Where’s your unexplained?

One is often asked somewhat unusual questions, like the one above, in the book business, and answering something like “modesty forbids” doesn’t necessarily go down well with the person who asked it.

This post is about my “mind body and spirit” section in the bookshop, which always has been a lively section here in Ramsgate.

Over the years I have sold a great many books about this subject, no one has ever brought one back and complained that it didn’t work and yet no one has ever arrived by broomstick, which I find odd.

I can tell you definitely that the best selling book in this section is the bible, and I occasionally get complaints from Christians that we stock books on fortune telling and so on.

I must admit if I ever came to censoring which books I stocked it would be very difficult to know where to draw the line, the only thing I try to avoid is pornography.

I say try to avoid as one can never be aware of the content of every page of every book, with a stock of around 30,000 titles.

All booksellers are vulnerable to prosecution because of this, and once again it is difficult to know where to draw the line, we are very lucky that we had the Chatterley trial in the UK.

In the UK one can escape prosecution if one can show that the book in question has literary merit.

For those of you unfamiliar with the trial, the high point was when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read” this was in the swinging 60s.

Well of course now days a bookshop that didn’t stock Lady Chatterley’s Lover on obscenity grounds, would be a pretty strange place.

Anyway click here to view my unexplained et al

And click on the picture above if you wish to enlarge it.