#10yrsago Orwell’s ill-tempered rant on bookselling
The bookshop by my office has a huge, blown-up quote from George Orwell’s 1936 essay “Bookshop
Memories” over the counter, which inspired me to go look up the original
essay. It’s a hilarious, ill-tempered, mean-spirited and vastly
entertaining rant about what’s wrong with the booky trade – sure to be
appreciated by recovering booksellers like me, and bookstore junkies
(like me):
A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste
for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them
and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love
books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if
they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as
to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a
peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in
that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date
gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’
magazines of the sixties. For casual reading – in your bath, for
instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in
the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a
back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in
the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten
thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening.
Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want
to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of
decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in
my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.