The Art of Browsing

Oliver Pritchett on some more elementary do’s and don’ts of book etiquette.

It is time to reclaim the verb ‘to browse’. Its proper meaning is ‘to linger in a bookshop, sampling the volumes on display’. These days the word is too often appropriated by Internet addicts and goats. When we sit at our keyboards and trawl through websites the correct verb should be ‘to gawp’. And when goats, with their insolent expressions, tear at sparse vegetation in scrubland, they are simply chomping. Browsing in a bookshop is an art, and therefore involves certain rules, which I am now going to explain.

The first thing to remember is that, as a browser, you are part of the bookshop’s ambience. You have a non-speaking, walk-on part in a great tableau. There are two possible poses to strike and I call these the Nonchalant and the Devotional. With the Nonchalant you put your weight on one leg and lean decoratively on, say, the Fiction A–Z section, resting your right elbow on the H shelf (e.g. Robert Harris to Joseph Heller) while holding the book in your left hand. When you adopt the Devotional pose, you don’t lean and you hold the volume in front of your face with both hands, as if it were a hymn book. You should never sit on the floor, having made an encampment with rucksack, coat, packet of Prêt à Manger sandwiches, Tesco shopping bags and a takeaway coffee cup. That makes the place look like a budget airline departure lounge. So remember the rule: only children may sit on bookshop floors. Some distinctions need to be made here: first of all, browsing is not the same as lurking. Hanging about in the History section or loitering in Biography is just going to unsettle other customers. And browsing is not the same thing as riffling, which is frowned on, except in university bookshops where it is called revising for exams. What is the browser’s purpose? It may be to help him or her decide whether to buy the book or it may be an attempt to get the gist of the thing so that he or she can bluff in the company of cultivated acquaintances. The browser must, of course, show consideration towards the bookshop owner. It is rather like sampling a discreet grape or two in a supermarket; that may be tolerated, but a banana would be overstepping the mark. So there are time limits to be observed. As a general rule, 1 hour and 10 minutes is the maximum browsing time for fiction, while it is 44 minutes for non-fiction. If you are heading for the exit without a book after spending the maximum browsing time in the shop, it is considered appropriate at least to buy a greetings card or, perhaps, an orange and white Penguin coffee mug. Some people can get  through a hefty novel by reading a chapter at a time, each in a different bookshop. This is the literary equivalent of a pub crawl, though if you happened to meet one of these persons in a pub you might be impressed by their erudition, but you can be sure they are not going to buy you a drink. In the Reference section you may encounter the browser-on-the run. This is the individual who has darted in to get urgent help with a crossword clue, to check something in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations or a Swedish phrase-book, or to look up ‘Downy mildew’ in the index of a gardening book. There are also those people who come to find their symptoms in the medical encyclopaedias. Remember, if you do this, not to linger too long, as there may be other patients waiting to consult the book. (Some medical encyclopaedias, featuring the most interesting ailments, are wrapped in cellophane these days, which can be a severe blow to hypochondriac bibliophiles.) Tim O’Kelly, the owner of the One Tree bookshop in Petersfield, tells me that occasionally people will take a big glossy cookery book from the shelves, then ask to borrow a pen so that they can copy out a recipe. This, I would say, is definitely Not Done, but Mr O’Kelly manages to grin and bear it. ‘You have to play the long game,’ he says philosophically. These days, many bookshops use the smell of freshly brewed coffee to lure their customers in and to show us that the way to a Larkin is through a latte. This raises all sorts of questions about the etiquette of browsing in bookshop cafés. Is it ever acceptable to eat a doughnut while dipping into Katherine Mansfield? Can you be sure that Ian Rankin’s skill at creating tension will not cause you to spill your Americano on page 49 of the Inspector Rebus mystery? Mr O’Kelly, taking the long view in Petersfield, is, of course, relaxed about his customers taking volumes to the shop’s café, and so are other shops. They are even tolerant in Waterstones, which has 80 cafés (some selling soup) in its 300 stores. They take the view that the benefits of café browsing outweigh any damage that may occur, and the longer people spend in their stores the better. Purist browsers will see all this as a sad decline in standards. It is, in some way, just a bit too convenient to be the done thing – like boil-in-the-bag rice, Velcro or pocket calculators. A little discomfort, after all, shows that you are totally absorbed in what you are reading. Finally, there is just one more important thing to mention. If you are, at this very moment, in a bookshop reading Slightly Foxed, in either the Nonchalant or the Devotional manner, may I politely suggest that you take it to the till and purchase it without any further ado?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 35 © Oliver Pritchett 2012