BOOK OF THE WEEK
ONCE UPON A TOME: THE MISADVENTURES OF A RARE BOOKSELLER
by Oliver Darkshire (Bantam £14.99, 244pp)
A number of years in the past, when two pantechnicons had been required, at some value, to move the crates containing my giant private library to Normandy, one of many drivers stated, in my listening to: ‘Hasn’t this man heard of Kindles?’
I’ve, however I hate them. Books with batteries won’t ever catch on with me. I really like paper, ink, the scent and really feel of fabric bindings. I would like books to be precise objects, and in As soon as Upon A Tome uncommon bookseller Oliver Darkshire shares with us his personal ardour for pale and dusty ‘bins of Trollopes’ and different bibliographic gems.
There is no such thing as a cash in books, let’s be clear on that time. Darkshire says his pay is simply only one up from the ‘grocery store kiosk or vagrancy’.
At greatest the ‘ugly stepchild’ of the antiques market or nice artwork, bookselling is ‘a industrial dead-end’, the enterprise all the time ‘on the sting of a nervous breakdown’. Lots of the objects provided on the market stay within the cupboards for many years, a lot of the inventory as invaluable as a ‘lifeless albatross’.
Who will ever need the 17 monumental volumes of an out-of-date encyclopaedia, ‘crammed with nearly all the pieces the layman might need to find out about something’, particularly as it’s all in French?
Books with batteries won’t ever catch on with me. I really like paper, ink, the scent and really feel of fabric bindings. I would like books to be precise objects, and in As soon as Upon A Tome uncommon bookseller Oliver Darkshire shares with us his personal ardour for pale and dusty ‘bins of Trollopes’ and different bibliographic gems
Henry Sotheran Ltd, in Sackville Road, London, the place Darkshire is employed, was based in 1761 and time has not moved on. The doorways stick so individuals cannot get in. Passers-by are knocked unconscious by the sunblind, which extends throughout the pavement. The store is a maze of secret passageways and cobwebby chambers, crammed with ‘crooked furnishings and misplaced literary paraphernalia’.
Darkshire comes throughout unmanned desks, the drawers lengthy undisturbed. When a member of employees dies or disappears, that is no excuse to filter out their cabinets, which will likely be discovered to include damaged umbrellas, jars of needlework pins or a primary version of Dickens’ The Thriller Of Edwin Drood. The one coaching and recommendation Darkshire acquired was: ‘By no means discuss to a buyer together with your palms in your trouser pockets.’
Telephones seldom ring, and anyway would not be answered — and no one is aware of how the answer-machine operates, as know-how is ‘past our potential to configure’.
Computer systems are anathema. Workers are happier with ‘a big ledger too giant to be simply shifted from desk to desk’. Within the workplace are banks of submitting cupboards, mounds of papers and binders, ‘organized based on some bespoke flip of logic coined many years in the past’. The point out of spreadsheets attracts a clean, and the stapler is a weapon of mass destruction. Guide individuals, ‘vibrant and fragile personalities’, are a bizarre mob. Patrons and sellers alike can get completely absorbed in abstruse matters, comparable to defunct prepare guides, classic A-Z maps of London, botanical primers, etchings of skeletons and ‘totally different sorts of smut’.
There are many collectors avid for the diaries of Viscountess Vane, an 18th-century widow with 100 lovers. Queues type for photographic albums of French maids or lumberjacks. Classic lingerie catalogues promote like scorching desserts.
Such pleasure happens seldom, in fact. Most days, when eccentrics wander in, Darkshire hopes in opposition to hope they will ‘shock you with a Gutenberg Bible’. However normally they’re making an attempt to promote a nugatory ancestral stamp album or, ‘the very last thing you need to stumble throughout as a bookseller’ — sure volumes of Punch.
Darkshire spends most of his shift placing collectively the store’s catalogue, ‘figuring out the version, checking for injury, writing some promoting copy’. His activity is to identify shortage worth, assess the foxing and look at gold-tooled leather-based bindings constructed from goat or cow.
Henry Sotheran Ltd, in Sackville Road, London, the place Darkshire, pictured, is employed, was based in 1761 and time has not moved on. The doorways stick so individuals cannot get in. Passers-by are knocked unconscious by the sunblind, which extends throughout the pavement. The store is a maze of secret passageways and cobwebby chambers, crammed with ‘crooked furnishings and misplaced literary paraphernalia’
Sotheran’s has a restoration division, or ebook hospital, the place by means of ‘an experimental mixture of glue, hope and witchcraft’, rips are mended, marbled endpapers changed and covers re-sewn. One wonders why anyone bothers, as periodically there must be a clear-out, with inventory donated to charity shops or else ‘shoved into recycling’.
However there are occasional gems. A century in the past, an American purchased a jewel and ivory-encrusted poetry ebook, and Sotheran’s consigned it for protected onward supply to the maintain of an ocean liner making its maiden voyage. It is a disgrace that was the Titanic.
One other time, a buyer introduced in a yellowing pamphlet of Measure For Measure, which turned out to have been chopped from Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623.
‘You do not actually get to see one thing this scarce and influential within the wild fairly often.’ Normally, they’re locked away in museums.
Books are fragile, even unstable. Darkshire, carrying gloves, inspects poisoned volumes aimed on the colonial market in India, Africa or Malaya. The concept was that, saturated in pesticide, the books would repel munching vermin. Or presumably kill the servants changing them on cabinets.
We’re additionally suggested to keep away from Victorian novels with shiny inexperienced jackets, because the dye contained arsenic. Moreover, the chemical compounds used to protect leather-based covers could make books ‘spontaneously explode’ if over-generously utilized.
Who’d have thought bookselling may very well be a struggle zone? It’s generally a lunatic asylum, particularly when mad individuals seem requesting Nazi memorabilia or accounts of ‘how Jews management the climate’.
A buyer as soon as wished a ebook proving ‘girls had smaller brains than males’, and there was appreciable curiosity within the copy of Mein Kampf which had belonged to Marlene Dietrich.
Books must be refrained from the sunshine, in any other case collections flip into ‘twisted, smouldering rags’.
In London, floods and damp are a continuous drawback. At Sotheran’s there are buckets in all places, ‘a motley array of pails and bowls’. There’s a mould infestation up the partitions. Within the spider-infested cellar, like forgotten prisoners in a medieval fortress, are ‘books largely decayed nearly past rescue’.
As soon as Upon A Tome is an utter deal with for these of us preferring books and studying to another exercise — the oddballs and obsessives who, like waggish Oliver Darkshire, by no means simply combined with different youngsters at college; who loathed obligatory video games and sport; who’ve by no means ‘texted’ or ‘tweeted’; and who require a whole lot of ground house, ‘an indecent quantity of sq. footage’, to accommodate our ever‑increasing hoard.
