By the book: Nothing left on shelf in cyber-library

I have a compulsion about books. So far, I have filled a small house and a large office and a car boot and it’s starting to make me think that bibliophilia may be incurable. I collect these items with a hunger, even read the damn things, too, but I am rapidly beginning to assume that the power of the collecting bug may have overtaken the prospect of ever reading all of ’em.

This is a quite a long term illness. I remember as a teenager, starting to mop up science fiction, then American cultists, and then realising quite rapidly that half an hour spent in a charity shop or two could actually produce a few cut-price gems, slightly dog-eared but utterly serviceable for little more than pennies.

I recall vividly, to this day, a second-hand store on my grandma’s Moss Side high street delivering a second edition of the Beat/Angry Young Men classic 1958 anthology Protest for a far from hefty 15p, at the end of the Seventies. I was only checking something in it last week.

In fact, thinking about it, there was one emporium that truly got me hooked: a shop in my university city of Sheffield called Rare and Racy which became my second, no third, maybe fourth, home, after my basement flat, the Nottingham House pub and the pinball arcade in the students’ union. Rock’n’roll writer-to-be Andy Gill (not the Leeds art student and Gang of Four guitarist, though we were all contemporaries) was one of the kings of the flipper, I do recall, in that long corridor next to the bar.

But Rare and Racy was a place to behold. Novels, poetry, photo collections, quirky postcards, and vinyl records by the several hundred. There was certainly a critic in that city – maybe it was Gill (not A.A.) himself – with a veritable supply of new long players because, every week, there’d be another selection of unspun recordings for my friends and I to plunder. It was the intoxicating height of pub rock and punk, new wave and reggae, and this marvellous shop – still there! – was a great place to spend an hour and a few quid, too.

This was the period when there was scant cash around – grants didn’t go too far even at 20p a pint – but there was the thrill of the chase. If it wasn’t a music fix you were seeking, then there was every chance you’d find a Kerouac or a Wolfe (Tom rather than Thomas) or a Thompson (Hunter S. rather than E.P.) or a Vonnegut lodged near the Donne or the Marvell (Andrew not Comics) off-loaded by the outgoing Lit students. It was a golden age to build your own paperback library and get an extra-curricular education.

Then time moved on and the prospect of scouring musty charity shelves and second-hand racks lost its appeal. Yet, eventually, fantastic new bookshops – Waterstone’s, Dillon’s, Borders – came along and, hip to the fact that there was a whole generation of readers who dug that late 20th Century bag, from Burgess to Ballard, Plath to Amis, Salinger to Pynchon, provided clean-lined displays full of the stuff. And knowledgable assistants. And coffee. Like a Left Bank cafe, only smoke-free and hoovered.

Then and then, Dillon’s was swallowed up. And now Borders has gone belly up, I’m afraid. But, for good or maybe even ill, our new best best-friend, the worldwide web, has, of course, solved the book collector’s dilemma – and how. It has seen off most of those worthy, offline stalwarts because it’s just simply too freaking good at what it does.

Today, I was trying to track a relatively rare collection of verse and prose by punk bassist and poet Richard Hell. Click Amazon. There’s the title in question. Click Marketplace. There’s the item  I want – ‘Used, Good’ – at about half the list price. And there’s the link to a series of further recommendations: all of Hell’s output, it seems, and at smile-inducing, knockdown prices.

When I was 16 or, indeed, 36, I had only a very small sense of what was even out there in print – in the UK, in the USA, around the world. If I’d gone into a good bookshop in 1986 or 1996, neither I, nor they, would have known what the hell Richard Hell had published. Now, the net gives me instant, comprehensive information and all at prices that are a fraction of what I would have paid in Waterstone’s if I’d known the book even existed!!

In other words, the book addict now has a virtual dealer in his own cyber-library and no volume need remain on any shelf – real or imagined – for long. It’s just there. Available. And winging its way in cardboard or brown paper in about three days’ time. I haven’t yet pressed the ‘Order’ button to access Hell and his short oeuvre. But I no doubt will. It’s there in a my hyper-basket. And will, quite probably, be wending a course into my quite literal mailbox very soon. My groaning bookcases will have to accept another gaggle of new arrivals.

Tags: Amazon, literature, Richard Hell