On non-mainstream books and getting out of bookshops

One of the guiding principles of this blog is to try and focus on books that are not in the public eye (at least now). Like I stated in my previous post, I feel that a lot of things today are treated as disposable, even if we are getting better at recycling about twenty years too late. News, books, music, cars, clothes – everything is becoming more throwaway, their lifespans reduced to a fraction of what they used to be. People have cars for a year or two then change; cheap clothes hawked by Primark and New Look are worn for that season and then replaced three or four months down the line. How many books do people read twice these days?

There was uproar a couple of years ago when everyone simultaneously seemed to notice for the first time that independent bookshops were rapidly becoming extinct, and the truth is that they were then and still are. And what do we have in their stead? Waterstones and Borders bombarding us with window displays of new shiny covers for the lastest celebrity autobiographies and £4 off stickers. Where is the variety?

In the charity shops!

I can’t remember the last time I paid full-price for a book, or bought a book from a high street retailer. Why bother when I can pick up books for a couple of quid, or hopefully even less, in a charity shop, especially when I can get a nice old edition which offer far more quirks and interest from a design point of view than today’s colourful cartoony fare (I’m thinking David Mitchell, Zadie Smith)? The uniform of the old Penguin paperbacks (see above), and Faber’s running author/title boxes (see below) provide a sort of innocent beauty that today’s multi-coloured explosions could never dream of possessing.


It’s as if the new batch have to hide their interior inadequacies with a show of outer glamour, like the girl with no personality but caked in make-up and tied into a boob tube and mini-skirt, while the earlier designs mentioned had to make no pretence about their appearances, they were happy to simply state their names on their covers, because they had no need to feel anxious about the products within.

Of course, it’s more about marketing than anything. Who wants to buy a book if it doesn’t look good in your hand while you’re reading it on the tube? What’s the point of buying a book if we can’t ogle the author’s posed photograph on the back inside cover?

The other big positive about book shopping in charity shops is that you can have all sorts of odd titles practically forced upon you (“I’m only 50p, how can you not buy me?”) that you would never come across in a chain store. Genres are all shoved together, there’s no recognition of the alphabet in the shelving order, pages are creased and covers are torn in places, but the experience is so much richer, and so are you.

When I used to frequent the big book stores, I’d head straight to the fiction section and then head out. Charity shops forced me to confront other books, and as a result my reading has broadened into biography (see below), travel, science, politics, art and other areas.


I want to make people more aware that books can be read years after they have been published, that they can be picked up at random, that they don’t have to be serialised or to read by a book club, or to have been reviewed in last week’s paper in order for you to read them.

This is why I’m listing the year of publication, place of purchase, cost and cover design of each book I write about alongside its photo, which I will take in a place either appropriate to its setting or where I read it.

Breaking the mold has been an aim of writers through the ages, and publishers and book shops should be looking to do the same. Sadly, they’re only helping to set it at the moment.