Hooked on Books

'Hooked on Books' is a second hand bookshop in Dover. When I was a teenager I used to go there a lot on my aimless wanderings through the town, to buy the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy books and Virginia Woolf novels. As well as the wall-to-wall shelves, subsidiary racks and tables in the centre, there are teetering piles of books on the floor and the counter waiting to be sorted, though the staff never seem too keen to order them. It's a dense concentration of books.

Today I went back to Dover for a few days, and on my way from the station to my childhood house, I thought I'd go to Hooked on Books and buy something. For a moment I had a fear that last time I was in Dover the shop hadn't been there, but I was relieved to find it still there, still facing the town hall across the pelican crossing. 

I bought two books: 'The World of Chess', a technicolour hardback exploring the many beguiling byways of the noble game 

and 'Epitaph for the Elm', a book written in the seventies about how Dutch Elm disease was killing all the elms. 

The owner of the shop commented that he hadn't seen me for a while. I was quite surprised that he recognised me. We talked about Dover and how it has got worse since I left.

Every time I go back to Dover there are more shops and houses boarded up. London Road is like the main street of a ghost town. There's nothing here anymore. Everyone goes through the port and on up the Jubilee Way to London or Canterbury. It makes me happy to see Hooked on Books still going after 15 years. Along with the snooker hall in the Working Men's Club and Best Deals, stolid purveyor of second hand CDs, DVDs and musical instruments,  it's one of the few champion cultural highlights of that ailing street.

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.