The Age of Uncertainty

Joy and the Joystrings Update

2012-05-24T19:45:00.004Z

Apologies to fans of Salvation Army rockers Joy and the Joystrings. When I saw this 1967 book, I assumed that it was a work of fiction:

However, thanks to MikeP, I now know that Joy and the Joystrings were a real band:

They were even signed to EMI and released albums like this:

And, during their LSD period, ones like this:

But what about the music? Actually, it's not bad (epilectic readers may wish to look away):

The song doesn't quite live up to the opening riff, which is deceptively mean n' moody, but they give Freddie and the Dreamers a run for their money.

The Joystrings appear to have dropped off the pop radar after 1970, but enjoyed a cult following in Salvation Army circles and staged a successful reunion in 2004. This tribute website includes some clips of the band in action.

I've threatened to add some Joy and the Joystrings to our holiday car music mix, but Mrs Steerforth has vetoed the idea, so it will have to be a private pleasure.

The Sacred and the Profane

2012-05-23T17:26:00.006Z

I'm now on Twitter. I resisted for several years but finally gave in a week ago; partly out of curiosity, but mainly because I was beginning to feel like a Luddite. After a few days in the Tweetosphere, I now realise what has happened to those bloggers who became increasingly quiet during the last couple of years.

I can see the uses of Twitter. A journalist friend of mine loves it, as he can canvas opinions, publicise interviews and shamelessly network. By the time he arrives at his desk, he has rubbed shoulders with thousands of fellow Londoners, checked out the latest business news and caught up with the trade gossip. By the time I arrive at my desk, I have passed a dead badger and wondered why people are now saying "Back in the day".

I'm not sure if I'm suited to Twitter. Sometimes it feels as if I'm at a party and although many of my favourite people are there, it's not quite working because I have to shout to make myself heard. It feels very ephemeral - a sometimes exciting, but an all-too-brief encounter, compared to the enduring relationships of the blogosphere. Perhaps I just need to give it more time.

One thing Twitter is very good for is posting amusing book jackets:

It sounds quite exciting and the couple in the photo look very animated, but a big bucket of cold water is thrown over the whole thing with the authors' names: Leonard P Barnett and Douglass A Griffiths (just so we don't confuse them with all the other Leonard Barnetts and Douglas Griffiths's).

There's certainly no adventure, unless you include trying to cop-off with someone under the disapproving glare of Leonard Barnett.

But if you're worried about young people falling under the spell of pop music, with its lustful rhythms and licentious lyrics, here is the answer:

As a bookseller, I missed out on the subgenre of novels related to the Salvation Army rock scene. Ignore it at your peril.

After church youth groups and Salvation Army pop concerts, marriage is surely inevitable and doesn't every young woman dream of a pipe-smoking, alsatian-holding man in a v-neck pullover and sta-press trousers that glow in the dark?

Look at him. He's every woman's fantasy:

I expect he has a lint-covered Murray mint in the deepest corner of his trouser pocket and a young male lover in the youth branch of the Bible Study group, but Avril won't know this until she's tidying out his wardrobe and discovers the gymnasium photos.

Bitter and disillutioned, Avril will put her old life behind her and embark on a new voyage of discovery:

This book was published in 1969:

One of the least-offensive limericks goes as follows:

There was a young lady of Cheam
Who crept into a vestry unseen
She pulled down her knickers
Likewise the vicar's
And said: "how's about it, old bean?"

As far as I know, there was no reprint.

As I've commented before, between the Lady Chatterley trial and the advent of AIDS, the media world appeared to have been obsessed with sex. Even classics weren't exempt:

Published as part of the 'Boudoir Book Selection'. I love the way it says 'COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED', implying that some very saucy bits have been left in. I wonder how many people bought this book in hope of some titilation, only to find themselves being lectured about political corruption during the reign of Louis Napoleon?

Finally, a novel which may strike a chord with zombie fans:

"Man, she had a shape to make corpses kick open caskets - and she was dead set on giving me rigor mortis".

I can't think of anything to add to that.

Hue and Cry

2012-05-14T17:47:00.005Z

When I told someone that I spent this afternoon with my mother watching Hue and Cry, I couldn't understand why they looked so perplexed. Then the penny dropped. No, I explained, not the mid-80s Scottish pop duo. I was talking about the 1947 British film that is generally recognised as the first Ealing comedy:

My mother and I watch a lot of Ealing films together. She loves them because they give her the opportunity to revisit her the world of her youth. I love them because it beats listening to her repertoire of six anecdotes about other people's illnesses, which are repeated on a never-ending loop. Instead, we sit together in a companionable silence.

Hue and Cry may be the first Ealing comedy, but it is also a children's thriller, inspired by the wonderful Emile and the Detectives. The plot is simple enough: a teenage boy discovers that a children's comic called 'The Trump' contains secret messages aimed at London's criminal underground. Ridiculed by the authorities, he decides to tackle the criminals himself, aided by a gang of local children.

The intro sequence is one of the most imaginative I've seen from this period and captures the film's fun, knockabout quality:

The star of the film is Harry Fowler (centre), who died earlier this year.

I didin't recognise the young Harry Fowler, but this face should be familiar to anyone who watched British television during the 1970s and 80s:

Although the film poster billed Jack Warner, Alistair Sim and Valerie White as the stars of Hue and Cry, Fowler outshone them all. His performance as Joe Kirby fulfilled the promise he showed five years earlier as the cheeky cockney boy, George Truscott, in Went the Day Well?

It's a pity that Harry Fowler ended up playing bit parts in series like Minder and The Bill, as he was a first-rate actor who deserved more starring roles.

The other star of the film is, arguably, London itself. Unlike many films of this era, which portrayed an undamaged, prewar city, Hue and Cry shows a war-scarred London of bombed-out houses and empty streets. It is easy to see how the War bankrupted Britain, leaving it with an economy that would take 40 years to recover:

But it's not all about bomb sites. One of the strengths of Hue and Cry is that it gives a panorama of postwar London, with just as many scenes shot in the West End, Convent Garden and Hampstead. While I was watching the film, I occasionally stole a glance at my mother and saw her delight at seeing her London. It isn't the past that's a foreign country, it's the future.

The girl in this scene was an actress called Joan Dowling, who went on to marry Harry Fowler in 1951. She made a dozen films in six years, but in spite of this success she was, allegedly, bitterly disappointed by her career and in 1953, committed suicide.

As for Alistair Sim, although he gets top billing, he only appears in Hue and Cry for under ten minutes. But what a ten minutes! I was very tempted to create a YouTube clip of Sim's performance, but this would spoil the film for anyone who hasn't seen it.

On the subject of spoilers, I should stop now.

You may be wondering why I'm reviewing such a well-known film, but the truth is that until two weeks ago, I'd never heard of Hue and Cry. Have I been living in a bubble, or is it relatively obscure compared to Ealing comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob?

As far as I'm concerned, Hue and Cry is a masterpiece. Apart from being a fun, life-enhancing comedy (much funnier than The Titfield Thunderbolt), it is also a fascinating social document with some stunning cinematography that is worthy of the best film noir. Discovering it was an unadulterated pleasure.

A Slightly Spooky Bloomsbury Moment

2012-05-09T22:16:00.005Z

Last week I wrote this post about a trip to Virginia Woolf's home in Rodmell and almost included this photo of Woolf with her niece, Angelica Bell:

I'd seen a copy of it in Virginia Woolf's writing room and was immediately struck by the image. Apart from being beautifully composed, Angelica is very striking, with a pretty but rather solemn, adolescent face. Apparently she found life in the Bloomsbury Group a bit of a bore when she was young, as there were no other children to play with.

During the visit, I wondered if Angelica was still alive, but after looking at the date of the photo it seemed rather unlikely. The next day, I wrote the blog post and in the end, decided not to use the photo, as there were already more than enough images. Then I forgot all about Angelica Bell.

But today, during a quiet moment this afternoon, I looked up Angelica Bell on Wikipedia and discovered that when I was looking at her photo in the garden she knew so well, she was still alive. Horray! The link with the Bloomsburys, TS Eliot, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and Keynes wasn't comletely severed.

But then I read on and discovered that sadly, Bell died the following day at the age of 93, just as I was deciding not to include a photo of her in my post. As Dame Edna would say, that's spooky.

Angelica, left, in Charleston

It's too late in the evening for a potted biography of Angelica Bell's bizarre life, but if you don't know how she discovered that her father wasn't her father and ended up marrying his lover, becoming Mrs Anglica Garnett, click here for the Wikipedia entry or here or here for an obituary.

You won't regret it.

A Taxing Problem

2012-05-08T16:33:00.013Z

The knives are out for Amazon. Following a recent report that revealed that they are allegedly guilty of tax avoidance*, the great and the good of the UK book industry have lined up to condemn the online retailer. My old boss James Heneage recently described Amazon as "dangerous", whilst Tim Waterstone condemned them as "rude, contemptuous, arrogant and subversive".

Strong words, but relatively mild compared to Waterstones' (the apostrophe was officially moved in January) current managing director, who branded Amazon a "ruthless, moneymaking devil". Devil? That sort of hyperbole is usually associated with some of the more outspoken members of the Iranian parliament, not retail executives.

Amazon have clearly got under a few people's skin.

James Heneage, somewhere in Wiltshire

According to James Heneage, Amazon are "damaging the high street book trade and threaten to undermine publishers' ability to nurture new talent. If you are concerned about the sort of books that get published you have to look to the future and the amount of value that businesses like Amazon can remove from the publishing business model".

Heneage goes on to argue that "great writers such as Patrick O'Brian and Joanna Trollope...did not start out as uniquely brilliant. (They) built gradually because publishers worked with them and had the money to invest, and pay for the expertise that spotted the books in the first place."

There is a lot to be said for this argument. I remember how it took around ten years for Ian Rankin to become a bestselling author, by which time he had written over a dozen books. When I worked at Waterstone's in the early 90s, the only Rankin we'd heard of was Robert, the author of humorous fantasy novels.

(On the subject of Robert Rankin, I once had an embarrassing exchange with a middle-aged woman who'd asked what I'd recommend for her 17-year-old son. When I said "Has he tried Rankin?" she misheard me, but to her credit didn't bat an eyelid and replied "Well, I suppose that would keep him quiet")

Ian Rankin could have continued to languish in the midlist, but he had a publisher that believed in him (probably encouraged by a recent Gold Dagger award) and they relaunched the Rebus novels with new jackets and a nationwide marketing campaign. It worked and the rest is history.

I wonder how Ian Rankin would fare today if he'd just written his first Inspector Rebus novel? Would he find a publisher for 'Knots and Crosses' as easily as he did in 1987 and if he had, would they publish a further six books before Rankin really hit his stride with 'Black and Blue'?

It's possible that a writer of Ian Rankin's talent could still succeed today by circumventing the normal publishing process. Several lesser writers have gained publishing deals by making their work available for nothing (or a nominal fee) to Kindle readers, allowing viral marketing to do the rest. But could Ian Rankin have afforded to do this without the financial support of a publisher?

As far as I was concerned, James Heneage had hit the nail on the head, but then I read this (and please forgive me for quoting it at length):

"I don't like it when someone like James Heneage steps forward to give the media a quote and blows it by mumbling about irrelevancies. Perhaps he is being misquoted or the paper is focussing on what were intended to be peripheral remarks, but this article makes it seem like his main objection to Amazon is that they're not really members of the club.

Firstly (sic) he seems to believe that great authors need to be nurtured by publishers: eliminating publishers imperils literature. I personally am quite sure that great authors will continue to emerge if 'publisher' goes the way of 'lamplighter' or 'footman'. He also seems to believe that publishers have an important role spotting those great writers: without publishers we wouldn't notice the diamonds in the rough. I agree that's a role publishers fill... for now. But if what replaces the current model is readers reading any old thing, including lots of self-published novels, and then blogging and tweeting about them, I think we'll see books with lasting appeal being taken up more not less quickly. I won't lament the loss of the 'kingmaker' role in publishing. And there will still be prominent figures who can champion new writing.

Heneage also thinks that Amazon is not 'investing' enough in the industry, in (implied) contrast to the way that publishers do. He doesn't elaborate, but single-handedly developing and popularising a global e-book platform sounds like investing to me. As does allowing any solvent reader with an internet connection to get any book through the mail in a day or two - including titles that 99% of bricks-and-mortar stores never carried. And it may not be the sort of investment Heneage likes, but Amazon have also made books cheaper. In fact I would say that the problem is that Amazon is investing too much rather than too little.

Heneage concludes by saying that if you have the long-term success of the industry at heart you don't undermine the competition too much. This is a terribly woolly remark. Is he suggesting that the only thing that's stopped Macmillan or Random House from grabbing 99% of the book market is a sportsmanlike restraint and a custodial mindset? The directors of publicly-traded firms would be fired if they announced they'd called a halt to growth because they were worried about the competition."

The author of this extract is Rob Jones, co-owner of the small publisher Snowbooks (you can find the full article on their blog, here) and he argues his case very persuasively. He could have added that what's happening now is the logical outcome of a process that allowed Ottakar's to expand so quickly during the ten years following the collapse of the NBA.

However, the advent of self-published ebooks is my idea of hell. Yes, there are some very good novels that have failed to gain the attentions of agents and publishers, but how can we identify them amongst the thousands that are available? It's equally woolly to suggest that the glut of self-published books can be successfully curated by a loose coalition of bloggers and tweeters.

I regularly receive emails inviting me to read and review a 'remarkable' new novel by an author I've never heard of. If I had more time on my hands and wasn't such a slow reader, perhaps I'd occasionally take some of these offers up out of curiosity. But life's too short. I'd rather spend my spare time reading unread masterpieces like 'Catch-22' or 'Mansfield Park'.

Even if I did review the new thriller that claims to "revive the genre with a splendid mixture of innovation and cutting edge timeliness" (I'm quoting from the publicist's email), what are my credentials? What's my relationship to the author? I'm not against amateur criticism and trust the integrity of bloggers like John Self far more than some of the 'You scratch my back...' reviews that appear in the broadsheets. But with the exception of John Self, Caustic Cover Critic, Gaskella and a few other notable book bloggers, I still prefer to leave it to the professionals rather than wade through the blogosphere.

As far as Amazon are concerned, I think it's naive to expect them to do anything other than avoid paying taxes. Unless they suffer a drop in sales from outraged UK customers (and let's face it, they won't), Amazon can't be expected to unilaterally sacrifice a sizeable chunk of their net profit. That's why governments need to force the issue rather than simply trust 'the market'.

What's the point of this article? I did have one an hour ago, but that was before a succession of "Daaa-aaad, Daaa-aaad"s from upstairs completely broke my concentration...Naughty Amazon, yes, but they're very good at what they do and unlike some people, I love ebooks, seeing a wonderful opportunity to bring thousands of obscure titles back into print.

As for James Heneage, I'm not sure if he's in a position to complain when, 15 years ago, he was charging across the high street bookselling landscape like Attila the Hun, driving many independent bookshops out of business (I know, because I was one of his henchmen). Admittedly Ottakar's paid its taxes and James was a wonderful man to work for, but like Amazon, we used our buying power to drive the competition out of business.

Nobody knows quite how the book industry is going to change during the next decade, but there are two certainties: bookshops will continue to close and ebook sales will probably overtake those of paperbacks. The worst case scenario is a virtual Amazon monopoly, with Kindle charts dominated by thousands of self-published titles of questionable quality. But in the same way that the best independent bookshops are thriving (think Topping's or Much Ado), I believe that imaginative publishers and booksellers will ride the storm successfully.

I'm sorry if this post has rambled. There was a cogent argument here somewhere, but it disappeared into the ether, aided by screaming children and an exploding lightbulb (or was it my Kindle?).

* Thank you to the kind person who advised me to change the original word to 'avoidance'.

An Afternoon With Virginia Woolf

2012-05-04T08:13:00.010Z

Although I only live five miles away from Virginia Woolf's rural retreat of Monk's House, it has taken me ten years to get there. I tried to go on several occasions, but the house never seemed to be open, limiting its admission times to the odd afternoon. Fortunately, the National Trust have now extended the opening hours.

As yesterday was a particularly dull, dank, overcast day, with a muted light that felt as if the sun was failing, I decided that this was a good opportunity to enjoy Monk's House without being jostled by any Virginia Woolf fans - they're famed for their brutality.

It took ten minutes to reach the idyllic village of Rodmell, but the incredibly noisy birdsong made me feel as if I'd travelled to a remote, temperate rainforest. I was also slightly unnerved by the fact that although I occasionally heard voices, the village seemed to be completely deserted. Perhaps I've watched too many episodes of the Avengers.

Unlike many historic properties, the entrance fee was very reasonably priced at under a fiver, but that's probably because most of the house was off limits, with only four rooms on view. However, the gardens alone make Monk's House worth a visit:

The building in the background is the early Norman church of St Peter's. It is believed that the font predates the church and may be over a thousand years old. The view from the graveyard reminds me of an Eric Ravilious painting:

This is Woolf's writing room. It's an inauspicious-looking building, but played host to some of the most important figures of the early 20th century. For example, the man on the right is John Maynard Keynes:

Keynes is also in this photo taken in the garden, with Lytton Strachey on the left:

Here are some photos taken from inside the writing room:

Even on such a gloomy day, the garden still provided some colour:

This is the downstairs bedroom:

Compared to Charleston, it seems quite austere, but there are several nice touches by Vanessa Bell. The original books were sold after Leonard Woolf died in 1969, but they have been replaced with volumes from the same period.

Apparently, Woolf decorated the spines of these books as a displacement activity when she was feeling at a particularly low ebb.

The sitting room looks very cosy, with many appealing touches by various members of the Bloomsbury Group.

The large object to the left of the chair is a radiogram, with one of those wonderful dials that lists places around Europe: Luxembourg, Athlone, Paris, Budapest. Woolf was no stranger to the radio and made this recording for the BBC in 1937.

The photograph below is of the dining room, which is rather small for the social milieu of the Woolfs. These chairs have supported many famous bottoms, including TS Eliot's, EM Forster's, the Bells' and Roger Fry's:

The painting on the right is by Virginia Woolf. It's competently executed, but she clearly didn't possess her sister's artistic talents.

To coin Doctor Johnson's quote about the Giant's Causeway, on its own merits, Monk's House is worth seeing, but not worth going to see unless you're a Virginia Woolf fan or live within a 30-mile radius. If the whole house was open, it would be a different matter.

Fortunately, the creative powerhouse of the Bloomsbury Group - Charleston - is only a few miles away (Virginia regularly walked across the Downs to visit her sister Vanessa there), so it's possible to combine the two in half a day. Ideally, if you're fit and weather's good, you can walk from Monk's House to Charlestone via Southease and Firle Beacon.

I've been to Charleston several times and would strongly recommend it to anyone. The rooms are stunning and the guided tours are the most interesting I've been on. There's also a rather nice teashop that serves homemade cakes - a definite plus point.

For more information about opening times, this link takes you to the National Trust page for Monk's House whilst this one is for Charleston.

N.B - Since publishing this post, I've realised that I failed to mention the beautiful parish church in Berwick - only a mile east of Charleston - which was decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. No visit to Monk's House and Charleston would be complete without a brief detour to Berwick.

For fans of the moving image (and middle-aged men wearing floral, metrosexual shirts), this video contains a beautifully-shot five-minute film of Monk's House, complete with marimba music.

Why I Wish I'd Been Born in 1946

2012-05-02T14:38:00.009Z

When was the best time to be born?

There are many periods that I'd like to visit if I could: Britain during the late Victorian age, America in the 50s, or Andalucia before the reconquista are three that instantly spring to mind. But would I want to swap them for my comfortable world of antibiotics, hot water and edible food? I don't think so.

Sometimes I find myself yearning for a world where no-one has ever heard of Alesha Dixon or Facebook, but if I start to get dewy-eyed about the past, I remind myself that history is always written by the winners and survivors. The stories of the millions of individuals who lived Hobbes's "poor, nasty, brutish and short lives" will never be heard.

After a great deal of thought, I've chosen 1946 as the best time to be born. If I'd been born ten years earlier, I would have experienced warfare, rationing and Shirley Temple films. But in the late 1940s, I'd be entering a world in which improved healthcare and educational opportunities were transforming the lives of millions.

Also, I could enjoy growing up in the world of Ealing comedies, Uncle Mac and steam engines.

It's a world that is celebrated in a Ladybird book I found recently, which has the slightly creepy title 'In the Train with Uncle Mac':

This is a Britain that now only exists in model railway displays and episodes of Chigley. It is a world of timeless villages and market towns, where technology has unobtrusively augmented peoples lives rather than changed them beyound all recognition.

Old maids still cycle to communion, village greens echo to the sound of willow on leather and car ownership is limited to the great and the good.

"Hullo! Here are our friends Bob and Betty just off on a long journey to the seaside. Dog Trigger is with them, so they are happy".

Whatever happened to 'hullo'? Nobody uses it any more, although Lionel Richie's notorious song sounds more like hullo than hello to me. Even hallo is disappearing.

I don't know how old Bob and Betty are, but I don't think I'd send them halfway across the country, unaccompanied, on a journey that includes changing in London.

It's time to leave and this smartly-dressed guard is a stark contrast to the scruffy, slouching men in donkey jackets who shuffled around the station platforms of my youth, blowing their whistles half-heartedly and shrugging their shoulders when I told them that the Nestle machine had swallowed two 5p coins.

"It is thrilling to stand on a railway footbridge and watch the trains rush by"

In those days, even a small, provincial station would have a full complement of staff, including porters, guards, clerks and signalmen:

I have vague memories of waving to men in signal boxes when I was very young. They always waved back. Then the signal boxes became automated. I wonder what happened to the signalmen?

"Bob and Betty are by themselves, but the guard will keep an eye on them". Oh, well that's all right then.

"So at last our express train has reached London where all is bustle and hurry".

It's time to change trains and the station porter is giving Bob and Betty directions to the Underground. But hasn't anyone noticed that creepy stranger standing right behind them?

Oh dear - it's that man again. Bob and Betty are so excited by the underground train that they haven't noticed that they're being followed.

"The train is rather noisy, and it sways and rattles as it rushes along".

The stranger sits next to Bob and Betty, pretending to read a newspaper.

Betty has now noticed the strange man following them and a woman on the down escalator looks concerned. But as they reach the top of the escalator, the man is stopped by a policeman, who seems to know him. Perhaps the man is a detective.

"There is a kitchen on the train and a real chef to cook the meals. Betty and Bob are smiling at the thought of a jolly good meal"

Bob and Betty are about to enjoy a bowl of thin, tasteless oxtail soup and a shepherd's pie of indeterminate origin, washed down with two glasses of weak squash.

"Betty and Bob had a glimpse of the driver. But an equally important person is the fireman, or stoker. He MUST keep up steam for the engine to pull the train. He shoots more and more coal into the great furnace and the wheels go faster and faster. Well done, fireman!"

Sadly, the recently-qualified fireman is unaware that the line is due to be electrified in a couple of years..

"Bob and Betty know that the long run is nearly done"

"Thank you for a safe and lovely journey!"

"Glad you enjoyed it!" grins the driver, while the fireman waves a grimy hand. The engine, too, looks dirty but somehow very proud".

So there you have it: incontrovertible documentary evidence that if I'd been born in 1946, this was the world I would have grown up in. A society in which youth crime meant St Trinians and young men who wanted 'respect' wore tweed.

It might have been a stuffy, stifling world, but that wouldn't have affected me because by the time I'd reached 18, everyone would have been listening to the Rolling Stones and sleeping with each other.

Obviously I'm being silly, but there is a kernel of truth. My wife's parents were part of the theatrical world of the 1960s and whenever I hear anecdotes about them or their friends, it sounds as if they lived in an enchanted age. It's not that stories themselves that impress me, but the incidental details: being able to move around London easily by car, turning up at the BBC to see if they have a job and actually getting one (which changes from teaboy to assistant producer within months), buying a four-storey house in Islington for a few thousand and the way a casual flirtation would end up in bed.

It was an enchanted time, for some at least, because it felt as if they lived in a world of possibilities where people were no longer tied to jobs or relationships for life. This experimentation was all done against the backdrop of their secure, Uncle Mac childhoods, blissfully unaware of the consequences of their actions on the next generation.

If I'd been born in 1946, I would also be retiring at a time when health care, benefits and private pensions were still sustainable.

I could spend my dotage enjoying fond memories of exciting holidays with Betty and Trigger, travelling across Britain by train, being offered sweets by kindly strangers.

NB - People born in 1946 include Stephen Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Alan Rickman, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, David Lynch, John Waters, Brian Cox, Charles Dance, Diane Keaton, Danny Glover, Cher, Charlotte Rampling, Dolly Parton, Liza Minelli, Freddie Mercury, Joanna Lumley, Felicity Kendal, George W Bush, Steve Biko and Philip Pullman.

A Man With a Van

2012-04-28T15:29:00.008Z

I am a broken man, crushed by the ordeal of physical labour. I don't suppose that I've done anything out of the ordinary - thousands of people load and unload vans every day - but it has been a shock after seven months of relative indolence.

I won't bore you with the details, except to say that I have been moving some furniture for someone over the last couple of weeks, driving a large van that has 166,000 miles on the clock and a suspension that amplifies the tiniest piece of grit on the road into something that resembles artillery fire at Stalingrad.

I'd burned some CDs of Radio Four podcasts to relieve the tedium of motorway driving, but even at full volume, Andrew Marr couldn't compete with the constant squeaking and rattling of metal parts trying to separate. I hadn't heard metal make noises like that since Das Boot.

The nadir came when the wipers stopped working during a flash flood on the M23 and the view ahead turned into a pointillist landscape of greys and dark greens. I took the first exit I could find and stopped at a layby, where I texted Bob, the van's owner: "Coming back. Wipers not working."

20 seconds later, my phone buzzed with a new text message: "Is it raining?"

In fairness to Bob, he fixed the fault quite promptly, swapping the broken fuse for the windscreen wipers with the one that operated the indicators. It was a novel solution, but I would have preferred to have been warned, as the honking and v-signs were making me quite paranoid.

The next day I did my last job for Bob, who gallantly provided me with a man who could stick his arm out of the window if I wished to turn left. Fortunately, the route was only six miles long and quite direct, so neither of us were required to perform any hand signals.

It looked as if everything was going to be all right after all. Sadly, at the final destination, I miscalculated the angle I needed to reverse into someone's drive and ended up getting stuck in the middle of their lawn. It took an hour to free the van from the quagmire I'd created and as we crept forward, it revealed a scene of desolation that reminded me of the Somme. I felt awful.

I'm not quite sure how I ended up agreeing to work for Bob. I think it was something to do with the mindset that comes with being self-employed, feeling obliged to say yes to any opportunity that comes along, regardless of how suitable it is.

But perhaps I also just liked the idea of driving a very big van.

Self Abuse

2012-04-23T10:36:00.003Z

Are you familiar with the words milt, grue and sesquipedalian? If they've just give you a naughty little frisson of lexicographical pleasure, then I would recommend this enjoyable article about obscure words, by Will Self.

But for me, the high point of Self's piece had nothing to do with logolepsy:

"As for visual arts, the current Damien Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern is a perfect opportunity to see what becomes of an artificer whose impulse towards difficult subject matter was unsupported by any capacity for hard cogitation or challenging artistry. The early works - the stuffed animals and fly-bedizened carcasses - retain a certain - albeit recherché - shock value, while the subsequent ones degenerate steadily to the condition of knocked-off merchandise, making the barrier between the gift shop and the exhibition space evaporate in a puff of consumerism."

That has to be one of the most galumptious things I've read in a long time.

A Publishing Question

2012-04-20T09:50:00.005Z

On the off chance that somebody in the publishing industry may stumble across this blog, I have a question that I'd like to ask (don't worry, I haven't written a novel or, even worse, a collection of 'lyrical' short stories).

I have a book that was published in 1943, containing the memoirs of a pilot in Bomber Command. Unlike many autobiographies from this period, the narrative has a disarmingly contemporary feel and reminds me of Geoffrey Wellum's bestselling memoir 'First Light'. In some places the writing almost reads like a screenplay.

It's a remarkable book. I bought it a few years ago in a charity shop and forgot all about it. When I went on to get a job working with old books, I neglected reading any of my own as I wanted a break from foxed pages and cracked hinges in my spare time, preferring clean new paperbacks. But the other day I found the book in my wardrobe and was immediately struck by the author's vivid prose style.

I've tried to find out more about this title, but I can't find any copies on sale anywhere in the world. I've also found it impossible to learn anything about the author, which obviously has a bearing on copyright.

I could put the book on sale, hoping to attract a decent price for such a scarce title, but I'd rather see it gain a new generation of readers.

Does anyone in the know have any recommendations?

Under the Influence

2012-04-17T16:53:00.005Z

During a failed attempt to create some space in my wardrobe this afternoon, I was confronted with some of my less judicious internet purchases - all bought under the influence of alcohol.

I don't mean to sound like a candidate for the Betty Ford Clinic. I'm not a heavy drinker, but I do enjoy a couple of glasses of wine in the evening and that, it seems, is all it takes to undo years of education and experience.

Here are some recent examples:

1. An insect in amber:

There is something wonderful about an insect in amber. It is the immediacy of it. We aren't looking at the fossilised remains of a creature; we are looking at the thing itself, trapped tens of millions of years ago in the resin of a tree. It makes my head hurt.

During one of these moments of wonder, aided by a particularly nice glass of Pouilly Fume, I ordered an insect in amber on eBay. Sadly, it turned out to be a particularly dull specimen - more of a speck really - in a piece of amber that is smaller than the nail of my little finger. A huge disappointment.

2. A boxed set of 'The West Wing':

I'm sure it's wonderful. I like political dramas and really enjoyed Borgen, which is supposed to be a Danish version of The West Wing, but unless my children are sent to boarding school or I find a job on an oil rig, I don't know when I'm going to have time to watch all 59 seasons.

Why did I order something that I can't watch?

3. A meteorite:

Like the insect in amber, there is something awe-inspiring about holding a lump of rock that has travelled through space, but once again, it's very small. Is it even a meteorite? Sometimes I wonder if it's just a bit of molten metal that's fallen on the floor in some obscure foundry in a former part of the Soviet Union. How can I tell?

4. An archery lesson:

Two years ago I visited a medieval fair and saw an archery stall. I decided to have a go and, to everyone's surprise, scored one bullseye after another. At last, a sport I was good at!

When Groupon sent an email offering a 75-minute archery lesson for under £20, it seemed like the best idea in the world. But in the cold light of day, I found myself thinking "Oh, I suppose I'd better have that archery lesson. I hope it doesn't rain".

Still, at least I'll have a defence against the marauding gangs in the post-apocalyptic world.

5. The complete works of Webern:

I like the idea of Webern. He reacted against the fin de siecle culture of the years leading up to 1914, rejecting the opulent, inflated late-romanticism of the time in favour of a new discipline. His music was uncompromisingly austere, with increasingly shorter compositions for ever-smaller ensembles of musicians (sadly, this process of compression came to a premature end when Webern was accidentally shot by a GI in 1945).

Unfortunately, I just can't listen to it.

I think I must have liked the idea of conquering the complete works of Webern when I ordered the boxed set, but in the cold light of day it wasn't such a good idea.

I like difficult music. I can quite happily listen to this, but not Webern.

6. A Queen Elizabeth I sixpence:

I'd always thought that a coin this old would be impossibly expensive. When I discovered that they were actually very affordable, I couldn't resist the temptation to own something that had passed through so many hands. But it was an impulse.

I'm not against being online under the influence of alcohol - this blog is largely a product of those second glasses of wine - but after exploring the depths of my wardrobe, I think that there's a strong case for ensuring that all transactional websites emulate the high street, closing their virtual doors at 5.30pm.

The View From My Door

2012-04-15T15:56:00.005Z

I've moved to a new workplace. I think I'm going to like it:

When I was younger, standing on windswept suburban platforms, watching trains full of exhausted people make their way back to the less fashionable parts of London, I used to dream of escaping to the countryside.

But instead, I moved to a small, affluent London suburb that had been picked up and dropped in the middle of the Sussex Downs at some unspecified point in the past. The dinner parties with people from Stoke Newington continued unabated, but without the absurdly long bus rides (or the nocturnal cab journeys, driven by someone who had only just arrived in Britain) between places that were only a few miles apart.

It was the perfect solution. I could see the countryside in the distance, but wasn't obliged to engage with it in any way.

However, during the last few months I have spent a lot of time on farms and have grown to love the silence and remoteness. Ridiculously, I didn't know how much countryside there was. My journeys along arterial main roads hadn't exposed me to the vast interior of the Weald, where it is still possible to escape from light pollution and the distant roar of traffic.

I love the fact that I can be sitting in an office, connected to the internet, but all I can hear is the sound of sheep, cows and birds.

Last week I was sitting at my desk, answering some emails, when a sheep came up to my window and stared at me for three minutes. I tried waving and flapping my arms around to get a reaction, but it continued to look me calmly in the eye, with a uniquely ovine insouciance. In the end, I was rescued by the distraction of some gamboling lambs.

I'm sure that my rural idyll will seem less appealing in December, but at the moment I feel as if all of those hours spent at Clapham Junction and countless bus stops, have finally been rewarded.

Booksellers

2012-04-12T21:16:00.002Z

After my recent post about publishers' sales reps, it seems only fair to turn the spotlight round to the booksellers. What type of people work in a bookshop? Are they passionate, slightly unworldly bibliophiles, who live and breathe books? Or are they a bunch of slackers, who break out into a cold sweat at the prospect of having to do a proper job?

During a very dull moment in a waiting room, I tried to remember everyone I'd ever worked with. I got to 200 before my memory started to become hazy. I felt slightly guilty when I realised that I hadn't given some of my ex-colleagues a second thought since we'd last met, but I expect they'd probably say the same about me.

The weekend staff were particularly hard to remember. The boys, who all seemed to be studying 'A' level English, merged into one amorphous blend of earnestness and skin complaints, although there were a couple who amused me by telling dirty jokes (which I then passed on to the reps).

The girls were easier to recall because some of them had recently friended me on Facebook, in a barrel-scraping attempt to pass the 500/1000 friends mark (I quietly 'defriended' them after a suitable period, but I doubt that they noticed).

However, they weren't 'proper' booksellers. The weekend staff were merely taking a brief pitstop on their way to a glittering career (at least, that's what they told me). The idea of becoming a full-time bookseller horrified them almost as much as the thought of their parents having sex.

When I asked one girl what job she wanted to do, she replied: "I don't know yet, but I do know one thing: I'm not going to work here." She later became our floor manager.

As for the proper booksellers, in the early days of Waterstone's, the slackers ruled the roost. For them, bookselling was a continuation of university life, with its constant shortage of money and cramped bedsits; redeemed only by brilliant conversations with like-minded people and long periods of inertia. The hours weren't as great, but at least you didn't have to wear a suit.

Anyone who actually wanted to be a bookseller was regarded with a mixture of contempt and suspicion. Was that really the limit of their ambitions?

In hindsight we were probably awful. Our hatred for the customers - those people who dared to interrupt our conversations and ruin our displays by buying the books - was only exceeded by our contempt for a head office who lived in an ivory tower and dared to suggest that we should only stock books that seemed likely to sell. Philistines!

Oddly enough, the customers seemed to like our bolshy attitude and inappropriate clothing, so when one male member of staff decided to create a bondage outfit out of dustbin bags (complete with holes for the nipples) and serve at the till, no-one batted an eyelid.

The till-points of Waterstone's contained many frustrated writers, artists, teachers and media people, waiting for their dream job to come along. Surprisingly, their hopes weren't always in vain. After a year of displaying no discernible work ethic or talent, X would effortlessly drift into a key role at the British Council, whilst Y suddenly became a production assistant at Channel Four. How did that happen?

The Waterstone's staff uniform, circa 1993

At the end of five years of watching other people move on to better things, I felt that I ought to create an illusion of progress and left to run an independent bookshop. At the time it seemed like a sound move, but I quickly discovered that I was working for the Arthur Daley of bookselling, with van loads of dodgy stock mysteriously appearing on the shop floor overnight. I didn't want to be Terry McCann, so I started job hunting.

In 1996, a new bookselling chain - which seemed to have risen without a trace - was advertising for managers. After a rather unconventional interview with James Heneage, the managing director, I became a 'manager-in-waiting' at Ottakar's.

Ottakar's, which was a nationwide chain of smallish shops in market towns, was a revelation. I soon realised that outside London, booksellers were a very different breed. The staff I met actually seemed to take a pride in their work and would happily break-off a conversation if they saw that a customer needed help. I felt as if I had joined a group of evangelical Christians: wide-eyed, enthusiastic and committed. Some of them even wore ties.

I've no doubt that the good morale was a reflection of the leadership, but I also noticed that outside London, booksellers were generally more motivated than my former colleagues. They weren't passing through on their way to something better. This was their career.

Keeping up with such enthusiastic people was exhausting, but I did my best.

At Waterstone's most of the staff I met were in their 20s and all of them were graduates, as Tim Waterstone refused to employ anyone without a degree (by doing this, he missed out on some very good booksellers).

Ottakar's was very different, with a mixed bag of people whose ages ranged from 16 to 65. Some of them had degrees, but many had simply joined when they left school or moved across from a completely different area of retail. Sometimes the recruitment criteria were a little too lax, for me at least.

It took a while to get used to seeing a copy of the Daily Mail (or worse) in the staff room and when I spotted well-thumbed copies of novels by Patricia Cornwell and Terry Pratchett, I realised that there weren't going to be many fist fights for a proof copy of the latest Umberto Eco.

My shop in Crawley

I was at Ottakar's for ten years and, during that time, came to recognise similar types in every branch I ran or visited. Every shop had its high flyer (usually under the age of 23) who seemed more competent than the manager and was usually destined to be their boss in four years' time. Some managers felt threatened by them. I just saw an opportunity to take a long holiday without worrying about the shop.

These high flyers were usually counterbalanced by one or two no-hopers who could spend an hour discussing Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series with a customer, but still hadn't unpacked yesterday's delivery. They seemed to think that promotion was a simple award for long service and could never understand why some young upstart had been promoted over their head.

In Ottakar's, although the booksellers came from a variety of backgrounds, the one thing they all shared was a genuine love of books and a morbid fear of having to sit at a desk for eight hours a day. Bookselling provided a variety of work centred around something that actually mattered, which was not something that the local call centre could offer.

The last day of Ottakar's, Worthing, before it was converted into a Waterstone's

At my branch of Waterstone's (which was probably atypical) in the early 90s, the attitude was more cynical. The staff had no loyalty to the company and regarded their jobs as a temporary expedient. They might enthuse over certain titles, but the idea of being passionate about all books would have been viewed as absurd. Indeed, neatly hidden away at the till point was a small sticker that said "Books are crap".

However, in their own way, the arrogant slackers of the early Waterstone's years were often very good booksellers. Freed from the constraints of the career ladder, completely indifferent to the concerns of area managers, they ordered what they liked. One buyer was chastised by his manager for buying ten copies of a £100 Ansel Adams book, but they all sold within days

Fifteen years on, the new owners of Waterstone's were keen to turn their backs on an era in which the easiest way to identify a member of staff was to look for the scruffiest person in the shop. Graduates were no longer essential. The main qualification was a passion for selling. To the horror of many, a couple of managers had been recruited from Gap and Burger King!

There was a clear message: we don't think bookish people are always good at selling. In today's tough commercial climate, we need proper retailers.

(This YouTube video is a brilliant satire of Borders and the pre-Daunt Waterstone's - sadly embedding has been disabled, so follow the link and skip the advert after five seconds)

In my darker moments, I wondered if they were right. Perhaps the traditional booksellers were just unemployable misfits who'd enjoyed years of sanctuary in the book trade. However, after three years of 'retailing', with planograms, loyalty cards and a staff training scheme called 'Get Selling', Waterstone's was on its knees and almost disappeared from the high street, until a Russian oligarch came along and bought the company from HMV.

Today, things have come full circle. Unable to compete on price, booksellers are returning to their traditional role as curators of the huge, bewildering range of books in print. However good Amazon is, they will never be able to match the fiction-in-translation table at the Brighton branch of Waterstone's.

During the next decade, many bookshops will go to the wall - that much is certain - and booksellers will become an endangered, exotic species. However, the best bookshops should survive (high street landlords permitting).

But to return to the initial question: who becomes a bookseller? Looking back over 20 years of bookselling, I don't think I could say that there was a typical bookseller. There were some quiet, bookish types (who often left to train as librarians), but there were also louche bohemians, alcoholics, artists, drug dealers, ex-nuns, former policemen, future policemen, writers, rock musicians, reiki therapists, scientists and poker players.

Misfits. All very different, but all round pegs that didn't fit into square holes. With fewer bookshops on the horizon, things are going to get much harder.

One Thing I Don't Miss About the 1970s...

2012-04-08T09:10:00.010Z

The Easter story, expressed through the medium of dance:

How anyone thought it was a good idea to tell the story of the cucifixion of Jesus through dance and mime, performed by the cast of Space 1999, is beyond me. But it seems that this sort of thing wasn't unusual in the 1970s.

I found this 1975 ITV handbook recently:

Published by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, it's a wonderful snapshot of commercial broadcasting in Britain during 1974, packed full of articles and photos (with a nerdtastic section on IBA transmitter stations).

It also clearly shows that television execs in the 1970s had an unhealthy obsession with dance, including this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And even this:

What was going on? Did they think that people really wanted to see this, or was it just cheap television?

In 1974, I was in bed by eight o'clock, so I missed the worst excesses of this obsession with dancing. However, I do have vague memories of men in trouser suits poncing around to Up, Up and Away, along with the occasional 'rock opera' (which my parents always turned off in disgust because the cast looked as if they were on drugs).

The BBC's hands weren't entirely clean either: Seaside Special, The Rolf Harris Show and just about any other live entertainment show had some awful dance group (naturally I exclude the gorgeous Pan's People from this diatribe).

At least today, dancing is restricted to a small core of programmes, for those who like that sort of thing. Also, those grim, po-faced contemporary dance groups, who did things like depict the Jarrow Crusade through the medium of movement, have now been replaced by streetdance and hip hop.

So next time you find yourself complaining that television isn't what it used to be, buy a boxed set of Homeland and look at this listing for BBC1 on April 16th, 1975.

1230 - Day and Night, including Crime Line.

1255 - News

1300 - Pebble Mill, including Family Advice with Claire Rayner.

1345 - Fingerbobs

1400 - Closedown

1558 - Regional News (Except London/SE)

1600 - Play School

1625 - Boris the Bold

1635 - Jackanory, with Judy Dench

1650 - The Monkees

1715 - If You Were Me (new series). People find out about each other's lives. Today: David from Plymouth and Julie from Puerto Rico.

1740 - Magic Roundabout

1745 - News

1800 - Nationwide

1850 - Film: The Lion and the Horse (1952). Starring Steve Cochrane and Wildfire, the wonder horse. Wholesome family film about a man and his horse.

2010 - Survivors, starring Carolyn Seymour, Lucy Fleming, Talfryn Thomas in The Fourth Horseman.

2100 - News

2125 - The Budget, with Sir Geoffrey Howe, Shadow Chancellor.

2135 - Last of the Summer Wine, starring Michael Bates, Bill Owen and Peter Sallis.

2205 - Sportsnight. European championship soccer, England v Cyprus from Wembley Stadium, highlights and action analysis; Amateur Boxing Association Championship.

2315 - Midweek, introduced by Ludovic Kennedy.

2328 - Weatherman

I rest my case.

However, there was one exception which, 37 years on, still stands up as a first-rate piece of drama:

Homage to the Sales Rep, Part Two - From Our Northern Correspondent

2012-04-06T23:26:00.005Z

Many thanks to those who tweeted links to my last post. I had no idea that a rambling tribute to the humble sales rep would provoke such a response. One comment, posted by a former colleague of mine, was so long that Blogger had a brainstorm and rejected it. Fortunately, he saved the text and emailed it to me.

I have reproduced it here, without permission, because it's far too good to languish in the obscurity of my email inbox.

Born 17 years before me, Mr X experienced the golden age of the book trade, when booksellers only had their wits and a micofiche to rely on. In those days, there was no '3 for 2' nonsense (a book cost what it said on the cover, so you could like it or lump it) and sales were achieved through good bookselling alone. How things have changed.

I'm not sure if Mr X wishes me to reveal his identity, but I have provided two visual clues for those in the know:

"What a wonderful post, Steerforth – and how brilliantly you capture the dogged spirit, essential kindness and serial eccentricity of reps. Your piece set me thinking of my own start in bookselling an age ago in the ‘60s.

I had washed up in Oxford after a failure to return the foetid hug of library school in the hot Summer of Love. Well, what would you have done in Aberystwyth in 1967? Bibliography and Classification at Llanbadarn Fawr or the beach, the Beatles and boy oh boy at Borth?

Clue No.1

My brother lived in Oxford and I had run there, away from my parents’ searing disapproval of my throwing away a decent living. They had seen a good career for me among the card files and date stamps of the West Riding County Library at Wakefield. Naturally I finished up in Blackwell’s.

Time passed and I found myself running the General Books Department in what was then undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest bookshops. Almost immediately, General became regarded as a dark ravine of insistent vulgarity, overshadowed by the high mountains of fine academic provision which surrounded it. I was unbelievably crass and ignorant when I began. I knew I wanted things to change. After all, not long before, we had been told to sell the 6 subscribed copies of Portnoy’s Complaint from behind the counter.

Around the same time, a huge debate among my seniors resulted in a decision that 36 copies of the first complete paperback edition of Lord of the Rings would suffice to meet the demand from town and gown. Things could only get better.

And this is where the reps came in. Only they weren’t called that. They were never called that. They were “travellers”. The qualifying “gentleman” was invisible but implied. It was indeed exclusively a masculine world. They tended to be tall, well-made men, red faced and often with moustaches which betrayed their forces backgrounds. They almost certainly, you felt, had had a good war. They were kindly and tolerant. They weren’t in any hurry. They knew what they knew.

Clue No.2

Goodness knows, by contrast, what they made of me – but they steered me and persuaded me and educated me so subtly that I often believed I was the absolute dog’s until I thought back over how I’d got from A to B.

They all stayed in the Eastgate Hotel on the High. Soon after 9 in the morning and lugging unfeasibly huge cases of samples, they would come plodding through Turl Street and into the Broad to begin the day’s subbing among the myriad BHB departments.

Most often, they represented individual publishing houses which in today’s world are mere imprints swallowed into the maw of this conglomerate or that. So Methuen was in the charge of T. Houston Fraser, a man of huge majesty and massive dignity; almost Beach the Butler come to life. Pitman was sold by Stanley Branwhite, who, I now see, displayed unmistakeable overtones of Ray Winstone. When he was President of the BPRA and presiding over the dinners which were commonplace then, Stanley would rise at regular intervals to “take wine” with each of his many cronies scattered across the room.

Reg Fisk travelled for Collins and I never met anyone more determined to repeat every word of every AI (Advance Information) in his possession (or die trying). As I later discovered, it was a Collins trait. Pat Seyd of Harrap had been in the navy on the Arctic convoys. He unfailingly wore a pinstripe and bowler hat combination in winter and a straw boater and white suit in summer. Stanley Nebel represented Macmillan and more than once brought with him a “learner” – an improbably gangly young American called Nigel Newton.

Bob Kemp carried Weidenfeld. He’d fought the Mau Mau in Kenya, so staring down Geoffrey Boycott and shutting him up in the Saraceno in Magdalen Street was a cakewalk by comparisons. Bob was a Mancunian but nobody’s perfect. John Oliver of Hamish Hamilton once asked me if he was boring me (he was). I blush with shame to think of it. Patrick Stephens, who represented his eponymous list, wore the air of an avuncular don indulging a promising student.

Alas, alas – they all (apart of course from Nigel) lie in Mellstock Churchyard now.

I am so glad that you mentioned John, the unspeakably difficult Random House rep. God forgive me for banning him from the Ottakar’s High Wycombe store in the 1990s. He had taken to wandering the back offices at will and in an inspired period had begun unpacking designated returns and putting them back on the shop selves, replacing them with other books (sometimes not his own) which he didn’t think we should be selling. I might have remembered that he was also the man who delivered a six-foot cardboard standing figure of a star author to a central London bookshop by taking it on a bus and paying its fare.

It does seem that the old race of independent ‘ornery reps who often hated their bosses but loved their customers has gone. The last vestige I remember was the fabulous gritty Yorkshireman “Dump Bin Dave,” who came in with the Arrow side of Random House to Ottakar’s in Northallerton.

Dave made all his appointments 12 months ahead and, as his nickname suggests, was fond of bulk sales. His inevitable sign-off after a subbing session was in the form of an “Ah just can’t wait…” statement, reminding me of the sheer irresistibility of his lead title. Some of these tended to be less convincing than others. I managed to restrain complete hysterics when he inflicted “Ah just can’t wait ta gerrome and start that new Oomberto Eco bewk.” This sounds snobbish as I tell it. It isn’t at all. But it was funny.

Dave is happily working on Leeds Market now. They don’t make them like that anymore."

Many thanks to Mr X for unintentionally writing this guest post. Here's a photo he might recognise:

Homage to the Sales Rep

2012-03-30T09:32:00.011Z

In an earlier post I wrote about my first year in bookselling and casually mentioned that every publisher's sales rep' used to be called Brian or Keith. Naturally, this was a slight exaggeration. There was also one called Barry.

When I joined Waterstone's, over 20 years ago, I was told that one of my jobs would involve buying new titles from publishers. Surprisingly, there was no training, but in spite of this I was given a monthly budget of £5000 to spend in any way I pleased. Unsurprisingly, when the word got out that Waterstone's had delegated its new title buying to a load of chinless wonders, it was like a feeding frenzy.

One of the first things that impressed me was how many sales reps there were. HarperCollins alone had four, just for SW London (one for fiction, another for children's, one for general non-fiction, plus a dedicated rep for maps and reference), whilst most of the other major publishers had at least two.

If you only had one sales representative per region, you weren't a proper publisher.

As a result, I probably spent around 60% of my time buying new titles from sales reps, during meetings that were called 'subbing' sessions. Until I reached the dizzy heights of management, all new title buying had to take place on the shop floor, so we usually tucked ourselves away in a quiet corner where we wouldn't be bothered by customers.

Each representative turned up with at least one large suitcase containing huge files of blad (which stands for book layout and design), showing mock-ups of dustjackets, blurbs and details of how much publicity the book was going to get. My job was to decide whether the book would sell in Richmond and, if I thought it would, guess how many copies we'd need.

Initially, I had no idea what I was talking about and the whole buying process seemed farcical. Some reps saw a golden opportunity for a stitch-up, convincing me that an obscure £35 book on dolphins warranted a minimum order of five copies. The more experienced reps took a longer view, knowing that any duds would only come back as returns, which would have to be credited back to the bookseller.

The best reps effectively taught me how to do my job, gently nudging me in the right direction if I'd overestimated how many books we needed. I had the good sense to listen to them, but not everyone did. When one young bookseller stubbornly refused to accept that he needed five rather than 40 copies of a new poetry title, the rep slammed his folder shut and said "Look, I'm going to go away now. I'll come back when I can talk to a grown-up."

The second thing that impressed me about the reps was how few of them read books. You would imagine that if a publisher employed people to sell its titles, they would try to recruit bookish, literary types. However, the majority of the 'old school' reps had no interest in books and would have been just as happy selling exhaust pipes or photocopiers.

There seemed to be very strong class divisions in the traditional publishing world. The public school, university-educated types went into the editorial departments, whilst the vulgar business of actually selling the books was left to people who had mostly left school at 16.

At first it seemed absurd that publishers had a sales force made up of people who didn't know that George Eliot was a woman, but over time I came to realise that the best sales reps were frequently the Brians and Barrys, who didn't read, whilst the worst were often the bright young things who may have had English degrees, but didn't know how to sell a book.

In the early 1990s, the typical rep was a man in his mid 50s, with a bald head, moustache and a ruddy face that indicated an approaching heart attack. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase "Keith won't be in for a while - he's just had a heart attack" (I suppose it was all those 'Little Chef' meals). When he arrived, panting with the effort of dragging a suitcase from the car park, I never knew whether he'd make it to the end of the session.

Keith may not have been widely read, but he knew his market. He understood that X sold well in Windsor but not in Slough, whilst Y was unknown outside the M25. Sadly, the editorial departments rarely seemed to take of notice of their reps' sales reports and a large part of our buying session would be spent moaning about our respective head offices.

"Honestly Phil, you tell me, how am I going to sell this? They haven't got a clue."

It was a working-class, male-dominated world. Hours were spent on the road, so the car was king and each rep knew every service station and shortcut. If you wanted to get rid of a rep, giving them an Austin Montego was usually enough.

Some of the reps had little scams that made them feel that they were getting the upper hand over their unsympathetic employers. For example, when one rep went to get petrol, his wife followed him in her car and filled her tank during the same sesion (when someone challenged the rep about his fuel costs, he brazened it out: "It's a thirsty car mate").

Occasionally, a bright young thing at head office would try to get the reps more engaged with the titles they were representing:

"Phil, I got this fucking memo from some tosser at Head Office telling me I had to read this new novel and write a report about it! D'you know what I did? I phoned him up and said I haven't read a fucking book in 25 years and I'm not going to start now."

But not all of the reps were 'wide boys'. One was an ex-public school man in his 60s, who lived in an expensive London flat with his belligerent, alcoholic mother. In spite of his effete manner and Brian Sewell voice, he was at pains to let us know that he was heterosexual, constantly praising the feminine charms of detox guru Leslie Kenton:

When it came to Alan Hollinghurst, he was less enthusiastic:

"This is a book by a homosexual author that will only be of interest to other homosexuals".

He wasn't terribly keen on Irvine Welsh either:

"Here is another book for young people to waste their pocket money on".

It was all said with a faint twinkle in the eye, but I felt that he was a rather bitter, disappointed man, trapped in a world he despised. When he was forced to retire, he refused to accept the gold-plated fountain pen that his colleagues had bought for him.

But by the time I became a bookseller, the traditional reps' world was changing. The Keiths were increasingly being replaced, either by Sues (much to the relief of many female booksellers) or earnest young graduates and the subbing sessions - once a mixture of dirty jokes, gossip and moaning - became more businesslike in tone.

Overall I got on very well with the sales reps and came to regard some of them as friends. They were generally bright, funny people with a healthy cynicism about the publishing industry and, most important of all, a good sense of humour. When I left high-street bookselling, one of the things I really missed was having a good gossip with a rep.

I loved exchanging scurrilous anecdotes about colleagues. I learned that one Ottakar's manager regularly had pyjama-party sleepovers in her shop, whilst another had stolen enough money to buy a sports car (he ended up in prison). But my favourite gossip was about authors. I learned that Jilly Cooper was lovely but Jeffrey Archer was deeply unpleasant, whilst Terry Pratchett could be very grumpy, only turning on the charm for his fans.

If a sales rep had ever been treated badly by an author, we all knew about it. In a few cases, an author's career was effectively killed off by the rep, as we all conspired to make sure that their books were barely visible.

The rep's job has got a lot harder in recent years. Every year, redundancies and early retirement have trimmed the sales forces of publishers and the surviving reps have been expected to cover ever larger areas for little or no extra pay. The once ubiquitous HarperCollins rep is now as elusive as the natterjack toad.

With only one major book chain left, the age of the publisher's rep is almost over. I think that there should be a memorial coat of arms, depicting a full English breakfast, some blood pressure tablets and a large black suitcase on wheels. But sadly, I think their passing will be unnoticed by all but a few.

Light and Shade

2012-03-28T08:48:00.021Z

During the last few days, our oven has exploded, the fridge has broken and my car's dashboard keeps flashing an orange light, warning of imminent doom. It feels as if we're in a Stephen King movie. As far as I know, there are no Native American burial grounds under our house, but we're near the site of the Battle of Lewes, so perhaps some tormented medieval souls are making their presence felt.

This morning I took the car to be serviced and walked home, cutting through some of the many twittens that are tucked away behind the main roads. Because it was so early, the sun was still low and I was struck by the contrast between the intense, golden light of the castle walls and the gloomy, muted colours of the narrow twittens.

I don't normally walk around thinking about light and shade, but last night I went to a fascinating talk about Eric Ravilious, given by author (and blogger) James Russell. Organised by the wonderful Much Ado Books, it was so successful that the venue had to be to changed to a larger place.

I'd say that there were at least 150 people at the talk - a number that any bookseller would be very happy with. Even the largest city centre stores struggle to achieve figures like that, so it's remarkable that an independent bookshop in a small Sussex village attracted such a good turnout.

It's a great tribute to both the growing popularity of Eric Ravilious and the marketing skills of Much Ado Books and James Russell.

I seemed to be the only person there under 50. I'm not quite sure why, although I know how difficult it is to do anything in the evening if you're in the tunnel of parenthood. Perhaps Banksy would have drawn a different crowd.

As for the talk itself, I think it would have been interesting even if I'd never heard of Eric Ravilious, thanks to James Russell's passion about his subject. Using a series of slides, he showed the contrast between Ravilious's paintings and the actual scenes. To a layman like me, it was a revelation.

For example, here is a lithograph that Ravilious made of Newhaven Harbour:

And here is the actual scene, which I've pinched from James Russell's blog:

I had no idea that Ravilous had excercised his artistic licence so liberally, compressing distances and altering the perspective to suit his purposes. That is one of the things that makes him a great artist, along with his ability to capture the spiritual quality of a place:

For example, compare this watercolour by Ravilious of the South Downs in winter:

With this traditional downland scene by a contemporary artist:

One is a work of great art. The other, I'm afraid, is a greetings card that I would send to someone to someone over the age of 90 (but only if they had advanced cataracts).

Perhaps my favourite Ravilious painting is 'Dangerous Work at Low Tide', which comes from the final years of his life when he was an official war artist. I bought a 420mm x 594mm print from the Ministry of Defence for the ridiculously cheap price of £18.

If this takes your fancy, you can buy it here.

Even if you only have a very casual interest in the art of the interwar years, I'd strongly recommend getting along to one of James Russell's talks. Recent venues have included London, Oxford and Bristol, so it's worth checking his blog to see where he's off to next.

Finally, a quick plug for Much Ado Books. The owners - Kate Olsen and Nash Robbins - ran a successful bookshop in Marblehead, Massachusetts for over 20 years before moving to Alfriston in Sussex. When 'Much Ado' first opened, I confidently predicted that they'd close within two years because Alfriston was too small to sustain a bookshop.

Instead, they went on to win the Independent Bookseller of the Year award and now have a thriving business which is an object lesson in how to run a bookshop in the age of Amazon and ebooks. It just shows how much I know.

In hindsight, they followed one of the golden rules of bookselling: open a shop where there are lots of posh people. Alfriston may be small, but it has a wonderful catchment area full of literary types who think that buying books at discounted prices from Amazon is insufferably vulgar. The owners have successfully exploited the area's Bloomsbury connection and both the stock and presentation are pitch perfect. It's hard to believe that they're relative newcomers to Sussex.

On April 22nd they're holding a book swap, hosted by Scott 'Me and My Big Mouth' Pack and Robert Husdon. The idea is that you bring a book that you love along and swap it for one you haven't read.

Frankly, if I love a book, I'm buggered if I'm going to let anyone else have it. I don't even lend books, so I'm not sure whether I'll go or not. Perhaps I could bring a book I'm not that keen on and pretend to like it, but I suppose that really isn't entering into the spirit of the occasion.

On the subject of books, I almost forgot to mention why James Russell was holding an event with Much Ado Books. He's written some books - beautiful, lavishly-illustrated hardbacks - that focus on different aspects of Ravilious's art. Here's one I bought earlier:

I wouldn't be tactless enough to include an Amazon link, but they are available from all good booksellers and, no doubt, some bad ones too.

This Evening

2012-03-26T17:17:00.004Z

This evening I decided to take advantage of the extra hour of daylight and go for what the Victorians used to call a perambulation. It was a lovely evening - almost t-shirt weather - and the sound of birdsong and horses hooves made me feel as if I was in an episode of Midsomer Murders, without the murders.

It almost made up for an otherwise shitty day, during which my wife and I decided to pull our oldest son out of the school system.

It has taken me a while to realise what a difficult time we've had. I've known several people with autistic children and compared to them, our life was a breeze, so I think I turned a blind eye to the fact that my son struggled to cope with normal, everyday situations and I kept looking for easy answers.

It was confusing. My son doesn't neatly fit into any category, but exhibits symptoms of several syndromes. Sometimes I think he has something that hasn't been named yet. At others I'm more inclined to agree with R D Laing's view that mental illness is a social construct (I'm not denying the existence of full-blown nutters, but there is a general consensus that neurotic and psychotic illnesses are exacerbated by modern, urban life).

Would my son's behaviour be regarded as problematic if we lived in a traditional community? Judging by his skill at computer games, he'd be an excellent hunter-gatherer.

It does feel as if we're in a big sausage machine sometimes, where people are sucked into a system that squeezes them into the right shape so that they can function in a modern, urban, post-industrial society, and if you're a square peg in a round hole, then you're diagnosed with a syndrome.

I don't know; I feel more confused than ever. If I hadn't had a second child I might have gone to my grave thinking that I was one of the most useless fathers in existence, but my younger son is completely different. Indeed, if he'd been my only child I might have been unbearably conceited.

I've met those smug parents who seem to delight in telling you how Lily or Hector love visiting the Tate Modern (when they're not busy having viola lessons) and then go on to show you the Matisse-influenced drawings they did when they got home. It always gives me a huge sense of satisfaction when they have a second child who turns out to be a complete mentalist: welcome to my world, you self-satisfied gits.

I'm not quite sure what's going to happen next. Obviously my son's education is important, but his mental health comes first. Getting him out of the front door is the first challenge (and I think that getting a dog may be the answer), after which I hope that my son will rediscover his curiosity about the world around him.

Meanwhile, his brother is downstairs doing maths games and designing a birthday card for his former childminder. His only worries seem to center around the number of people who want to be his friend. Also, the schoolwork isn't challenging enough.

Life is such a lottery.

Somerset Maugham Talking About Novelists

2012-03-24T16:17:00.005Z

"All novels are, every now and then, a great deal of a bore. You have to accept that. No novel is interesting all the way through unless it's a very, very short one."

You wouldn't expect to find a YouTube clip of an author born in 1874 talking about a book he'd published in 1915. But Somerset Maugham had the good fortune to live a long life, whilst writers like D H Lawrence (born 11 years after Maugham) seem as remote as Thomas Hardy.

Here's an interview that Maugham did with the wonderfully effete Malcolm Muggeridge. The sound is slightly out of synch with the video:

Somerset Maugham's longevity was probably a result of good genes and living in the south of France, but there may have been another factor too. According to Clement Freud, Maugham was "obsessed with staying alive and spent most of his later years averting death, which included the consumption of a range of pills including some made from the entrails of swan".

Freud also noted that Maugham had the worst halitosis he had ever encountered.

Fortunately YouTube is still several years away from providing odourama, so we can enoy this close-up encounter with Somerset Maugham without holding our breath.

Independents' Day

2012-03-21T19:46:00.006Z

I'm still getting used to the randomness of self-employment. After years of working regular hours for a set number of days per week, it feels strange to not know what you're doing from one day to the next.

On Monday I received a text from someone that read:

"Hi Phil, I'm in the process of designing a bookshop and could use some helpful input. I think you're probably the man - what do you reckon?"

24 hours later I was wandering around a huge, deserted haberdashery shop, trying to imagine how it would work as a bookshop. I wasn't sure whether I'd be much use, but I'd forgotten how much I'd learned. Years of opening shops, ordering stock and trawling through spreadsheets of sales data had given me a good overview of the priorities.

I made a few suggestions, including moving the till point closer to the entrance, putting the children's books nearer the back and reducing the opening stock order by 80%, but I couldn't bring myself to make the most obvious recommendation. Don't do it!

According to an article published in today's Bookseller, "Four in ten shops will shut and property portfolios will reduce by 30-40% in the next five years as customers increasingly turn to online shopping over bricks and mortar, according to a report released this morning".

It's not a good time to open a shop.

I'm fairly confident that the best independent bookshops will survive if they have a good catchment area, but sadly this shop wasn't in one of those towns. Indeed, when I looked at the shabbily-dressed locals, slowly hobbling past the window, it reminded me of an episode of The Walking Dead.

Luckily the rent is very low, so the shop will only have to sell a few books a day to be profitable. Also, the owner is a very talented bookseller with several successful businesses, so he knows exactly what he's doing. But I still think that it takes a tremendous amount of courage to open a shop in today's economic climate.

According to Hugo Clark from Deloitte's, "The role of stores is changing but that does not mean they will be less important. The store of the future will be less about driving product sales and more about a holistic brand experience."

I think if my name was Hugo, I'd refrain from using phrases like 'holistic brand experience' as people will think that you're a bit of a ponce. But he's right. I think that the retail chains of the future will make most of their money online and only need a small number of stores as showcases for their 'brand'.

It all sounds a bit depressing, but with fewer chain stores around we could be about to enter a new golden age of small businesses and independent shops.

I'll come clean; I want to see Britain end up like an episode of Chigley and if the recession brings us any closer to the promised land, then I welcome the retail meltdown. Let's bring back steam, tweed, cravats and tiffin:

Five Forgotten Gentlemen

2012-03-19T17:53:00.004Z

I found a photograph today, nestled between pages 118 and 119 of a Victorian novel called 'The Old Helmet', by Elizabeth Wetherell. The picture was in such a dreadful state - torn, creased and discoloured - that I was tempted to throw it away.

But one hour later, after enduring the tedium of Photoshop Elements, the image suddenly came to life:

It looks like the 1890s to me. I should know - I was there only the other week.

I wonder what Creese's Oatmeal Stout tasted like?

My First Year in Bookselling

2012-03-15T16:03:00.014Z

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I spent the best part of 18 years working in bookshops. Where did all the time go? It's not even as if I wanted to be a bookseller. I just needed a job and my girlfriend told me that there was a vacancy in a new shop called Waterstone's. I'd never heard of them.

I got the job after an interview with a woman with shaking hands, who already seemed tired and disillutioned with her new shop. That probably wasn't a good sign. I was offered a starting salary of £7,250 p/a, rising to £7,500 if I completed my three month probationary period.

Even 20 years ago, if you earned less than £10,000 a year, your options in life were pretty limited. With such awful pay, the job could only be a useful stopgap. It certainly wasn't a sensible career choice.

Sadly, I didn't have a Plan B and my Damascene moment never came. Some booksellers passed through the shop like gap year backpackers in Goa, taking a breather before going on to enjoy successful careers in television or publishing. I stayed and became Colonel Kurtz.

I spent the early 1990s at Waterstone's in Richmond - an affluent suburb of London that was quickly changing from old money into a ghetto for post-apartheid South African exiles, American business execs and semi-retired rock stars. I think my mother was the last working class person to grow up in Richmond. There should be some sort of plaque on her old house.

Starting at Waterstone's was a baptism of fire. I wasn't well-read in those days (I was more interested in music) and each shift was like being on Mastermind, except that the rounds lasted for three hours at a time and you weren't allowed to make a mistake or say "Pass".

Some people shouted at me because I hadn't heard of the book they wanted. Others merely resorted to sarcasm or barely-concealed contempt. At first it was deeply humiliating, but as my knowledge and confidence grew, I realised that it was unreasonable for people to expect me to be omniscient. It wasn't a personal failure if I'd never heard of an obscure, long out of print novel that was published in 1948.

I noticed that a lot of older people seemed to resent the young and welcomed the opportunity to bully them. Men in their 60s would regularly chastise our 18-year-old Saturday girl for her poor general knowledge of politicians of the 1950s, forgetting that they had lived four times as long, whilst middle-aged women expected me to be their gimp, running up and down the three flights of stairs until I'd reached the bottom of their long lists (sadly the demands stopped there).

The worst were the South African women, dripping in gold, with vulgar Gucci sunglasses and rottweiler accents: "Yeess, Ah'm wanting to know if you hev eeny books bah theess lady?" The answer was always Jackie Collins and even if the book was staring them in the face, it seemed to go against the grain for them to do anything for themselves.

Every day was a struggle, but luckily I picked the job up quite quickly and learned to talk with great authority on subjects that I knew nothing about. I also realised that I had a knack for making sure that we didn't run out of the bestselling titles (harder than it sounds when publishers took up to three weeks to deliever and there were no computerised stock control systems).

But perhaps the most important lesson I learned was how to answer back in a way that wouldn't get me the sack. Once people could no longer smell the fear, they treated me with respect and I began to enjoy my job more.

Interestingly, the really successful people - whether they were famous authors like Anthony Burgess or celebrities like Mick Jagger - were unfailingly polite. It was the noveau riche who were a pain in the arse. They were usually quite thick as well, but felt that their wealth conferred a natural superiority.

Anthony Burgess. One of my colleagues dared me to tell him how much I enjoyed his 'Chocolate Orange', but I chickened out.

For some reason that I couldn't fathom, the most ghastly people always bought Ayn Rand or The Art of War, whilst the dippy ones couldn't get enough of A Year in Provence. I tried hard not show my contempt for people's book choices, but when one Tim-Nice-But-Dim customer held up a copy of The Bridges of Madison County and said "This is wonderful, isn't it..." I cracked and launched into a Bernard Black-style diatribe.

Apparently the poor man left the shop looking as if he'd been horribly violated. I'm amazed he didn't complain.

During my first year at Waterstone's, I quickly discovered that bookshops were magnets for eccentrics, kleptomaniacs and the mentally ill - and that was just the staff (the most audacious book thief was a man called Desmond who decided that the most efficient way of stealing stock was to become a bookseller). We also had a loyal following of lost souls who spent so much time in the shop that their stock knowledge easily equalled ours.

In many ways bookselling left a lot to be desired. The money was terrible, working with the public was exhausting and the shift system meant that many evenings and weekends were wasted.

However, the best parts of the job more than compensated for the irritations. I loved having the freedom to spend vast sums of money buying new titles from publishers' reps (all of whom seemed to be called Brian or Keith), taking a punt on an unknown author or range, only to find that I'd spotted a new trend, like the Aga saga craze. In my first year at Waterstone's, two buying decisions alone paid for my salary.

Trying to look busy, waiting for the self-timer to go off

I also loved meeting authors and publishers, deciphering the complex web of friendships and petty rivalries between people in the book world. I never read reviews in the same light once I realised how many of them were written by friends reviewing each others' books.

Sometimes I even liked working with the public - usually on a quiet evening when there was time to talk to customers, find out what they liked and make recommendations. Seeing people enjoy the shop, relaxing in an armchair with a book from a new display I'd created was very rewarding.

The first year passed quickly. 12 months on I still had no idea what I wanted to do and although I hated being poor, I realised that I loved my job. The books were interesting, my colleagues were bright, funny people and I felt that I was quite good at what I did.

Some of the staff of Waterstone's Richmond, on Brighton Pier

I stayed. The money gradually improved and by the time I was a manager in London, I was able to afford a mortgage, meals out and a decent holiday every year. It didn't last. I ruined it all by having children and leaving London. I have lived in penury ever since.

I'd probably still be managing a bookshop now, if HMV hadn't bought Ottakar's. But I'm very glad I left. I don't think that I could ever go back to working weekends, dealing with the public and putting up with head office edicts any more. Once you've tasted freedom, it's hard to go back.

However I miss the fun: the buzz of a crowded shop on the last Saturday before Christmas, meeting old friends at drunken book launches and having a good bitch with the publishers' sales reps. I don't think there's much fun in the book trade any more, so perhaps I was lucky to get out while I did.

How many other jobs give you the opportunity to play with wigs, make-up and live snakes?

Somerset Maugham and a Book Title I Daren't Mention

2012-03-13T12:38:00.014Z

I've been feeling under the weather for a while - nothing specific, just aches and pains, lethargy and a general feeling of wrongness. I put it down to stress, working outdoors in the cold or, perhaps, simply middle age beginning to claim its stake.

I carried on as usual, relying on siestas in the afternoon to deal with the tiredness and a few glasses of wine in the evening to dull the pain. But last week I started to feel pretty rough and decided to visit my GP for some reassurance.

I suppose I was hoping to see an old-fashioned doctor - the sort who still occasionally work as locums, call you "old chap" and say things like "Nothing to worry about, but keep the golf clubs in the boot for a couple of weeks. If the pain starts to niggle, have a small brandy at bedtime". Instead, I had a woman who looked horrified and used phrases like "Actually, that's really bad".

After five minutes of watching her pull yikes! faces, I was convinced that I wasn't long for this world. When I discovered that it was just pneumonia, I felt a huge sense of relief.

I've now spent five days in bed and instead of wasting my time watching YouTube clips of the Jeremy Kyle Show (I never set out to watch them, but whether I begin with chimpanzees or the Hadron Collider, it always seems to lead back to Jeremy Kyle), I've been reading Of Human Bondage. After some rather unfortunate experiences, I decided not to use the novel's title for this post.

I'd never read Somerset Maugham before. I associated him with that group of early 20th century British second-rate writers - Bennett, Walpole and Galsworthy - whose novels were incredibly popular in their day but are now regarded as dated, with turgid prose and half-baked philosophies. Even Maugham himself seemed to agree with this view: "I am in the front row of second-raters".

But by chance I came across the customer reviews for Of Human Bondage on Amazon and was so impressed by the passion Maugham's novel had inspired in its readers (nearly everyone gave the book five stars) I decided to give it a go.

I'm normally a slow reader, but managed to devour all 729 pages of Maugham's bildungsroman in a weekend. Admittedly I was stuck in bed, but if I'd picked up a Joseph Conrad novel I would have soon been reaching for the remote control. Instead, I was fully immersed in the London of the 1890s, walked its streets, sat in its parks and jostled amongst the crowds at the music hall.

Of Human Bondage (Wikipedia link included because I don't intend to discuss the plot) is Maugham's masterpiece. The prose may lack the stylistic perfection of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but it is a powerful novel of ideas that, with its musings on absurdism, anticipates existentialist works like Nausea and The Myth of Sisyphus.

Throughout the narrative, the main character regularly asks himself if there can really be any meaning to existence. Everywhere he looks, people lead lives of quiet tragedy, defeated by overwhelming odds, with any last vestiges of hope crushed by the final acceptance of their own ineluctable mediocrity (if only they'd had blogging in those days).

If that sounds all rather maudlin, don't be put off. Above all, Of Human Bondage is a compelling story and unlike that other great chronicler of late Victorian London, George Gissing, it isn't relentless gloomy.

A typical George Gissing scene

Maugham doesn't shy away from any unpalatable truths and some passages must have shocked its readers in 1915, but he avoids unnecessarry melodrama and resolves the novel with a conclusion that won't leave you banging your head against the wall.

Somerset Maugham has never been popular with the critics. Even at the height of his career, Maugham's plain, conventional prose was compared unfavourably to the work of new modernist writers like Thomas Mann and William Faulkner. But although Of Human Bondage may not be stylistically innovative, its sheer weight of ideas, the integrity of its narrative and the strength of its characters make it, in my opinion, a masterpiece.

Sadly, Somerset Maugham's greatest novel doesn't appear on any of the recent 100 best books lists that appear with an ever increasing frequency. It doesn't even pop up on readers' choices, eclipsed by masterpieces like The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones' Diary. That's why I'm adding my small stone to the cairn.

If you harbour any secret time travel fantasies about going back to late Victorian London, this is the nearest you'll get. Of Human Bondage is a panorama of a society in transition during the fin de siecle: outwardly stable, but driven by undercurrents that are threatening long-held views on religion, gender and class. Maugham's descriptions of the streets, cafes and railway stations are so vivid that you will feel as if you've been there.

Like most great novels, Of Human Bondage vividly conveys its time, but never seems dated because it asks questions and makes observations that are as pertinent today as they were 100 years ago. For example, one passage, in which Maugham describes a dance hall, could almost be lifted word for word to describe a modern club and the desperate hedonism of its users, anxious to forget the tedium of their daily lives.

As with many novels of this period, Somerset Maugham does occasionally get on his soapbox. There's the usual stuff about sex, money and the Church of England; but unlike H G Wells' incredibly tedious novel The New Machiavelli, he doesn't allow his pontificating to spoil the narrative.

Of Human Bondage is a great novel to read when you're ill or on a long journey. But frankly, why wait?

Sample quotes from On Human Bondage:

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.

You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.

“Oh, it's always the same,' she sighed, 'if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.”

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

Spaced Out

2012-03-11T09:52:00.005Z

Aside from the prospect of nuclear armageddon, the future looked good in the early 1960s:

In some ways I'm very relieved that we aren't all living in domed cities and flying helicars - I think the novelty would wear off quite quickly - but I do miss the optimism of the Space Age. Regardless of its scientific value, there is a heroic quality about manned space flight that excites us.

When the space shuttles were decommissioned without being replaced, it was part of a subtle shift that has taken place in our attitude towards the future. I became particularly aware of this when my youngest son asked me why there were supersonic airliners and moon landings when I was a little boy, but not now.

As he was too young for a lecture on postmodernism and the cultural legacy of the end of the Cold War, I gave him the short answer: they cost too much money.

But NASA's estimate that a return to the moon would cost $104 billion seems a drop in the ocean compared to the $757.8 billion that the US Department of Defense claims that it spent in Iraq (some claim that it's much higher in reality).

Maybe it's just the chattering classes of Lewes (aka 'Islington-on-the-Downs'), but whoever I talk to there is a growing pessimism about the future. People seem to be battening down the hatches, buying wood burning stoves, preparing for an age of hardship and struggle.

Returning to the moon might seem a frivilous and irrelevant enterprise, but it would help to foster a new sense of optimism. Posterity never condemns a generation for spending too much money on a beautiful building or a miraculous piece of engineering, but it does condemn them for a lack of vision and courage.

That's my geeky fantasy, anyway. Obviously, this would be the ideal:

I know that I should be thinking about eradicating third world debt, saving public libraries and reducing our carbon emissions, rather than moonbases run by women in catsuits. I'm sorry.

I must admit I not all there at the moment. I've been bedridden with a chest infection for the last three days and I think the drugs are getting to me, hence this strange post. I hate being ill.

The one thing that's keeping me sane is Somerset Maugham's 'Of Human Bondage', which I'm reading for the first time. Who would have thought that a 1915, 700-page bildungsroman could be so compelling? (Don't tell me how it ends)

But as the author wrote:

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life".

In a Russian Mood

2012-03-06T22:35:00.006Z

After reading about the return of Vladimir Putin, I've been in a distinctly Russian mood. I was going to listen to Shostakovich and eat borsch, but ended up getting waylaid by some Soviet disco hits from the late 1970s, including this gem:

I had no idea that disco fever spread beyond the Iron Curtain, but you'd never get bands this big in the West (with the possible exception of the Love Unlimited Orchestra). It's overmanning. No wonder the Soviet economy collapsed.

Beyond the wah-wah guitars and dodgy afros, it's a good old-fashioned gloomy Russian ballad. I can't see the Bee Gees covering this track.

It's strange to think that a whole generation have been born and reached adulthood since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR, with its Mayday parades, geriatric politicians and five-year plans feels recent to me, but I've read that many Russian teenagers and children are woefully ignorant about the period.

This will tell them all they need to know:

Returning to music, I found another gloomy Russian ballad - a wonderful song called Виски (Whisky) by a contemporary singer called Елена Ваенга (Elena Vaenga). I can't understand a word she's saying apart from viski and boogie woogie, but I'm completely mesmerised by her beautiful voice: