[BKARTS] BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS

[Richard Adamiak <adambook@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        Orwell worked for a time in a used book shop in London and wrote 
up his experience with characteristic penetration. Here are the concluding 
lines:

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier ? On the whole­in spite of my 
employer?s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop­no.
     Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated 
person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. 
Unless one goes in for ??rare?? books it is not a difficult trade to learn, 
and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides 
of books. (Most booksellers don?t. You can get their measure by having a 
look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don?t see 
an ad for Boswell?s Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The 
Mill on the Floss by T. S. Elliot.)  Also it is a humane trade which is not 
capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never 
squeeze the small independent booksellers out of existence as they have 
squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long­I 
was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a 70-hour week, apart 
from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books­and it is an unhealthy 
life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too 
warm the windows will get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his 
windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of 
objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every 
bluebottle prefers to die.
     But the reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life 
is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell 
lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is 
the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. 
There was a time when I really did love books­loved the sight and smell and 
feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. 
Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling 
at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavor about the battered 
unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor 
eighteenth-century poets, out of date gazetteers, odd volumes of forgotten 
novels, bound numbers of ladies? magazines of the ?sixties. For casual 
reading­in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired 
to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch­there is 
nothing to touch a back number of the Girl?s Own Paper. But as soon as I 
went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five 
or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. 
Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to 
read and can?t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying 
paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with 
paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

Fortnightly, November 1936
Reprinted in Orwell?s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. I, 
pp., 242-246

Richard Adamiak

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