To me, bookshops have always seemed as rivers do to a fisherman; maybe it’s a reflection of Melville’s comment in Moby Dick that all thinking people will find their way, sooner or later, to running water. A big flea market is a delta where merchandise flows sluggishly through scores of channels over which the collector must dart and hop. Ashwood’s and its fastchanging stock evoked rapids where hundreds of salmon leapt in the sluicing water. Other shops mimicked still pools. You could safely let a book remain on the shelf for years, lurking like a crafty old pike in the cool depths.
In Australia, nature and the book existed in a state of war. Summer damp and heat reacted with the bleach in paper to produce ‘foxing’; an apparently pristine book could be marred on every page by its rusty blotches. A few of Sydney’s arrogant varnish-brown cockroaches were likely to scuttle out of any carton you started to excavate, but other bugs were more insidious. Some could drill a perfect millimetre-wide tunnel through the heftiest tome. Others confined themselves to the surface. When a publisher coated his covers with the wrong sort of ‘size’, bugs headed for them in the millions, slithering under the dust wrapper to browse until the boards were covered with winding white tracks. Certain books were notorious for this fault. In a shelf devoted to works by Randolph Stow, insects always singled out his collection of poems, A Counterfeit Silence. ‘It was bound in a turquoise cloth that was sized with gelatine,’ remembers Sydney bookseller Nicholas Pounder. ‘Once a critical humidity was archieved, it was like aniseed to a hound; the silverfish and cookies would scamper, slavering.’
But people could do far worse damage than any insect. Annotations, underlinings and marginalia were common, the reader carrying on an exasperated conversation with the writer. A scribbled ‘Fool!’ in the margin was common, as was ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, with the occasional ‘So true!’ Obviously the never expected anybody else to read these books, since, even when they wrote ‘False’, they never explained why it was false.
Many people, it seems, are convinced that the front endpaper – the blank page at the beginning of a book – exists to be written on. Ladies and gentlemen, the free endpaper has the same significance in a book as the silences in a Pinter play, the gaps between movements in a Beethoven quartet or the unpainted canvas of one of Bacon’s screaming popes. Between the gaudiness of the dust wrapper and the solemnity of the text, it provides a beat.
Anything written on it should at least equal the binding in beauty or the text in intelligence. In the case of most books, admittedly, this isn’t a challenge. When Michel Houellebecq’s hero in Atomised masturbates on a Metro train and catches his ejaculation – though hopefully just his ejaculation – in a hastily-slammed geography text, the book undoubtedly gains in the process. However, in scrawling ‘Dear Clive, thought this would remind you of our happy school days ha ha ha’ on the flyleaf of Lord of the Flies, ‘Your old pal Clary’ does nobody a favour.
But there are worse sins. Once, in a London bookshop, a discussion I was having with a bookseller about an early printing of Nigel Kneale’s Tomato Cain was interrupted by a customer asking if we knew a book by Hemingway with a name ‘to do with bells’.
‘You mean For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ the bookseller said.
‘That’s the one!’ Taking out a pen, he reached over to the Kneale book, tore out the endpaper, and started to write on it.
Both of us squealed – there’s no other word for it. From £30, the value of the book dropped to 10p.
uit: A pound of paper : confessions of a book addict - John Baxter
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