The Art of Bookselling

Just as most good books aren’t really about the things they say they are, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) isn’t really about a bookshop. It’s about English insularity, politics, the misuse of power and the headstrong persistence of hope, with Florence Green’s Suffolk bookshop a symbol for every newcomer who ever found their best intentions beaten down by suspicion and hidebound tradition. At the end of the book, the formidable local matriarch Mrs Gamart manipulates her MP nephew into pushing through Parliament a bill specifically designed to close down Florence’s shop in favour of a local arts centre. The arts centre is Mrs Gamart’s pet project, and the town of Hardborough falls into line behind her. Florence has to con­clude that ‘the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop’. That is the last line of a book about a book­shop. An upbeat ending it is not.

As someone who runs an antiquarian bookshop, Henry Sotheran Ltd in London, I feel all this in a very raw part of my soul. However, I don’t think Fitzgerald is really writing about the bookshop industry. Indeed, the resistance Florence meets to her new shop is something that most of us would find unfamiliar. In my home town of Battle, which is not entirely dissimilar to Fitzgerald’s fictional Hardborough, our excellent new local bookshop Rother Books was welcomed with open arms three years ago and continues to thrive. It’s clear that Fitzgerald is using the bookshop to explore the innate conservatism of the English, which is really encapsulated in the furore caused when Florence decides to stock the recently published Lolita. Mr Brundish, Florence’s most influential supporter, puts his finger on the issue:

‘It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.’

Lazy is comfortable, though, and the bookshop makes some peo­ple very uncomfortable indeed. Lolita is the rallying point for Mrs Gamart’s campaign against Florence’s shop, ironically because of its popularity. The ‘undesirable attention’ caused by the window dis­play of the ‘unduly sensational novel by V. Nabokov’ brings enough disruption to the High Street to allow Mrs Gamart to lodge a formal complaint with Florence’s solicitor. Florence’s refusal to apologize and withdraw her bestseller from sale stiff­ens the matriarch’s resolve and bolsters her case against the shop as a public nuisance. This is the sort of perception that can only come from someone who has actually worked in a bookshop. You soon learn that some of your customers are very conservative, and that some subjects will always sell. Fitzgerald notes that certain customers will buy anything by anyone who has been in the SAS and also by ‘Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men’. That holds true to this day, and I love these people, for their dedication pays the bills. She also pinpoints the con­servatism of the market in the distinction between books that are ‘stickers’ and those that are ‘stayers’. Stickers are terribly hard to sell, and include philosophy and poetry. Stayers, such as reference books and dictionaries, are the books you always keep in stock because, although unexciting, they fulfil people’s needs. Stickers and stayers go to the back of the shop. The window is reserved for the ‘aristocratic’ – in Florence’s case, ‘luxurious’ books about country houses that, like their owners, demand their place at the front by ‘right of birth’. It is funny that, for Fitzgerald, the English class system applies even to its books. There are always exceptions to these rules though. Every now and again, the bookshop owner encounters a collector with interesting taste, an enquiring mind and a deep pocket, and the meeting of minds is invigorating for both parties. Florence has just one such customer, Mr Brundish, whose introductory letter describes a passionate engagement between customer and bookseller from a lost golden age of bibliophilia:

In my great-grandfather’s time there was a bookseller in the High Street who, I believe, knocked down one of the customers with a folio when he grew too quarrelsome. There had been some delay in the arrival of the latest instalment of a new novel – I think, Dombey and Son. From that day to this, no one has been courageous enough to sell books in Hardborough.

Supporters like Mr Brundish bring real hope to the bookseller. During hard times such as we have experienced recently, they can be the difference between survival and the unthinkable opposite. All things must pass, though, and when Mr Brundish, the only person with more influence in Hardborough than Mrs Gamart, dies, Florence’s bookshop is doomed. It is a lesson to all booksellers – cherish your best customers but never forget to cultivate more. You also have to know your market. Nothing is worse for business than selling books that aren’t quite right for the customer. Florence’s bookkeeper is unnerved to see the number of ‘returns inwards’ caused by buyers not liking their books and return­ing them: ‘They’re shocked, or say they’ve detected a distinct tinge of socialism.’ The balance between pushing exciting literature and not frightening the horses is something no bookseller has ever entirely mastered. This problem is central to the buying of stock, which is a complicated art of selection, negotiation and guesswork. Florence, as a seller of new books, deals with publishers’ reps, while as an antiquar­ian dealer I tend to deal with individuals with books to sell, but the basic process described is the same. Things have changed nowadays for new booksellers, but in the 1950s the reps would slog through the countryside to visit your shop with a selection of stock and would negotiate better prices on popular books as long as you took some of their less exciting wares: Those [reps] who made [the journey] were somewhat unwilling to part with their Fragrant Moments and engagement books, which were what Florence really wanted, unless she would also take a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made a demand. There is also the logistical problem of transporting and storing large loads of books. Winding Suffolk roads make life difficult for Florence; the Byzantine puzzle of the central London one-way system does the same for us. Then there is the awful intuition that unsold stock is just dead weight, summed up when, after the compulsory purchase of the shop, Florence discovers there would be ‘no claim for depreciation, as books were legally counted as ironmongery’. All these pressures mean that, like many other bookshops, includ­ing ours, Florence’s premises find themselves being used by people for secondary purposes that sound like a good idea at the time – peo­ple such as Theodore Gill, a persistent and prolific local water-colour painter, who arrives ‘smiling as a toad does’ with bundles of dreadful paintings that he expects Florence to exhibit. She is finally able to fob him off, despite him hanging small paintings willy-nilly on her shelves, but she does succumb to the idea of running a private circulating library. This is hugely time-consuming, highly unprofitable and ultimately disastrous when Mrs Gamart imperiously picks up books reserved for other customers and causes an actual riot. The financial pressure on bookshops to diversify and provide other ser­vices – coffee, cake, juggling workshops – is still very real and demands a whole range of skills that the dedicated bookseller might not have or, indeed, be interested in acquiring. A bookseller simply wants to sell books to like-minded people, and Fitzgerald under­stands that perfectly. I have always thought that, although this novel is about more than just a bookshop, it must have been written by someone with insider knowledge. It was no surprise to learn that in the 1950s, when Penelope and her husband Desmond were hard up, she took a part-time job at the Sole Bay Bookshop in Southwold, run by the very genteel Phyllis Neame. In her 2013 biog­raphy of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee reports Fitzgerald’s rather nostalgic feelings about her time there:

Mrs Neame . . . would have been hor­rified at the idea of on-line bookselling, and so would the customers, who thought of the shop as the one place to go on a wet day (and the weather can be very bad in Southwold). They would hang about for hours and go away without buying anything – except perhaps one greeting card – but we never complained, that would have been against the tradition of bookshop keeping.

Like Florence’s shop (and, we think, Sotheran’s), the Sole Bay Bookshop had a poltergeist. Penelope and Phyllis had a long debate about stocking Lolita and, in the end, went ahead. The dreaded novel didn’t bring Phyllis’s bookshop down, which at least paints a rosier picture of English tastes than Fitzgerald’s book, but Phyllis was reportedly quite upset by the depiction of Southwold as Hardborough, insisting it was all much nicer, as I’m sure it was. The Bookshop isn’t a roman-à-clef. It’s a funny book, but it’s also so gloomy in its conclu­sions that it does make you fear for the future of British culture. From my own place in the book industry, I really don’t think it’s as bad as all that. We have a lovely clientele who buy books across all kinds of subjects and who love a good chat about whatever they’re reading, and we all learn from each other. Yet any bookseller will recognize the world Fitzgerald creates, and she is absolutely right in pointing out that you should never, ever employ an 11-year-old girl with a Donald Duck ruler to run your private circulating library.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 73 © Chris Saunders 2022