Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

MORE ANXIETY ABOUT PRINTED BOOKS

A few weeks back, my wife and I did something that we had not done for nearly 16 years, when I was still a film reviewer and we sometimes spent whole days watching movies at the International Film Festival. We went to the local art house and watched three movies one after the other. In part, this was our knee-jerk reaction now that lock-down is (apparently) over and cinemas are open once again.

 One was the documentary Water Lilies of Monet – The Magic of Water and Light. We enjoyed it, but found parts of it (ironically) a little too “arty”, especially when it went into re-enactments, with voice-over, of Monet’s life. There’s that odd phenomenon, too, that such documentaries, with their shots of real locations that inspired works of art, often have the perverse effect of belittling the art itself. Let me not be churlish, however. It was a delight to see so many images of Monet’s work about the Seine, even before he began specialising in water lilies; and I admit to being enlightened by the film’s account of Monet’s close friendship with the politician Clemenceau, a relationship of which I had been quite ignorant. Another non-French film with a French theme was Resistance, purporting to dramatise the life of Marcel Marceau during the Second World War. Regrettably it was rubbish. Marceau, destined to become the world’s most famous mime artist, was a genuine hero and humanitarian who did work in the French Resistance and did save the lives of many Jewish children who were in danger of deportation to death camps. Certainly his life deserves celebrating. But the film was hyped up with Hollywood tropes and sensationalism, melodramatic scenes that never happened (such as Marceau’s confrontation with Klaus Barbie) and ridiculous dialogue. A story that could have made a good documentary was instead turned into formulaic nonsense.

But the third movie was the real subject of this editorial, which I have delayed mentioning because of my discursive (read – waffling) ways. 

D.W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers consists largely of interviews with mainly American and mainly New York (but also a few British) second-hand booksellers – or as they prefer to be known, antiquarian booksellers. In part, it was about the eccentricity of these (overwhelmingly elderly) people, many of whom drifted into the trade either because they inherited it or simply because they loved the sight and the feel and the smell of old books. One or two  - included a man who must be a multi-millionaire – inherited huge libraries of valuable first editions and there was much talk about their monentary value. Information was given about the hundreds of thousands – and in some cases millions – of dollars that have been paid at auctions for Shakespeare folios, early editions of Don Quixote, and signed copies of other classics. There were also the dealers with niche markets in books on geography or cartography or science fiction or Beat poets or what have you.

An interesting point made by one interviewee (there were no subtitles to identify any of them) was that, no matter how monetarily valuable many books are, they never earn the tens-of-millions of dollars that are paid for some paintings. An artwork is a unique thing, while even a valuable book (unless it is a codex or manuscript) has been replicated in the print-run that produced it.

Yet, apart from the enthusiasm of one or two youngsters in the trade, there was an undertone of anxiety to this film. Many of New York’s well-established and once well-patronised second-hand booksellers have closed down and the whole trade model is shrinking. Some of the interviewees say that what once sustained their business were the browsers who simply came to look and might perhaps discover something that interested them. There also used to be the joy of the hunt. Some buyers would be in search of a rare book that had eluded them for years; and the joy of finding that rare book was what motivated them. Now all manner of rare books are sold on the internet. Hello Amazon. Those who seek a particular rare book can now find it at the press of a key. The joy of the hunt has gone and antiquarian bookshops are dying.

I know at first hand the allure of second-hand-bookshops here in New Zealand, because it was once my regular weekend pastime to trawl through them. I have never been in search of rare or valuable books – partly because I have never had the money to buy such items, but mainly because I was always in search of things I actually wanted to read, regardless of the tattered or cheap-edition form in which I bought them. For me, it is the contents of books that are paramount, not the presentation, much as I like viewing and handling old books with their firm board covers and marbled end-papers and deckled edges and superseded typefaces.

I was well-acquainted with the type of mileu that was made into such good comedy in the British sitcom Black Books 20-odd years ago. Many of the proprietors really were people who seemed more interested in reading at their desk than in selling books, and who could be grumpy with buying customers for disturbing their peace. But many of the shops I used to visit have disappeared. There used to be five second-hand bookshops in central Auckland. There are now only two, and one of them is exclusively for those seeking very expensive editions (so not for me). The massive Hard-to-Find-But-Worth-the-Effort bookshop that used to be in Onehunga has now down-sized and moved to the inner-city suburb of Newton. There used to be three second-hand bookshops in Devonport. There is now one, and it is half the size it used to be. Selling second-hand books was always a precarious way of making a living, but I can only assume that New Zealand second-hand booksellers are now facing the same pressures as American ones.

Yet, despite some predictions, the enemy is not Kindle or other forms of reading whole books on line. In the last twenty years it has been proven repeatedly that people still prefer to read physically-existing printed books instead of books on a screen.

As I argued in an earlier posting, AnxietyAbout Books, there is now a widespread anxiety about the whole traditional concept of reading. Rather than reading whole books (in any form), more functionally-literate people prefer to read bite-sized information, which is indeed seen online. The slow demise of second-hand bookshops is only a small part of a wider cultural shift in which television, podcasts, websites and blogs like the one you are now reading have moved to the centre of culture, while those of us who know how to read at length become a smaller proportion of society.