Where have all the bookshops gone? Into coffee shops, every one

Midsummer Madness

Every once a while, it is worth pausing for a moment, taking a look around, and reflecting on what you see. This, I am told, is good for the soul. At least, better than a night out at an Aberdeen steak house. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of technology and the European Union, we are all very busy these days. Pausing is no longer de rigueur. Looking is infra dig. And reflecting is as obsolete as the smallhold farm.

Nevertheless, to save you the time, I have made a short assessment of the state of play:

It has been rained off.

Still, don your cagoules, fill up your thermos flasks, and brave the climate. I want to take you on a journey.

Oxford Blues

It begins in a small city in the centre of a small island somewhere off the north coast of the European mainland. Built around its ancient university, Oxford, England has recently become the perfect microcosm of the troubles of the Western world. True, much of our world is not built around elite institutes of ancient learning, and it rains less in some places. But that is not my fault.

Now, Oxford, England is a learned city: a tradition dating back to the twelfth century when Robin Hood never visited. You might have been to Oxford, England and admired its scholastic qualities, its architecture and its intellectual ambience. Noted perhaps how the streets around the various university colleges feed off the educative endeavours of the colleges: filled with tea rooms, medieval-looking pubs and dusty old bookshops.

Perhaps.

On the other hand, you may have been to Oxford and missed all this. You may have come expecting to find a place of erudition and instead stood outside its McDonald’s, wondering which college that could be. Or maybe you sat in one of what seem to be a hundred American coffee bars and were reminded of home, wherever in the world that might be. Perhaps you bought a polo shirt in Gap or updated your mobile phone in one of its wide variety of traditional cellular communications stores. The choices were unlimited, you might have thought, musing on the semantics of latté ingredients like a misplaced Saussure.

This week I was in Oxford, England. Partly for the reason of book-shopping but also because I live there. I visited a favourite bookshop. It is low-beamed, and full to the gunwales of dusty books, every nook and cranny crammed with paperbacks, hardbacks, pamphlets and literary arcana. Just as if in a movie, it is called The Little Bookshop. The seller is a man prone to playing Ginsberg readings or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Brian Eno in the store. The average paperback is about £1.50 or £2.00 – roughly half the price of a latté with marshmallows. He gives discounts if he approves of the books you are buying, and even handed me two anthologies the other day, gratis.

But he then broke my heart (in the film of this story the seller is played by Hugh Grant, for a fee of $7 million). The store is set to close. The same fate awaits another beautiful and famous bookseller in town, ending a tradition of over three hundred years. I bought my books and left the shop like one that hath been stunned and is of sense forlorn. Sadder and wiser.

The rents were too high, is what he said, and increasing every month. Too high for a bookshop, affordable only for bigger and more popular stores. And the books aren’t selling. “No-one wants to read anymore,” he said. “The punters I do get complain about the price.”

As I walked disconsolately through the streets of this city of learning I was reminded of an old Goon Show sketch in which Eccles, a simpleton played by his creator Spike Milligan, is conversing with a man of good education. “I see you’re wearing a Cambridge tie,” the man says to Eccles in astonishment. “Yep,” says Eccles. “What were you doing at Cambridge?” the man asks. “I was buying a tie,” Eccles replies.

I decided to hunt down the architects of this small act of cultural genocide. This is what I found.

The Film Maker

“Books? Come off it!” he said. “Why read a book when you can sit back with some popcorn and watch a 90-minute film with some celebrity skin?”

Fortunately I had found a man ready to provide me with all the stereotypical clichés I could swallow.

“Books are dead,” the famous writer-director went on. “People want to be entertained. And fast.”

His name was Chris Hudson, liberal champion and maker of the most financially successful British movie in history, Clotting Hill, in which an “archetypal” foppish “Brit-twit” runs a dusty low-shelved book store, and laments his poverty before going home to a house which, outside of the movie, values at £1.5million.

“It’s the movies,” he says, getting the medium right at least, “it’s supposed to be about escapism.”

“Really?” I asked, “Is that why there are no McDonalds and Starbucks in your cinematic Clotting Hill, when in the real one there are no dusty low-shelved bookshops?”

“That’s right,” he said, unapologetically. “I made a mint from that film. My house trebled in value and was bought by an American. Clotting Hill is all the rage. Make of the reality what you will.”

And he left. His specific brand of liberal humour a worldwide hit.

The TV Producer

“What do you want?” she asked, cordially. “I’m busy”.

Her name was Helen Doodle, the officially “controversial” creator of the voyeuristic TV game-show Our Father, and producer of Glass Brain, an “ingenious” and “monstrously sick” comedy show that tackled the subject of child abuse by showing lots of simulated sex and naked women pretending to be ten year-old girls.

“I know your shows are popular,” I said, “but…”

“Damn right they’re popular!” she yelled. “Have you seen the press coverage?”

“I’m afraid so. Our Father seems to have provided a wellspring of causeries for the so-called ‘serious’ press…”

“You can’t read about anything else these days!” she enthused.

“That’s exactly my point…”

“The nation is catatonic. Can’t get enough of it. It’s a phenomenon! Minute-by-minute updates straight to your mobile from the Our Father house. More young people voted in the Our Father poll than in the general election. Politicians just didn’t camp it up enough mate.”

“Have you ever read Orwell?” I asked, and was met with a blank expression.

“Have you seen the press coverage?” she repeated.

“Only he warns against…”

“Look,” she said, “we’re a sensation. Lots of us have got famous – and rich. And we are good for society. A national debate has begun. We’ve got friends. Powerful friends. Media friends. Friends who will instantly defend anything we do. It’s all about freedom. Anything goes and everything makes money.”

“Sensational, yes. Exactly.”

“What’s to worry about?” she said. “We’re all liberals now, aren’t we?”

“Are you?” I said. “What about my bookshop?”

“Bookshop? What are you, a prude or a snob? You think you’re better than us?”

“Than who?”

“These people are stars. People want to be entertained.”

“But books…”

“Sex, fashion, shopping – it’s what people want. History is dead. Cruel is cool. Abuse is funny, and titillating. News can’t compete – not even wars are gory enough these days. Politics? Books?” She feigned a yawn. “Boring.”

“Er…”

“Like I said, we’re all liberals.”

“Liberals?”

She leant forward. “Here, wanna hear some gossip about Brian and Tod from Our Father?”

The Magazine Editors

“I expect monster sales,” she said.

“That’s right, darling,” he agreed. “Monstrous.”

They were Jacqui Tunque and Max Turdoch, co-editors of the new weekly glossy B-list Celebrity Toe-Nail Clippings.

“We’ve got an enormous launch planned.”

“You really think it’ll sell?”

“I guarantee it!” Max said, winking at me.

“But the content…”

“Our rivals sell by the million. Celebrity Cellulite is the fastest growing title in publishing. Sheet magazine is a real hit. Some people are even replacing their newspapers with Sheet. It focuses on the hairstyles of the Spice Girls and just ran an unbelievable exclusive about Vicky from Our Father and how she might give up manicuring to present the ten o’ clock news.”

“Amazing.”

“Isn’t it? And they haven’t even gone below the thigh bone. Not like we have. We’re aiming for a no-nonsense class of readership. We want to make everyone and everything free.”

“Free?”

“That’s right, free. For a small cover charge.”

“Look, there’s a bookshop…”

“We’ve already been on the evening news. ‘Experts’ they called us. It was a real honour. I got me mum to watch and everything.” They embraced. “What were you saying?”

“Oh, it’s nothing…”

The Memorabilia Vendor

“It seems quite weird to me,” he said. “I mean they tear down the old pubs and replace them with clean mock-old pubs. But if that’s what they want, then I’m more than happy to make a profit.”

His name was Rick Stevens, his job to kit out pubs with pseudo-antiquities and fake memorabilia.

“Business is booming. Did you know that at least once every hour a new Irish theme pub opens in Britain? People love it. The traditional old family-run pub is dead. A new country is being born. A mock-historic Britain.”

“And you are delivering this new nation?”

“In a way, yes. There’s money to be made and I’m a businessman. I give people what they want, and get what I can out of it. I’m a liberal.”

“You’re a liberal?”

“That’s right. A neo-liberal. A free-marketeer, and proud of it. I go where the profit is. We make around £25,000 a pub. It’s funny, I don’t even like the Irish.”

“What?”

“That’s right. And yet most of the pubs I decorate are of an Irish theme. That’s what being a liberal is all about I guess.”

“There’s this bookshop…”

“What do you need? Old-looking shelves? Pictures of writers? I’ve got some famous Russian guy and some French bloke looking all moody with a cigarette. Quality. Fake books? They sell like a treat in Oxford. Something for the mantelpiece. You know, to remember the place by.”

“No, look it’s closing.”

He glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’m a busy man. I’ve got no time for sentimentality. It’s the market, books can’t compete anymore. I’ve torn down pubs older than your bookshop I bet. Besides, the qualities we destroy can be re-created, only without the need for old-fashioned reality. Here, take my card.”

The Bookseller

“What do you mean no bookshops? I’ll have you know that I own the most popular bookstore in Oxford. We are a very successful business. Particularly in our café, where the lattés outsell Harry Potter.”

His name was Hilary Cappuccio, chief of Hoarders bookstore, Oxford’s biggest as measured in tables.

“Yes, only I’m wondering about choice,” I said.

He let out a huge guffaw. “Choice? How much more choice do you want? We have the biggest variety of blends in Oxford.”

“No I was rather referring to books.”

“Oh, them. We have more new titles than ever in our two-year history. More copies of the hot sellers than anywhere, and the least cobwebs. We are a dust-free zone, with the brightest lighting in town. We aim to make the whole book-buying experience quick and easy. Finding a book in our store is not difficult. Although not as easy as finding a hot chocolate with marshmallows.”

“What about serendipity?”

“Who?”

“What if I want to stumble across an old book, one long desired or delightfully unexpected?”

“Have you tried our mocha?”

“You only sell commercial books you want everyone to buy. You force the agenda. Our minds are no longer free.”

“Do you need a glass of water? Look, we give people what they want. They go for the books that are best marketed.”

“I see.”

“The publishing houses put a lot of effort into choosing the exact titles to promote. We can’t let them down, can we? We have a duty to fight on the side of contemporary writers. They must not lose out to the past. It’s then or now. We sell now.”

“I can see that.”

“That’s the law of the market. If your old bookshop can’t compete then you have to ask yourself: does it deserve to exist anymore? You’re either liberal or you’re not.”

“Liberal?”

“We make judgements, democratic judgements, about what people want. Your bookshop was too elitist, thinking people will be interested in yellowing old classics rather than glossy new ‘chick-lit’. They’re completely outmoded. This week we are pushing hard on three new titles: Girls on the Pull, Lads on the Run and Our Father: Uncut (with subtitles). We expect to make the best-seller charts on all three.”

“Can I have that glass of water?”

“How about a coffee?”

The Oxford Chancellory

“Must I wear this garb?” I asked, fruitlessly.

I was sitting before a committee of the University elite, all of whom were glaring at me. I had to choose my words carefully.

“Do you care about education?”

Consternation broke out, so I calmed them with, “OK, let me re-phrase that. Does the university own the land that my two bookshops sit on?”

The general murmurs were affirmative.

“So you’ve put the rent up and put them out of business?”

“We need the money,” someone insisted, from behind the Louis XV table.

“I see. Do you care more about profit than education?”

“We care about the standards of education. That means the best.”

“At what expense?” I asked.

“Why, how much are you thinking of giving?”

“Look, my bookshops are closing down. Are you all the same? You. Our Father. The entrepreneur. Don’t you care about the future? Where are we going?”

“To luncheon!” came a voice.

“What about liberal enlightenment? What about defending quality? Please, what kind of a world are we creating that has no bookshops? Isn’t there more to life than selling to the highest bidder? Can’t you cut back on dinner expenses?”

But they were shuffling out the oak-panelled doors, one of them carrying a copy of Celebrity Cellulite under his arm.