Pen Pusher Magazine

Dear Readers,

The following article is part of a new Pen Pusher campaign to promote independent bookshops. Please get in touch to recommend any independents not on our list. If you would like to write a recommendation please send them to editors@penpushermagazine.co.uk, word limit: 350 words – in Pen Pusher NINE, Crysse Morrison recommends Hunting Raven Books. Also, get in touch to tell us about your own book buying habits and your opinions on this matter.

Here's a very short story: a friend recommended a novel; I was bored at work; I went onto the Internet; I ordered a copy for an excellent price; it was delivered; I read the first few pages ... and decided I didn’t like it.
This reminded me of something: that going to a bookshop is the only real way to buy a book. Plus, you certainly don’t get that same thrill when your chosen volume arrives in a chilled plastic carton. There’s something a little funereal about it – you could almost read it as portent of the death (or near-death experience) of a local independent bookshop near you.

Chain bookshops running cut-price deals, book sales rocketing in supermarkets (they were up 41% last year) and, of course, the Internet, means that if it wasn’t hard enough to start with, running an independent bookshop appears to get more and more difficult with every passing year.

I don’t claim to have delved into all the pros and cons of the current situation, it’s just that if fewer people/companies control the market and therefore what publishers are prepared to release we could all be reading Wayne Rooney’s autobiography for Christmas ... and not through choice.

A lot of people in London live near enough to an independent bookseller to veer off the main drag, visit, get to know the stock, order books, browse there and potentially benefit from the often excellent knowledge of the staff. All this without being surrounded by a 100 other people doing exactly the same thing, whilst enjoying a coffee, restraining their errant child, thumbing all the magazines to death before retuning them, erroneously, to the gardening section, to the sweet sounds of canned music. To, essentially, really enjoy buying a book.

It’s worth noting that business, and not the consumer, drives the drastic price reductions and deals in large chains. If you are an avid reader living in near penury I urge you to make use of all the cheap offers you can (or go to the library). But for everyone else, why not sometimes savour the delights and advantages that independent bookshops can offer?

The key point to hold onto when you are loitering, habitually, near Borders is that publishers already struggle to be able to afford to publish any work that breaks the mould, is plain weird or too unusual to sell in any quantity, as the need for popular bestsellers is now so great. As Jonathan Coe writes in his book about BS Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (which, incidentally, is written about in Pen Pusher ONE) ‘those [the fifties and sixties] were the days when if you had talent it was recognised’. I’m not sure if that’s the case now. And it’s not good for anyone: neither the publishing industry nor the individual writer or reader. But I don’t think it’s hard to make a little difference in this case.
ACG