The Books, The Books
It's been a busy month for Polly and I, as we were supplying the books for the Ludlow Food Festival last week, immediately followed by going to our first ever Booksellers Association conference. We learnt a lot from both of these experiences (on which more another time), but I wanted to just take a moment to talk about one of the things that we have been doing in an ongoing way, which is organising (and falling in love with) the books in the shop.
The previous operators mostly had books organised alphabetically by title, which is really great if you know the title of the book you are looking for (eg if you have sold it online and want to find it to send out), but is not the most user-friendly arrangement for customers who want to browse and discover things or learn about a particular topic. So we have been systematically reorganising the shop, moving sections around to where we want them - for example I have put music books next to the CDs, sport next to countryside pursuits, which is next to nature, and so on. Then, within sections we are categorising a bit more, so PPE now has separate Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Psychology sections, split up within that for things like UK politics, European politics and so on. Customers have said nice things about the new set up, so we are happy about that, it feels worthwhile, although at times it has felt overwhelming (whoever prints architecture books has never had to carry more than one of them up or down stairs).
By now we have moved almost every single book in the shop, and it has been an absolute labour of love to handle them all. Our staff have been very graceful and thorough as they are faced with yet more massive piles of heavy books to lift and carry and understand and sort, barely flinching when I have said things like - we need to move all of these down here, and then this bit goes over there, and... and... and. They have all been fantastic (thanks, our brilliant women!), and the shop is close now to being roughly where we want it. There are tweaks as we realise that we want to put more new books in the front room, so the Folios have to go somewhere else, or Christmas starts to loom so a section is dedicated to that, but in general if you come in now, we can tell you where something might be.
However, a shop will never be a static thing, as, if we are lucky, people come in and buy the books, so more books have to be moved into the empty spaces. We are getting used to this ebb and flow as tides of books gently wash through the shop and are finding ourselves needing to step up to fill the emptying shelves. We have massive piles of books stored in the barn next door, and we have been trying to make sense of what is hidden in all the piles and boxes and shelves out there as we unpack and move them into the shop where people can see them.
There are thousands of unsorted books, so each one is a discovery and could be literally anything. We have unearthed popular fiction from the 1900s and the 1970s, specialist books about windmills, dissertations about poverty in African countries, a handbook about railway tracks and their gauges from 1936 complete with diagrams for building them, biographies of men who liked horse-riding, sex advice, memoirs about running a smallholding, puzzzle books, sheet music, foreign-language art essays, Swahili slang phrases, books about how to collect teddy bears and a joke book for when you are sitting on the loo. They have been paperbacks, sometimes torn, sometimes with fabulous lurid covers, or leather bound, silk covered, dust-jacketed and un-jacketed. Some have bookplates inside, or contain notes, bookmarks, recipes used as markers for other recipes in cookbooks, letters, postcards, tickets, and drawings. Many of the cookbooks are splattered with the results of the recipes, pages are dog-eared, words underlined, notes written in margins. Each book has been such a delightful, human thing - all that knowledge, all that research, all the trouble to create beautiful objects, and all the humans who have read and handled them, with their handwritten names and dates, or memories left in the pages.
Polly and I can regularly be found exclaiming over a book we have found, laughing at its jokes, gasping at sentences that would be absolutely not be written today, sighing over the letters or left-behind photographs or gorgeous endpapers or something or other. Last week we found a Victorian photo album, filled with fading pictures of a family in period dresses, leather-bound and framed by cardboard pages printed with vivid green and white foliage. There was the book about being an alien, written for foreign people moving to the UK in the 1940s, full of tender, warm jokes about how much British people like tea, and queues. And then there was the copy of The Professor, written by Charlotte Bronte before she was famous, reissued by her husband in 1856 after her untimely death. This one gave me chills, because Jane Eyre is one of THE books of my life, and to see Charlotte's introduction to this earlier novel, written in hindsight after her success with Jane Eyre, and then the note from her bereaved husband, made me want to cry.
In short, we love books, and handling all of these has made us love them more. There are more books here than we could possibly read in a lifetime, and yet more waiting for us to find them. We have done our best with the displays to showcase some of the many wonders we have, putting books 'face-out' so you can see more of their beautiful covers, and each one makes me smile. I mean, just look at them! Every day I am here I see something I haven't seen before, and ten minutes have gone by and I have not done the thing I was going to do because a cover caught my attention, or a pile caught my eye, and here I am, flicking through books again, instead of doing the accounts. What a treasure trove we are in charge of, what a box of delights.
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