagination, a well-honed
curiosity, and reading well crafted
writing can take one on a sensory experience that seems so real.
When the large online purveyors of books started to dominate
the book selling market, even though I was one of the first to dip my toes into
the eCommerce bookseller’s sites, I became alarmed by the prospects of buying all
my books from the nameless and faceless websites because I live in a city that
does not have a large independent bookstore presence. The alarm became pangs of
pain when I read of the failures of many of the brick-and-mortar independents;
thankfully those pangs have become cautious optimism as I learned of the
revival of the brick-and-mortar independents and I learned about people like
James Daunt, who Latham refers to, who had stepped in as the CEO of Barnes and
Nobles to hopefully revive the fortunes of one of my beloved independents: The
Tattered Cover in Denver.
Which brings me to the last and probably my favorite chapter.
It is aptly titled Bookshops. This is where Latham write his own
narrative, how his fate and happenstance brought him to this point in his life
and career, as well as the wisdom and lessons that he had accrued throughout
his life as a bookseller. It was a scintillating read, and it made me
optimistic about the independent bookstores, actually about all brick-and-mortar
bookstores in general, as long as there are people like Latham who are
operating these bookstores.
I had learned that there are two other books that delve into
book selling and the bookseller calling. Since I read Latham’s book first, the
other two books will need to be exceptional in order to meet the standards set
by The Bookseller’s Tale.
This book made me very happy.
