The End of Charing Cross?

You could take the Charing Cross Road once from Centre Point and walk south and stop for tea at the coffee shop in the National Portrait Gallery with the satisfaction that you had had the good fortune to be able to examine a facsimile edition of Tomé Pires's Summa Oriental, feasted on a second hand copy of the Haji's Book of Nursery Rhymes along the way, and you'd have probably met many remarkable men and Gurdjieff, too, and waded through murders most foul in the book-shelves of Murder Inc and probably managed to persuade a doubting bibliopolist that you had the means to buy a 1st edition copy of 1984 that you managed to persuade him to pull out from his locked showcase.

There were three chain bookshops in Charing Cross, but now there's only two, but the crux of the Charing Cross Road is not the big giants but the small shops, the second hand trade and antiquarian books and shops that look after the niche market ranging from esoterica to car manuals and books about maps and art, and first editions galore. It is this side of the street that is now under threat from money-grabbing landlords, and inhospitable planning policy and the Internet too and big bookshops and supermarkets who are able to buy in bulk and sell as loss leaders at three for the price of two.

Wan A. Hulaimi writes in today's New Sunday Times about the imminent demise of London's famous street of books. His early post on the street is linked here, and here's another link to a post on the same topic.

(And happy I am to hear that our Awang Goneng has a second book about Terengganu coming out later this year.  Now I want the big glossy coffee table version that only exists in my dreams!)

The Death of Independent Bookshops

The death of independent bookshops is just one symptom of a much wider crisis in publishing. Discounted books, online bookselling and the advent of ebooks are destroying old patterns of reading and book buying. We are living through a revolution as enormous as the one created by Gutenberg’s printing press – and authors and publishers are terrified they will become as outdated as the monks who copied out manuscripts. How this happened is down to ambitious editors, greedy agents, demanding writers and big businesses with an eye for easy profit. Combine that with devilishly fast technological innovation and you have a story as astonishing as the credit crunch – and potentially as destructive.

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph mourns the loss of yet another independent London bookshop, and wonders whether the writing on the wall for literature in a piece aptly called Apoca-Lit:

We are living through a moment when all the balls have been thrown in the air and no one is sure where they will land. In the digital age, will publishers and agents survive in their current form? Derek Johns argues that “authors need agents as first readers and financial advisers” and someone will have to collate and distribute books whether in bound or ebook form. But will they? How long can it be before Tesco (which already has a 10 per cent share of the book market) stops dealing with fussy publishers and brands its own books? The ebook is also changing things dramatically. The iPad arrives in this country next month and looks set to put the Sony Reader out of commission. Perhaps more significantly, ebooks will allow writers to bypass agents, publishers and bookshops by launching their work on the web or exchanging it quickly among themselves. The extra costs involved in manufacturing books will inevitably come to make them seem a luxury and make the bound book as obsolete as vinyl. ... Without some form of institutional support, there is a risk that only the trashy and the brilliant will thrive. That might sound like a bracingly efficient way of doing things, but the wonder of books is that no one can ever be sure how important they might be – or who might start slowly and then turn, eventually, into a genius. The careers of many authors show that the mercurial and the eccentric often take a long time to be appreciated. Abolishing the gatekeepers – however excessive or peculiar they may be – will not help reveal all those hidden talents to public view. Instead, the danger is our bookshelves will come to resemble a long line of branded baked beans.

In case you think this is an alarmist view look at what Simon-Peter Trimarco, manager, of the Kilburn Bookshops says about the business shutting down:

I'm trying to put down my thoughts about where I see the industry going, and realize that I think the whole industry is going to fail in the next couple of years. Dillons, Ottakar's, Hammicks have all gone; Borders went bankrupt in December; Waterstone's has obviously been struggling for ages; most independents have closed, or will do soon; and those stalwarts and new shops which (we are told) are "thriving" are situated in out-of-the-way places and in very affluent neighbourhoods with no competition for the mass market.

Soon there won't be enough shops for publishers to get a new title stocked and sold - then they'll start failing too. We’ve had to suffer the online folk like Amazon and the big chains and supermarkets demanding huge discounts in order to discount themselves to oblivion. 

And he foresees that :

... once almost all the bookshops have closed, Amazon, or some similar mega-company, will start opening little Browsing Bookshops. It'll be like TescoMetro or Starbucks: first put all the other shops and suppliers out of business, then go in there yourself and tell everyone what a great job you do, a great service to the "consumer", that we‘ve never had it so good.

Previous posts about Independent bookshops here.

The Damaging Irony of Big Time Bookselling

Foyles is still the acceptable face of bookselling, probably because it is still unlike the predators that are now quietly consuming the book trade throughout the world. Conquering giants now want commissions of 60 per cent or more from publishers and then they ask a sum again to display the titles prominently. They strike bargains that enable them to sell three books for the price of two, like lavatory cleaners in a discount store, and much as they draw crowds to their jangling tills, the trail that they leave behind is of closed shops and hand-to-mouth publishers and unknown but probably good writers that do not have the pull of Dan Brown or Harry Potter. This is the damaging irony of big time bookselling; that it consumes the very trade it is meant to be promoting, and many, many books from small publishers never get to be read by the wider book-reading people. So who stands to gain, who stands to lose in this dog-eat-book world? Remainder books are big business now, big enough to have their own book fairs. Testimony surely to the growing value of shelf space in the bookshops that have to be cleared as quickly as books are being churned up by the big boy publishers.

Following the closure of Borders in Charing Cross Road, Wan Hulaimi (our Awang Goneng) writes a passionate piece about the demise of bookshops thanks to ruthless and ultimately short-sighted business practices. I love his description of the eccentric way Foyles used to operate. It brings back memories of when I used to make a pilgrimage down to London as a teenager, to visit what was felt by many to be the best bookshop in the world. (Pic on right - Charing Cross Road)

Literary London

London is the literary capital of the world? Not any more, according to Boyd Tonkin in today's Independent:

Our carnival of pluralism rolls merrily on, fit adornment for a global city-state. Yet, a mere generation ago, literary life in London meant something utterly alien to today's cosmopolitan sprawl. In the post-imperial capital that staggered on into the Thatcher era, many aspiring writers still hankered for a single focus of authority. Outsiders might travel hopefully in search of an entrée to this inner sanctum. Look at VS Naipaul's mortifying early career. But few doubted that some secret chamber of wisdom and patronage persisted - if only they could find the door. ...

Tash's London Launch

I remember a line in Kam Raslan's Memoirs of an Old Boy along the lines of "When London was part of the Malaysian Empire". Well Thurs 7th of May sure felt like that for me. I went along to Tash Aw's London launch for Map of The Invisible World at Asia House. There was a real crush of people to hear him talk to the debonair Karim Raslan who had flown in from KL specially for the event. Kak Teh has more of the story, some pics, and all about our gastronomic adventures and vigourous testing of the six degrees of separation law afterwards, and it was great too to meet up with another Malaysian book-loving friend and blogger Fiona Wan who also writes about our evening here. Tash will be in KL on 7th June and there are a whole lot of activities scheduled for him which I will tell you about later.

Stories in the Park

Here's a riddle for you - how is a short story like a park? :

They are both confined things, but no less for being that. A park isn't the sprawling countryside and the short story isn't a long rambling novel, but they give you a pretty high dose of wonderful literature, or being in a natural environment.

Bet you never thought of the short story in those terms, but the analogy works pretty well.

Alison Flood in The Guardian reminds us that London's parks have a literary heritage. And now a group of contemporary authors (Will Self, Ali Smith William Boyd, Nicola Barker, Clare Wigfall, Sheena Mackay and Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh) have been commissioned to write short stories, each set in a different park. The stories will also be sold on recycled paper in individual booklets from the parks as well as in bookshops.

Rowan Routh (quoted above) devised and edited the series, and explains in The Bookseller :

I love short stories and always felt that it is a misperception that the public don’t. I was walking through Hyde Park, when I suddenly thought, 'So many Londoners love these places, and they have such a literary heritage - so many greats, like Dickens, Thackeray and Conrad, have set scenes in them' . . . So I thought of the Park Stories series and approached The Royal Parks to produce them.

Will it work though? Nicholas Lezard on The Guardian blog is sceptical, citing the unpredictability of authors, and more seriously the fact that :

... specially commissioned literature, particularly in modern times, tends to fall flat.

Still, as a reader and a lover of London, I think that a walking tour of the parks in late spring with a nice story to read on a park bench is a pretty nice way of getting reacquainted with the city.

And like so many other great ideas ... couldn't this one be brought to a city near you?

Virtual Tour of Charing Cross Road

One of my favourite haunts when I go back to London is Charing Cross Road with specialist bookshops the length of the street, the biggest and most famous of course being Foyles. Now crime, romance, sci-fi bookshop, Murder One, the only one of its kind in the UK, is to close its doors and the street may never be the same again.

Mark McCormick in The Guardian puts together an interactive guide to the area complete with map so you can take a virtual tour with photos and video.

I'm homesick!

Bibliotherarapy

Can literature sort out your life problems? A group of authors including Alain de Botton have set up a "cultural apothecary" to dispenses bibliotherapy to those who need it :

On offer at the School of Life: books; artwork; holidays; courses; food; sermons; and – most popular of all – "bibliotherapy". Split over ground floor and basement, the building offers a sanctuary where visitors can read, relax and think for themselves.

The bookshop also offers intriguing weekend trips :

De Botton, who six years ago published The Art of Travel, will take customers to Heathrow, where they can expect a guided tour of the new terminal, meet baggage staff and chat to plane spotters – all for £250. Another holiday will feature a tour of the "great tarmac institution" of the M1, promising meetings with "architects and historians, artists and truckers".

More on the shop's website and on the School of Life blog.

Festival of Asian Literature

Michael Binyon in The Times has news of a very interesting literary festival and it's one that slipped beneath my radar completely last year.

The second Festival of Asian Literature will runs from May 12-23 at Asia House which Binyon describes as :

... a vibrant new cultural centre, is fast emerging as London's cultural window on a continent, one that is fast emerging as the main showcase of the arts, films, music and literature of India, China and some 30 other countries from Indonesia to the Gulf.

The 11 day event brings together some major Asian authors including Mohsin Hamid, Amitav Ghost, Shashi Tharoor, Pankaj Mishra, Xinran, Diane Liang Wei, as well as Malaysian author Chiew-Siah Tei , who was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary prize.

I am terribly jealous of those who will get to go!

(Picture above shows Xinran, Diane Liang Wei and Chiew-Siah Tei)

Literary London

Don't know about you, but when I travel I love to fit my reading to the place I'm visiting.

If you're off to London any time soon (one or two of you are there already!), you might enjoy this guide to the city in books, produced by Booktrust for the Get London Reading campaign. (The full, interactive map features 400 books set in, or about the capital, and if you find that any books have been forgotten - you can just add them!)

Of course Dickens and Conan Doyle are necessary choices, but there are plenty of suggestions for contemporary fiction including Sarah Waters The Night Watch, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani.

Not Daunted by Squidginess

If we can invoke all the bookshops in the world and hold them up to test for squidginess then let me slip in my favourite, Daunts, on Marylebone High Street, London, specialising in travel books.

In the main room, books are arranged not by author or publisher or type, but by geographical region: Low Countries, Oceania, The Balkans, Central Europe. Travel guides jostle cookbooks wrestle maps cavort with novels nudge photography collections elbow phrasebooks for shelf space.


Other more general works are laid out temptingly on the tables screaming to be picked up and poured over. The windows are of stained glass, there's a second tier of books along a wooden balcony and a skylight runs the length of the gallery, so that the shop appears nothing less than a chapel of books. Amen. Amen.

There are no sofas, no in-store-coffee-corner, but down the road is Patisserie Valerie. Books can be devoured with grilled goast cheese crostini and red pepper salad in a room decorated with chandeliers, gilt mirrors and pale green and yellow murals of flowery bowers and dhows sailing between mythical islands. And I can never resist a fruit-laden tart from the window display of cakes and gateaux and marzipan animals.

I also nurse with joy the knowledge that in the C18th, this shop belonged to a bookseller called Davies. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first comprehensive English dictionary, met Boswell (who became his friend and later biographer) on this very spot in May 1763.

The past happens in the same spaces as the present in London and the dust of history settles on your clothes.

I will be back there in a couple of weeks. I may even brave the cold to explore some of the other London bookshops listed here.

Not in my Name

Was working hard yesterday reading McEwan's longlisted Saturday at the hairdessers. (Good reading spot apart from the fact that you have to keep blowing away the bits of hair that fall on the pages.) Anyway, the book is set on a single day - Saturday 15th February 2003, the day of the first huge demonstration against the Iraq with more than a million marching in London alone.

I was here, not there, or I would have marched.

A few weeks later, the war started and a second demonstration was held in London on another Saturday: 22nd March, a little smaller (just half a million marchers) and more subdued than the first. This time I was part of the crowd and this is the piece I wrote that day:

My placard is a piece of cardboard rescued from the bin in my sister's house. I haven't written anything profound on it, just ANGRY, BETRAYED. Which is how I feel. Only ANGRY doesn't do justice to this gnawing pain in my guts. INCENSED, would perhaps have been better.

A nice young man helps me to stick my homemade banner with brown parcel tape to a Socialist Worker banner saying STOP THE WAR. Though of course it can't be stopped now it's started, can it? Still it's important to stand up and be counted, to send the message around the world that there is opposition. (And what a joy it is to hear a BBC newscaster say later a propos of the march: "This is still a country deeply divided." The biggest wartime demonstration in this country ever.)

I buy a whistle and a pocket full of badges to give away to the kids: NOT IN MY NAME. Left wing newspapers and flyers are thrust into my hand.

This is my first demonstration. Ever. Middle-aged protest virgin. I'm self-conscious as I take my place behind the other marchers, expecting to feel out of place. But there's a real cross section of people in this march. Many marchers are elderly, some are kids with their parents. There's a real feeling of camaraderie, but the mood is sombre rather than defiant.

Helicopters from the television stations hover overhead. Reporters push among the crowd looking for photo opportunities.

The chanting picks up, and I gingerly join in as I manage to catch the words.

What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now. Peace now peace now peace now peacenowpeacenowpeacenow.

We start off late from Gower Street, move slowly down Shaftesbury Avenue, police lining the route. At Picadilly, another river of protesters joins us, moving from the South of the city.

Bush Blair USA. How many kids have you killed today?

It's a glorious spring day. I feel so blessed to be walking through this magnificent city in the sunshine. I'm proud to be among others who care enough about the state of the world to come from all over the country and march. And we're free to do so without the fear of being arrested for dissent against the government. (Believe me, you value this when you live in a country like Malaysia.)

Who let the dogs out? Bush Bush and Blair.

I start up a conversation with a woman named Roz who tells me that she is a veteran of all the marches. She's around my age, and so diminutive that I have to bend sideways to hear her over the noise of the whistles, sirens and chanting, not so easy with my unwieldy banner which has the wind billowing behind it. But I learn that Roz been protesting at Westminster all week, sitting in the road to stop the traffic. She fills me in on all the other protests and demonstrations around the country, and tells me about the thousands arrested in San Fransisco, including the a man who fell or was pushed from the Golden Gate bridge.

1-2-3-4 we don't want your bloody war.



Roz seems to think I'm doing quite well as a protester. Maybe I'll take it up more seriously.

5-6-7-8 stop the killing stop the hate.

We flood into Hyde Park. Thank goodness there are toilets and food stalls set up. I have an improvised picnic of fish cake and soggy chips on the grass and then join the crowd again to listen to speeches. One Welsh Labour MP who voted against Blair gives an eloquent speech about the dangers of American Imperialism. There's a moments silence and the Moslems in the crowd are asked to say the Al-Fateha prayer. Some of the speeches are shallow sloganeering though, and I was unhappy about the Palestinian issue being linked to this protest about war with Iraq so I decide not to stay till the end.

As I leave, I see a field of hands made by children from all over the country. Tiny banners made by drawing around their hands and cutting them out, then decorating them with peace messages. The sight of all those tiny hands and the heartfelt words on them has the tears pricking my eyes.

I trudge up to Bond street to take the tube home. My feet hurt like hell by now, but my heart is lightened.

Satanic Synchronicity

Just started rereading Peter Ackroyd's chilling Hawksmoor, twenty years or so after it first terrified me.

Ackroyd moves back and forth between the eighteenth century and the present in this tale of architect Nicholas Dyer who builds churches based on satanic principles. Dyer is based on real-life architect based on Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked with Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London and constructed a number of churches in London. And there is certainly evidence of the incorporation of occult elements in the Hawksmoor churches. (If you're curious take a look at this excellent essay The Eloquence of Stone: A Long Look at Christ Church by Eduardo Zinna.)







All my own nightmares are here between the pages. Ackroyd recreates the London I search for each time I walk the oldest parts of the city, conscious of the thousands of years of history beneath my feet. Sometimes the past seems so close that you could enter it.

I am afraid of old churches too. Wake in a cold sweat dreaming of spires and the chanting of demons.

I'm leading up to a story ...

My friend Lucy taught EFL with me on Summer School at my college in Plymouth. She has a brother who is an archaeologist and has been on numerous digs, and she's always fascinated by his work. Back in the mid-80's he was involved in the first dig of a crypt of a church from the eighteenth-century. The church was Christ Church in Spitalfields, and it was one of the Hawksmoor churches.



The idea was that the crypt was to be cleared of coffins so that it could be used as a centre for the homeless of this very poor area of the East End. But there were quite a number of coffins dating from the period when the church was built and these had to be catalogued first since they would offer important insights into the life of the local population of the time.

Now at that point in time it was common to use lead-lined coffins which preserve the body from the elements.

My friend's brother and his team set about opening up the coffins to document the contents.

Maybe it was because of the build up of gases in the coffin, or maybe there was a chemical reaction when air rushed in, but as soon as the coffin lids were prised open, the bodies just ... exploded.

One woman had a corpse explode in her face and was covered with fragments of the body. She began to scream, couldn't stop. Had to be warded in a psychiatric hospital.(Apparently post traumatic stress syndrome is a very real danger for forensic anthropolgists who need to receive regular counselling).

Anyhow, Lucy heard this story from her brother when she went to visit the site of the dig in the crypt one day and she could see her brother was pretty spooked out by the incident.

Lucy later caught her bus home, decided to read on the journey and reached into her bag for the new novel she had bought that morning.

You've guessed it - Ackroyd's Hawksmoor. Set in the very same church she had just visited.

Now how's that for synchronicity?

The Naffest Musical Instrument

My favourite shop in London is The Recorder Centre.

Yes. Indeed. I'm afraid so. I'm out of the closet.

I play the naffest musical instrument of them all.

Painfully inflicted on generations of school kids as an introduction to ensemble playing (and this is how I began), the recorder is almost universally reviled.

Tell someone you play it and they invariably say "Oh so do I. I learned it at school." And then they launch off into a discussion of how their son/daughter plays the violin/cello/flute/oboe and so on. A REAL musical instrument.

I was apologetic too. At first.

I could tootle away for hours, just pleasing myself, making up tunes, playing by ear. But that was as far as it went. When I went to Nigeria, I took a recorder with me and played songs and Christmas carols for my students to sing to. I chucked two recorders in my suitcase when I first came to Malaysia, and just played for myself whenever I wanted to relax and had nothing better to do.

Then I found the shop on one of my visits home, on Chiltern Street, a short walk from Baker's Street and Oxford Street. A whole shop selling recorders? I was amazed.

I asked the assistant if she could sell me some music for my recorder. I wasn't very advanced, did she have something fairly easy to play? I enjoyed the instrument, I told her, but wished that I could play a PROPER instrument.

She didn't skip a beat. She lead me across the shop to a display of CD's. Look, she said, all these are recordings of recorder music, and all by professional recorder players. It is a proper instrument. A beautiful instrument. And it's every bit as challenging to play well as any other instrument. You need to take it seriously. (Since she was a professional recorder player herself, as I later learned, I can appreciate her anguish.)

She showed me recorders costing thousands of pounds and let me try them. My favourite was a sub sub contra bass recorder, shaped like an organ pipe with a curved metal mouthpiece and as tall as me. Whoever would have thought that a recorder could look and sound like this? (One day I'll buy one.) And then she searched her shleves for music I would enjoy learning to play.

I brought the sheet music and a couple of books on technique back to Malaysia with me. Practiced almost daily and enjoyed myself thoroughly.

On my next trip home (alas when my mother was dying of cancer, and I needed, desperately, something to make me happy), I bought a tenor recorder, a ton of music and CD's of recorder players to inspire me.

And now, although I still have much to learn (particularly about how to get the ornamentations - trills, battements, flattements, grace notes - to sound right), I'm really flying. I love the feeling of being right inside the music, making the notes with my breath.

And above all I love the music I play. Telemann, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Loueillet, Handel and many composers I'd never heard of before, but am equally enchanted by. I'm learning the recorder part from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 - a brilliant, glittering piece which stands alone perfectly without the rest of the orchestra (but which is just a single thread of colour in Bach's scheme of things, each thread as vivid as the next to form an incredible tapestry of sound).

I don't care I don't care I don't care if the instrument is naff! I don't care if the world doesn't care for this instrument. I don't care if no-one cares for my playing. I'm happy making music and am busy discovering new worlds.

Johnson's Dictionary

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was published 250 years ago this month. Beryl Bainbridge here describes how a failed teacher and celebrated 'hack' worked for nine years in a London garret to redefine the English language - and his reputation. His working methods for compiling the dictionary are described here in some detail. Just imagine what he could have done with a computer at his disposal!

I think dictionaries are sexy, and in a parallel universe I'm a lexicographer for sure - a job that combines a love of words with a love of research. (I seem fated to have a lot to do with dictionaries - writing reviews on them for The Star and promoting them for Oxford.) And I'm a great fan of Johnson's - if I had the chance to go back in history and have dinner with just one famous writer, it might well be him. I loved both Boswell's Life of and Beryl Bainbridge's novel about him: According to Queeney.

There's a lovely little cafe on Marylebone High Street in London called Patisserie Valerie where I love to hang out when I'm back home. Everywhere in London you get a buzz from stepping on history. But this place is special to me - quite apart from the fact the cakes are heavenly! The upstairs rooms used to accommodate a bookshop ... and it was here than Boswell met Johnson for the first time.