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| Topping Bath bookshop |
Is there a better place than a bookshop for reading aloud? I was in Bath this week at Topping Bookshop after closing time, (a civilised 8pm) reading to a wine-warmed audience and talking off the cuff with Kathleen Jamie, a poet I much admire. It was wonderful to be offset from head to toe in books, some of them – especially the art and architecture display – extremely beautiful; tantalising. You realise in a well-stocked bookshop just how many things you’ve ever looked for in books in the past, and how, passive as they are, they still have the power to interest you and fire the imagination. The bookshop promises a kind of feast of revelations starting with the spines and covers, lettering and images … stimulating good sensations before you even open a book.
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| Kate Miller reading at Topping Bath |
Only certain bookshops, though, have the old magic, that atmosphere – surely something to do with the smell of books? the cushioning of sound by walls of books? – in which you lose all sense of urgency and start to feel embedded in the place, a sensation of physical comfort. Occasionally in libraries too, ensconced among books, I’ve experienced this tide of warmth apparently washing the sand inside my head.
For ages I haven’t found a way to describe this when it happened. The best I could say was it was like a low note and warm light on in my skull, something spinning me into a safe cocoon, where liquid as a larva I would change my state; now that we have more scientific information it seems it is probably down to the arrival of endorphins in the inner part of the brain's parietal cortex, rolling in a large mossy ball on the end of a feathery leash to the happiness store. Where I’d like to think (unscientifically) it reconnects with vintage happiness that has lain there a long time.
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| Holiday at The Dew Drop Inn by Eve Garnett |
When did this start? In childhood I’d often go with my father on a Saturday to Gieves. It was a grand old outfitters on the Hard near the Naval Dockyard of Portsmouth. Now, writing this, I am not sure of my facts: perhaps he was going to the barber while I waited in the bookshop at the back (or perhaps the bookshop was next door). Whatever, Time disappeared. I remember the pleasure and responsibility of exchanging a book token, finally deciding on a Puffin paperback. One year, Eve Garnett’s Holiday at the Dewdrop Inn; another time, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. Both stories turned on a town child going to stay deep in the English countryside and becoming sensitized to and intoxicated by rural life and the natural world.
I was reminded of the pleasure and release from being a townie that I had from having ‘free reign’ (or should that be free rein?) in those books this week when Kathleen Jamie and I both mentioned childhood games, dreams and dramas. And owned up to old habits of observance, centred on pieces of the natural world, especially trees, particular birds and wild native animals. We both admit to being awed by deer, and indeed I am overawed by horses, which one sees so rarely in Central London and certainly never without handlers or riders. Even the smell of horse is bewitching. It’s natural – the more so, as a child perhaps – to be struck so deeply by the non-human world that one is changed, re-programmed, opened to new possibilities.If books just by their presence as texts open up landscapes of the memory, passages and stairways into our individual and private histories, and recover the surprise of curiosities awakened (and sometimes unsatisfied), so reading from them, putting voices to the words, constitutes a powerful kind of push into the imagined and remembered world. A kind of radio experience, one of our audience said, with the wide palette of Scots and English accent and inflection, rhythms of speech and storytelling. Two voices changing pace, vocabulary and emphasis meant the chosen poems were effortlessly mobilised and engaged in a conversation of ideas, a compendium of images. We answered questions about their manufacture out of thinking, the process of definition, the time they take to write.
Which brings me back to giving things (like poems which are so patently reports on time) time. And the kind of place where Time backs up, in the nicest way, on shelves or layers: where ancient and modern meet, and fuel for the imagination’s on display. I’ve always been interested in the Great Good Place, both the sociologist’s (Ray Oldenburg) and the fantasist’s (Henry James) and the sense both writers convey that in such a spot, whether it’s a fine interior or the corner of a shop or park, you feel entirely easy: you have access to the ordinary things of life, they are all good and not prescribed or finite, and at any moment you can go where your taste takes you, by the nose, the eye, or your ear.
So, with many thanks to Topping (Bath) I salute the bookshop as a place where the little doors are opened and poems are let out, like small kept birds, out from narrow slots and bindings, to fly around the heads of listeners, on their way to open country.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Kate Miller's Costa Book Awards shortlisted The Observances
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code OBSERVANCES (case-sensitive). Happy reading!