The Virtual Bookseller

I'm feeling quite cheerful today, particularly as I've just been hearing about what an awful Christmas most of our friends have had. As Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, people are miserable for a variety of reasons, however there does seem to be a consistent thread running through most of the anecdotes I've heard: 40-something parents, squeezed between demanding young children and needy, elderly parents, several of whom have become too ill to return home and are still in Lewes.

My mother-in-law attempted to spend Christmas with us, but had to abandon her journey because of the appalling weather. She got as far as Victoria Station, which was apparently full of exhausted, folorn-looking pensioners, dragging wheeled suitcases of presents. In their ap-free existence, they were blissfully unaware that the entire transport network had been shut down.

Our Christmas was rather pleasant, apart from my growing conviction that I was going to die soon.

I'm trying to convalesce, but it's difficult. When you work for a company or organisation, sick leave can feel like a minor victory against the machine. But now I'm the machine and I can't afford to take two weeks off, so I've been making short trips to work to fulfill orders and deal with enquiries.

I'm relieved that I don't run a bookshop. I entertained the idea a few years ago, but was warned off by James Heneage, the former MD of Ottakar's. I'm very glad that I listened. I would have had to borrow money, either to buy an existing business or establish a new one and would have been servicing a debt in the face of declining book sales.

Selling on the internet is easy, compared to running a shop. I don't have to start work at 9.00 and no longer have to worry about window displays, bestsellers, promotions, local parking charges, bad weather, staff sickness, health and safety audits, cashing-up, cleaning, deliveries, Christmas opening hours, signing sessions or dealing with customers. I have no 'brand'. I just sell my books for a pound or two less than the next person.

If I work full time, I know that I will be able to cover the monthly bills and food shopping. If I put my feet up and start watching too many 1970s drama series in the afternoon, I'm confident that my bank account will go into the red halfway through the month, so that's my incentive to work.

I've noticed that each country I sell to has its own quirks. German customers can be obsessed with delivery times, but are scrupulously honest. Italian buyers often seem pleasantly surprised when the book actually arrives, as if it is an unsual occurence. Americans rarely leave feedback unless they are annoyed, which distorts the seller rating.

Some of them are also very sensitive to 'odors'.

I realise that it is rather offputting if a book smells and if I detect a strong scent of tobacco or mildew, I'll either bin the book or mention it in the listing. Unfortunately, judging by the comments I receive, a small number of books slip through the net, probably because my nasal acumen has been dulled by the cowshed opposite my unit:

Perhaps I should hold each book close to my nose and have a good sniff. But I don't fancy the idea of spending several hours a day inhaling spores and dust particles. I'm not sure what the answer is.

Britain appears to be the home of pedants. My actual customers are fine, but I occasionally receive strongly-worded emails from browsers informing me that my book listing about so-and-so is woefully inaccurate and that the real first edition was published with a blue cloth cover in 1872. Sometimes, the timing (usually sent after 10.00pm) and tone suggests that the author has had a few drinks.

Of course I don't like to make mistakes, but if the only existing record for a title is in error, I have no way of telling. I welcome politely-worded corrections, but take exception to the more pompous, boorish emails.

I'm also slightly irritated by the emails I get from secondhand booksellers, particularly the ones in block capitals that read: "PLEASE ADVISE BEST PRICE INCLUDING DEALER DISCOUNT AND 2ND CLASS POST."

In a nutshell, they want to buy a book from me for around £4 and sell it on for a markup. I've no objection to that. If a seller has found customers who are prepared to pay more, then good luck to them. But when they want me to give them a 10% discount, cheaper postage and pay by cheque (which requires a time-wasting trip to the bank), I become rather grumpy and want to say "Just buy the book, like everybody else".

Fortunately, most of the people I deal with, in every country, are thoroughly decent and reasonable (they are bibliophiles, after all) and the majority of emails are from customers telling me how delighted they are with their purchase. It's particularly gratifying when someone has been reunited with a much-loved book from their youth.

Perhaps the aspect of my work that I find most satisfying is when a book that was destined for the scrapheap - literally - now has a new lease of life, bringing pleasure to another generation of readers. My business is small enough for me to care about each individual order and I enjoy finding out why Mrs X in Wyoming has spent so many years looking for the 1927 novel I've just sold to her.

The other advantage of selling on the internet is that my working hours are completely flexible, which means that I can deal with my son's various problems without having to take time off. Sometimes a whole day can be lost to medical appointments or a sudden crisis, so it is useful to be in a postion where I can catch up at the weekend.

I often go to work on Sunday, but I don't like it. The building creaks and groans, with noises that sometimes sound as if someone is standing behind me. It's very M. R. James at times.

I mention M. R. James as if I'm familiar with his works, but apart from one short story and the odd BBC drama, I'm a stranger to his oeuvre; probably because I find it hard to become engaged with something I don't believe in. I prefer the more worldly company of Anthony Trollope.

On the subject of Trollope, again, I'll end with this anecdote, which I forgot to mention in my last post:

One day, Trollope was in his club and heard two men complaining bitterly about how annoying one of his characters was, in a story that was being serialised. Trollope tapped both men on the shoulder and said: "Gentlemen, I shall have her killed within the week."

Was I Wrong About Trollope?

In a recent comment, I suggested that Anthony Trollope was the 'Werther's Originals' of English literature (for non-UK readers, they are a sweet/candy, favoured by the elderly). I also suggested that my current penchant for Trollope was evidence that I was knocking on a bit, or as the Spanish would say, es bastante viejo.

When you need reading glasses and would rather take a Trollope than a trollop to bed, you have crossed a border.

But I was wrong. Here is a young woman who loves Trollope, apart from The Warden, which she thinks is a bit boring:

The Post-Operative Paradise

Apart from inadvertently growing a beard, I have achieved very little this week. I'm not sure how long it takes to recover from surgery, but I'm in no hurry to return to work. I can't say I miss being surrounded by malevolent bulls and surly, limbless farm workers. Also, I think I'm temperamentally suited to indolence.

But does reading count as indolence? I'm not sure. Particularly when the authors include Paul Theroux, Michael Blakemore and John Williams. As this is supposed to be a literary blog, I thought I'd recommend the best books I've read recently:

Paul Theroux - The Last Train to Zona Verde

"A tourist doesn't know where they've been. A traveller doesn't know where they're going."

Many things have been said about Paul Theroux: he is not a travel writer, but a writer who travels; he regards himself as a novelist, but the reading public don't buy his fiction; he hasn't written anything decent for 30 years; he is pompous, self-important, cynical and grumpy; even his brother doesn't like him...

I could go on - everyone seems to have an opinion on the author. But who is Paul Theroux? Even he doesn't seem to be quite sure and wrote two novels - My Secret History and My Other Life - which narrate the alternate histories of a character called Paul Theroux.

However, I liked the Paul Theroux that I met in The Last Train to Zona Verde. Written ten years after his African travel memoir, Dark Star Safari, Theroux is now in his 70s and realises that he is making his last journey on the continent. He has loved Africa since he taught there in the 1960s, but is depressed by the growing corruption and squalor that surrounds him. He asks himself the question that all travellers ask at some point: What am I doing here?

"Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in a way to resemble the act of writing - a groping in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness."

In a Daily Telegraph review, Kevin Telfer criticises Theroux for writing a book that "feels more like a description of Theroux's inner state than what is around him." This not only seems to be rather missing the point of good travel writing, but is also woefully inaccurate, as one of the strengths of The Last Train to Zona Verde is its vivid accounts of the landscape and people.

If Theroux is 'grumpy' about sub-Saharan Africa, it is because he is comparing the present day reality of the continent with the idealism of the 1960s:

"We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West, a mirror image of our own failures. Such places are transit camps filled with people who have been abandoned by their fattened and corrupt governments."

But this is not a relentlessly gloomy book. Time and time again, we meet people who rise above the limitations of their backgrounds to triumph against the odds and Theroux is as keen to tell the stories of others as he is to ask himself what a 70-year-old man is doing on a journey that might end in death.

I enjoyed this armchair journey to somewhere I never intend to visit and would recommend it without reservation.


Michael Blakemore - Stage Blood

The mark of a really good book is one that makes you care about a subject you've never been interested in. In spite of having in-laws who worked in the theatre, I'm woefully ignorant about the subject and wouldn't have chosen to read this book if it hadn't been for this brilliant review by Simon Callow.

Whether you're interested in the early years of the National Theatre or not, Stage Blood is a gripping read in which the octogenrian Michael Blakemore settles an ancient score with Sir Peter Hall. In the hands of a lesser writer, it could have been an unedifying read by an embittered old man, but this memoir sparkles with generosity and wit.

Blakemore's portraits of figures like Olivier and Tynan are immensely entertaining, as is his description of Anthony Hopkins' disastrous, alcohol-fuelled performance of Macbeth. But it is the growing tension with Sir Peter, culminating in a terrible showdown, which rises Stage Blood above the level of an ordinary memoir and gives the reader a vicarious, visceral thrill.


John Williams - Stoner

When you read a book that has been universally praised and selected as every other person's book of the year, it is hard not to feel a certain resistance. How could any novel possibly live up to this amount of hype?

But Stoner did.


Alexander Lernet-Holenia - I Was Jack Mortimer

One of the best small publishers around is Pushkin Press, who specialise in discovering and translating lost classics, particularly European ones. I discovered them ten years ago, when I read Antal Szerb's wonderful Journey By Moonlight (originally published in Hungarian) and managed to get the book included in an 'Undiscovered Classics' promotion that I organised, across 130 branches of Ottakar's.


I Was Jack Mortimer is an short Austrian novel, published in 1930, that reads like that bastard offspring of Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler. It also reminded me of Antal Szerb and Jiri Weil, with its highly developed sense of the absurd.

The plot is simple enough: a taxi driver picks up a passenger at a station and is asked to drive to the Bristol Hotel. After a few minutes, the driver asks the passenger to clarify whether he wants the Old Bristol or the New Bristol. There is no reply. He repeats his question and is once again met with silence. When he is finally able to turn  round, the driver is horrified to see that his passenger has been killed. But how?

What follows is an enjoyably absurd story that vividly evokes the spirit of Middle Europe between the wars. It only takes a couple of hours to read, so I'd recommend it for a journey.


I've also enjoyed Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? - a great comfort read, full of wit and insight. I'd always regarded Trollope as a bit of an old windbag until I took the plunge a few years ago and read He Knew He Was Right.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I find Trollope's novels increasingly appealing.

Finally, I'd also recommend Max Hastings' book Bomber Command - another book about a subject I knew relatively little about. I had no idea that at the beginning of the War, British bombing was woefully inaccurate, with navigation equipment so rudimentary, that pilots were often miles from their targets.

Occasionally, if a magnetic storm affected their compasses, they even flew in the wrong direction and one pilot - a man named Warren - unwittingly bombed an English city (from then on, his colleagues called him Baron von Warren).

Although Max Hastings tries to be even-handed, it is clear that he doesn't have much time for 'Bomber' Harris, whose obsession with destroying every city in Germany allegedly clouded his military judgement and resulted in the unnecessary loss of life of both airmen and civillians.

If I had to recommend just one book, then it would have to be Stoner, but you've probably already read it.

At some point my wife will stop waiting on me hand and foot and I'll have to resume selling books, but in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy every moment.

Finally, this has nothing to do with books, but I watched The Happiest Days of Your Life with my mother the other day and thought that this scene alone made the whole film worthwhile:

New Year, New Look

It began around a month ago: a growing, but frustratingly nebulous feeling of 'wrongness', accompanied by an appetite for afternoon naps that increased in length. I remembered my wife's warning - "Don't you dare be ill at Christmas!" - and tried to carry on as normal, quietly ducking out of as many social engagements as possible.

I read a lot, including the new Paul Theroux, a mammoth Trollope novel and the wonderful 'Stoner'.

During a drive to see some friends in Hampton, just before Christmas, I wondered how I was going to get through the day and resolved to see a doctor as soon as possible. But what would I tell them? There is an undefined territory between wellness and illness that I've never been able to map. I procrastinated.

Christmas and the New Year were the quietest we'd had for years, so I was able to conceal my growing inability to cope with everyday tasks. I largely kept my worries about the possible causes to myself and resolved to have a full medical as soon as possible.

But three days ago, everything changed. A growing pain in the centre of my stomach quickly became excrutiating as it migrated to the right side. I consulted Google and felt fairly certain that I had appendicitis, but was a trip to hospital justified? I wasn't sure.

I had a vision of a James Robertson Justice-style doctor pressing down on my stomach and annoucing to his young cohorts "Ladies and gentleman, this man has been admitted with suspected appendicitis. I will now demonstrate that it is just wind."

Then I read an entry about the complications that follow a burst appendix and my mind was made up.

The Accident and Emergency department of Brighton Hospital was surprisingly empty for a Saturday night. The only people waiting to be seen were a young couple in their 20s, a rather malodorous homeless man and three Chinese people, who kept changing their seats every five minutes, possibly in an attempt to fox the queueing system.

After what seemed ages, but was probably only 20 minutes, I was assessed and moved to a holding centre, where people lay on beds in cubicles. Opposite me lay a well-spoken woman, who faintly resembled the 122-year-old Jeanne Calment. She appeared to have forgotten what was wrong with her and the nurses' attempts to coax information out of her were largely unsuccessful.

On my left, a curtain concealed a woman who sounded as if she was in her 50s. Unlike Madame Calment, she was able to remember every detail of the last 24 hours and proceed to give a blow-by-blow account of the minutiae of her day: "Then I went to me mum and dad's and I sat down on the sofa, put on the telly and I 'ad a sausage roll..." and on she went, until she eventually proved that ad nausea wasn't just a figure of speech.

When the woman mentioned sausage rolls for the second time, I started to get the giggles. Each movement of laughter produced a spasm of intense pain, so I turned my attentions to the old woman.

I thought how absurd it was that doctors and nurses were going through the charade of treating the old woman as if she had a curable illness, when the truth - the 'elephant in the room' - was she was just very old and had probably reached the natural end of her life. But what was the alternative?

What upset me most of all was that the old woman appeared to be alone in the world. I thought of all the elderly people my mother knows who book unnecessary chiropody appointments, just so they can be touched by another person.

After a pain relief drip failed to make any difference, morphine was introduced. That didn't work either, but after three further doses, I noticed that although I could still feel the pain, I felt curiously detached from it.

I listened to the voices in the distance. Someone was being aggressive, but it was clear that they were very frightened. Another person kept talking in affected genteel accent about their 'anterior', trying to add a certain gravitas to their account, but undermining it with malapropisms.

As I listened to what was going on around me, what impressed me most was the utter professionalism of the staff, who appeared to treat every patient with an unfailing courtesy and respect. I had plenty of opportunities to eavesdrop on conversations and was impressed by what I heard. Lame jokes were laughed at, dull anecdotes listened to with interest and confusion met with patience.

I was less impressed by the patients, who were a rather rum bunch. A woman on my ward was booked in for an operation, but because she was obsese, diabetic and smoked 20 a day, the doctors wanted to run some tests on her heart first. Instead of being grateful for these precationary meaures, she whinged and moaned incessantly: "I wanna go 'ome today. I don't wanna hang around in this shithole."

I didn't like the woman's sense of entitlement, particularly given that her health problems appeared to be largely self-inflicted, but a universal healthcare system is there for the feckless, the irresponsible and the gluttonous as well as the abstainers, the joggers and the vegans.

An elderly man with the strongest Sussex accent I've ever heard complained about the meals at every opportunity: "Oi've got no complaint 'bout the 'awspital, but the food 'ere is doiabolical!" A Filipino nurse replied "If you don't like the food, I can get form for you to complain if you like." The Sussex man snorted: "Forrrm? Caahn't see that it would make any difference, moi dearr. S'no point tryin'. Nawbody listens."

Admittedly the food wasn't haute cuisine and it was appropriate that it was usually served by Eastern Europeans, as the last time I'd tasted anything like it was in communist Czechoslovakia, but it was still vaguely edible. As for the wards, they were anything but a 'shithole' - spotlessly clean and comfortable.

Perhaps I have lower standards.

My only complaints about the hospital were its design - which resembled one of those mazes that scientists use to induce stress in rats - and a litigation-avoiding obsession with doing everything in triplicate. When someone pressed down hard on my appendix, I consoled myself with the thought that now the diagnosis was complete, I'd never have to experience that pain again. How wrong I was.

But I had music with me, which helped more than anything else. If you're ever waiting to go into surgery, I can strongly recommend Mozart's sublime 'Soave sia il vento'.

After the operation, which wasn't the keyhole surgery I was hoping for, I spent the night in a dementia ward (the only place with an available bed) listening to one man yell "Ben!" every ten seconds for most of the night, while another shouted "Push down hard on the fog 'orns boys" (I don't think the sea view helped).

In the morning, I saw the full horror of dementia - a condition that I had only understood in an abstract way before. The person calling out for Ben turned out to be an Irishman named Bill, who had reached a state where he couldn't remember what a cup of tea was for and regularly tipped the contents all over his bed as he examined the cup, trying to guess its purpose.

Under the influence of morphine, the sound of Bill calling for Ben brought back the theme tune of a children's 'Watch with Mother' programme. But sadly the introduction of opiates into my system didn't result in any epic poems or symphonies.

People compare the very old to young children, but infants learn and remember. Bill was unlearning, becoming less competent with each day. Here was a man who once made people laugh, had a job and made love, reduced to a state where he could no longer recognise everyday objects or remember where he was for longer than two minutes.

Caring for Bill was draining. When he wasn't shouting for Ben, he yelled "Nurse!"every five or ten minutes and required a constant change of sheets. In the coming decades, the National Health Service will have to cater for a steadily increasing number of Bills. At what point will it become unsustainable?

But my experience during the last 48 hours emphasised the strengths of the NHS more than its weaknesses. The medical care was second to none and the wards were clean and comfortable. It made the current controversy in the US about Obamacare seem even more absurd.

This excellent cartoon has been doing the rounds recently (click on it to see the full cartoon). It lacks subtlety and the 'Anywhere but America' claim is inaccurate, but it still makes an important point:

Of course the NHS is far from perfect. People wait too long for important tests, operation waiting lists are often unacceptably long and the labyrinthine bureacracy can sometimes be hard to deal with, but overall, the sum is greater than its parts. It is a noble idea that, most of the time, actually works.

Long may it continue.