Ventnor Rare Books

We recently went to Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight. It’s a small seaside town with one main street. We spent some time wandering down it and into the charity shops. I went to have a look in the old bookshop at the bottom of the street, but when I got there I discovered it had been shut down. There was a note on the door saying they couldn’t afford to keep it open anymore, thank you for all your support, and so on, we still collect old books and if you are interested in trading, phone us on this number. They said they had been open for fifty years or something.

Last summer we went to the Isle of Wight and I bought two books from that shop: a pocket guide to wildflowers and a worn copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems printed in the twenties or thirties, I think. (Tennyson lived on the Isle of Wight and hung out with the grieving Queen Victoria as her poet laureate). It was a singular outpost of history and information in that town, but nobody wanted it: Ventnor Rare Books.

Chess book

On the road from the station, just under the bridge, there’s a man who sells books. When I was at university he sold them there as well. I once bought a copy of Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych from him. And then more recently I bought ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys from him. I had been searching everywhere for books by John Cowper Powys quite unsuccessfully after visiting his native Dorset. I spoke to the bookseller about him. He said he knew of John Cowper Powys and that he was hard to find. The bookseller is from Dorset and at heart he is a Pagan, he sympathises with the Pagan aspect of John Cowper Powys’ writings.

On our most recent encounter I bought a chess book from him: ‘Batsford’s Chess openings’, a collaboration between Gary Kasparov and Raymond Keene, British GM, a combination described on the cover as ‘a real coup’. The page are full of chess notation. It’s like code. It’s like maths.

I decided against buying this book once. I thought ‘I don’t need this. I’ve got enough chess books already.’ But below that thought deeper, in my unconscience, was the thought: ‘you can never have enough chess books.’ And this thought asserted itself later on when I passed the street bookseller, one Saturday and all it needed was for him to offer me 50p off, for me to offer him the cash.

He’s getting old now. His curly hair is grey. His face is lined with wrinkles now. And he drinks. The sight of a can of special brew resting among the books, I realised was a familiar one, as is the sight of him in a nearby pub in the mid-afternoon. As I was buying the chess book he was talkative with the alcohol. He told me that when he was young he was bright and he played chess. He, and he told me this as if he was imparting a singularly interesting anecdote, magnified by drunken expansion and the soft tints of the past, he played someone five years older than him in a tournament and two of the games were stalemates – that’s how close it was. It’s like war, chess, he said, he always liked the bigger pieces, but he hasn’t played for years.

I told him how I always play chess on my phone – that way I can always be playing, wherever I am, and that’s how you get better – by practising. I play on the internet on my phone. I always have about six games going at once.

I buy the Batsford Chess Openings Encyclopaedia with columns and rows of notation. If I concentrate on one opening then I can learn all the variations and my opponent will be at my mercy.

Questions of purity

My generation and the previous generation have all necessarily built up collections of media objects: CDs, books, records, cassettes, videos, DVDs. They feature in almost every house in the world, certainly in the West: bookshelves full of books, piles of DVDs near the television, stacks of CDs near the stereo, all lovingly sorted into alphabetical order.

These media collections take up space. They are displays, exhibitions, large in size and content and colour, objects assembled together in one space for people to see and use.

Though these collections are treasured and often beautiful, it makes one think about how so much space is being taken up by these things, and then it makes one think that it’s actually rather strange how we collect physical manifestations of what are unphysical things to begin with.

A film, for example, though it must be recorded on something to be communicated, is not a piece of film, it is an experience, you watch it happen on a screen. The pictures you see are not physical, they are projections of events, pretend or otherwise, which have been captured and communicated via a medium. Let us remember that the obsolescent media we are investigating and writing about in this project are just that: media, mediums, through which messages, pictures, musics, travel to our sense receptors. There has to be a medium, but the medium is not de facto necessary and indeed with the new digital technology, the media through which art travels are thinning out and in the process it is a purer communication. The vinyl record or the CD was only necessary because there was no other more direct way of getting the recorded music to the listener. It is not the shiny disc that matters and it’s not the artwork in the plastic case that matters, this is just a by-product. Musicians are musicians. They have chosen their method of communicating their expression. They are not visual artists. The artwork in CDs or vinyl is a welcome addition, maybe, adds meaning maybe, but it’s someone else’s meaning, the visual artist’s meaning. Everything except the music is extraneous. An mp3 is the purest version of the recording of a musician’s expression because there is nothing else to distract from the listening and consumption of the music.

With books, it’s slightly different because to absorb the words you must physically interact with something. You are actively involved in the process of consuming the writing. It takes effort to read a book, you don’t just watch it or listen to it passively, and as such, the physical medium of the book is more important to preserve, but not essential, and could also be said to sully the author’s intentions with added meaning: cover art, blurbs, fonts, etc.

New dictionary, old dictionary

Hello. Today I bought a dictionary. It’s the 12^th edition Chambers Dictionary. It cost £40, probably the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. I bought it from an independent bookshop called ‘City Books’ in Brighton. Now I can look up all the obscure words in the Azed crossword in the Observer, and I don’t have to endure the sordid, ad-riddled experience of looking them up on the internet.

Here are some excerpts from the ‘word lover’s miscellany’ section in the middle of my new dictionary.

Wonk – a serious or studious person, especially one with an interest in a trivial or unfashionable subject.

Blatherskite – a garrulous talker of nonsense.

Izzard – the letter Z.

Othergates (this word is now extinct) – in another way.

Forswink (this word is almost extinct) – to exhaust by labour.

Anyway, now I have an obsolete Chambers Concise Dictionary, a few years old, and if anyone wants it, just ask. I’d like someone to have it. (shown below in its natural habitat)

Technophobia

‘How to be Really Interesting’ by Steve Davis MBE

This book belonged to my dad. He has doodled on the cover with a biro, shading in the letters and signing his name. When I was young, I saw this as permission for me to similarly deface it - if dad’s allowed to draw on it, then so am I, it’s only fair. I have written my name alongside the right forearm of Steve Davis the boxer and above his left shoulder I have written the word ‘time’. I had only just learnt how to spell this word. I must have been very young, but I remember enjoying the way the magic ‘e’ on the end changes the sound of the ‘i’. My brother Ben has signed his name on the back cover in imitation of my dad’s signature, and my brother Joe, the youngest, has written his name above the right shoulder of besuited Steve Davis. The 'J' is backwards.

Looking at the scrappy biroed cover of this book, I become a detective of the past. My dad’s distracted doodles tell a cryptic story. They were probably made in the evening after work with the television on in the background, my mum knitting in the armchair, in the garish early nineties living room amongst neon clothing, perms and bowl-cuts, red grouting between the tiles in the kitchen, brown furry sofa, pink roobled carpet, Ghostbusters lunch boxes.

It was the perfect size for leaning on when writing something – doing a crossword, demonstrating maths or perhaps drawing something for me. If I examine the cover closely I can see the imprints of numbers and letters and lines, and the surface is creased like the wrinkles on a hand. It’s not a bulky heavy hardback, it’s a flimsy in-between, but gives just enough resistance to support the concerted ballpoint pressure, and this proximity to unsheathed biro led to its defacement.

I wonder when the line was crossed, the taboo broken. Which was the first pen mark made on the shiny cover?

My guess is that this book was a present for my dad. It was published in 1988. It’s a first edition and could conceivably be worth a some money if it wasn’t for the widespread biro defacement, but without these details it would have much less cultural, personal value.

The Inevitable Digital Future

Let us consider for a moment the future. The tendency in the world of books seems to be towards complete digitalisation. One day, maybe a hundred years from now, the paper book will more than likely be obsolete. A hundred years is a long time. It’s practically impossible to imagine such a distant future, but let us try anyway. Let us make some estimations based on the cultural tendencies of the present. 

How many of the things that exist in our world can we replace by things that aren’t there, by computer data? There’s no stopping us, really. Experiences need not be actually experienced, they can be virtually experienced in a digital environment, just like music is listened to now in a digital environment, without the presence of a CD or a band. We know, of course, when we listen to a recording, that the band isn’t there in the room, it’s just a reproduction of the experience of listening to the band live. Perhaps in the future this principle will extend to other experiences like visiting a different country. And someone will say to you, ‘so you’ve been to Argentina? But have you been there live? You should go there live, it’s much better.’

Or you will meet someone on the internet and the bodysuit you wear that is covered with nanochip sensors will communicate to you direct reproductions of the feelings of touch you would experience if you were actually there shaking his hand or stroking her back. It will be essentially, sensibly identical. When the technology arrives, some will say, ‘it’s just not the same!’ but the younger generation will take to it like there is nothing at all strange about it and they will feed on the glorious ease of it all, the convenience. With each generation there are new technologies that we inure ourselves to, leaving the older generations confused and angry. This trend WILL continue.

In this context it’s not so hard to imagine a world without books. We can confidently say that within a century or so, books will be a rarity, reserved for specialist collectors, antique collectors. As they are outmoded, millions of books will be recycled. People will leave boxes and boxes of them outside in the streets by the bins, as the charity shops stop accepting them as donations. There will be desperate conservation projects that seek to save these books, place them in vast warehouses. Books, paper books that is, will be museum pieces. The libraries of Oxford and Cambridge will struggle to justify their existence, as the people who regularly use the bulky paper collections, die out.

There is no doubt that this is the beginning of the end.