When it comes to the English comic novel and LOL or anything
else for that matter my favourites are Terry Pratchett, David Lodge, Tom
Sharpe, P G Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton, also because of Good Omens, Neil
Gaiman has to come in somewhere too.
Back in the days before the internet and out of town
shopping, we, my family that is, had four independent bookshops in
Hertfordshire and one of our jobs, my brother, father, stepmother and me did
was to chose what we thought were the best new books for these bookshops.
Easy with established writers, but with new writers the only
way to decide if you are going to buy a lot or a little of a title was to read
the proofs, which we did, back in the day – that is. Back then having bought
fifty copies of Watership Down – or whatever it was – basically we then told
the customers how good it was, or had red faces and a lot of unsold books.
Nowadays I am a secondhand bookseller living in the world of
the internet, so of course if I rabbit on about rabbits, I can’t just order
fifty copies, but it occurs to me that in some way I am a professional reader,
if not a dear reader, and so I am going to start doing some blog posts in the
form of something approaching a book review.
Not only am I a reseller but I am a rereader pretty much all
of Terry’s books have been reread by me, the exceptions being Unseen
Academicals and Strata neither of which did it for me. Perhaps one of these
days, a reread and they will.
Anyway I am halfway through A Slip of the Keyboard inasmuch
as I have read the Neil Gaiman forward and The Scribbling Intruder, not sure
how I missed reading it before, but I did.
I think it’s a must read for every Pratchett fan, but it is
also a book with more about signing sessions in bookshops than I have ever come
across before, making it a must read for booksellers.
Back in the day I have been involved in signing sessions as
a bookseller, from signing sessions with half mile queues, to signing sessions
where major literary figures sat at a desk in a busy town centre bookshop and
the only people who approached them asked the questions like, where are the
cookery books.
I Think it was the chapter headed, “Advice to Booksellers”
that did it, inspired me to start on this journey which I hope will lead to
some book – reviewing isn’t quite the word I am looking for here – but some
sort of extension of something I have done for the last forty years, which is
help my customers along to the next book.
What I can’t do is ask the first question that I would ask
in the bookshop, which is. “What have you read that you enjoyed?” But I can say
here, if you have read most of Terry’s novels then you will probably enjoy Slip
of the Keyboard, which is as near to an autobiography as you are going to
get.
I can also say we haven’t got it in stock, the pictures are
of some of the books by the authors mentioned in this blog that we have got in
stock, that’s the way with secondhand bookshops.
But is does lead me on to wondering if there is anything
that authors and secondhand booksellers can do together that could promote
books and reading, we already have James Patterson Handing out grants to new
bookshops and libraries.
At the moment all of it, new independent bookshops,
libraries, secondhand bookshops and even the big chain booksellers have been
severely reduced in numbers and the verity of available physical books.
For us in the book business this is a worrying trend, a
particularly worrying aspect of which is finding a bookseller or librarian who
is widely read. Going into a bookshop or library and asking for Terry
Pratchett, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe, P G Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton or Neil
Gaiman, isn’t likely to get too many “who”s as they are all authors who sell
well at the moment, but the situation isn’t good out there.
The next step, which is going into the library or bookshop
having read all of the Terry Pratchetts and finding someone there who has also
read them all and with whom you can discuss what to read now/next with, is
often a step too far.
It’s a completely different question to which authors are
like Terry Pratchett? Which is easy to answer with. “None.”
