EXTRA TALES FROM THE BOOK TRADE

My favourite book came into the shop this week in a hard back version I’d never seen before. It’s called Firmin and is by Sam Savage and is about a rat, which lives in a second hand bookshop, and learns to read. Read this book and you will never feel the same way about a rat again. How I love it. Here’s the book produced by Weidenfeld and Nicholson with a lovely fake nibble along the top of it.

‘A rat of deep humanity and intelligence’ says Philip Pullman.

What a creative piece of publishing! So obviously I cleaned it up and bought it.

Books may be stored in all kinds of places before they are donated to us and those places can be dirty and damp and vermin infested. So sometimes books do come in which have been chewed. Mice, rats…? Who knows? Children’s books may well have been chewed by babies who are teething. Whatever has chewed them, they get thrown out immediately, as do books which are covered in mould. Some of those you can feel tickling your lungs in a way you know is not to be recommended.

I experienced something of this recently when going through my father’s papers with my sisters prior to sending them off to a library. They’d been stored in a garage and mice had got in to one box and some of my father’s correspondence had clearly been turned into mouse bedding. So it goes. We just have to hope that anything of interest was in the top half of each page since the mice attacked from the bottom up. The papers are somewhere safe now where no mouse can reach them or read them.

This week it is the question of sticky labels I am pondering. To try and remove or not. You know the ones those round labels saying three for two or Richard and Judy’s Book Club or long listed/short listed for the Booker/Costa/Orange etc. Or as read on BBC Radio 4. If they’re relatively new they can be peeled off quite easily and don’t leave a residue. However if the book is older and has a more papery cover or it’s sat in the sun for a while,  then getting the label off without tearing the cover can be tricky, and sometimes you don’t know how tricky until you start doing it. Then you’re scraping label glue off with your finger nails for the next ten minutes and you end up with a book looking scruffier than if you’d just left the label there in the first place.

No saints and butterflies falling out of books this week. Instead, the card of a man who is a partner at a large city law firm, a bookmark of a Parisian seafood restaurant called La Marée, several sheets of toilet paper (unused) and an old Waterstone’s bookmark with a quote from H.G. Wells.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H.G.Wells

I took nineteen more of my books to the shop bringing it up to a grand total of 60 in three weeks. Not bad. I’m feeling rather pleased with myself and sense my shelves are breathing more easily but then my partner says, ‘It’s a drop in the ocean, isn’t it?’ And I look and think maybe I should adopt a more brutal approach. Maybe I should attack my white-spined Picadors. My Coastings and my Songlines, my States of Desire and my Beloveds. Maybe it’s time for them to go as well. I’m gradually getting into the swing of things. Marie Kondo would be pleased with me, I think.