Lament for a Lost Sofa
Wivenhoe Bookshop found here
Ling Low
When a branch of Ottakars opened up in my hometown about ten years ago, I was snobbishly high minded about its various distractions. Among the bookshop’s colourful and – I thought – superfluous diversions there was an interactive contraption in the children’s section, and shelves full of toys on prominent display. I thought all this a cheap and cynical ploy to get people to stay in the shop. But then, I was the kind of child who liked lining up Penguin Classics in alphabetical order*.
Alongside the bookshop’s child-friendly amusements, there were adult-friendly sofas and chairs which reconciled me to it somewhat. In particular, there was a sofa which was located just opposite the Erotic Fiction section. If you sat there for a while, you would see male customers veer towards the shelf, then sidle to an indeterminate point nearby as soon they saw you perched there. Fortunately, the Science Fiction section was the next shelf along, and provided a handy refuge.
I rather liked that sofa. More than its opportune locale, there was something nice about having sofas in general in a bookshop. Sofas seemed to say, “Come in from the cold and sit awhile. Enjoy that feeling of being surrounded by things to read and look at. Ignore the screams of children fighting over the big interactive toy.” With sofas, you could spend time idly browsing: whether you were getting sucked into the first chapter of a really good book, or furtively reading a self-help manual.
Ottakars was, in time, taken over by Waterstones. And bookshops were overtaken by the internet. Now, I hardly ever go into a bookshop to find a particular book. It’s easier to look online first, in the internet’s cheap and infinite stockroom. But I still go into bookshops to do that kind of idle browsing which can lead to unplanned purchases. Picking up an appealing volume by chance can lead to finding a book you’ll love. That’s a feeling which can’t be replicated by an automated message that tells you, “Customers who bought this, also bought that”.
When I drifted most recently into the bookshop in question, I found that all the sofas had disappeared. I took the absence of the one near Erotic Fiction to heart the most. But further investigation revealed a deficit, a veritable desert, of sitting furniture. Even those round step stools (usually my last resort) were missing. The interactive centrepiece of the children’s section was gone too, and there was not a single fun beanbag to be fought over.
I don’t know when this erosion of sofas happened. It may have been gradual. But to make the cynicism of it all the more apparent, the coffee shop upstairs was resplendent in sofas, behind a cordon clearly demarcating its territory. Entering the coffee shop with an unpaid-for book is one of those taboo things. Though I’ve never seen it written down, I’m sure there’s a rule that you have to buy the book first. Then you have to buy a coffee.
I know that bookshops are being squeezed hard at the moment, and that the recession has added to their asphyxiation by the internet. Encouraging customers to ‘sample’ the books might lead to bent spines, creased corners, etc – books that cannot be sold. But it would be nice to go into a bookshop and not to feel as though it exists solely to process the purchasing of minor celebrity biographies and cookbooks. It would be nice if there was a place for the wayward reader.
More than that, it is necessary if bookshops want to survive. If we can’t handle books and browse through their actual pages, then bookshops will have nothing over online stores. And then they really will be reduced to warehouses full of celebrity biographies, cookbooks, and celebrity chef biographies. As this won’t be to the advantage of anyone apart from Antony Worrall Thompson, it is crucial that bookshops fight back by improving their reading environments. As the first part of the bookshop rescue plan, I propose that all sofas should be returned to the shop floor, with extra padding if possible. Let’s start with the one next to Erotic Fiction.
*By author surname, in case you were wondering.
What the author of this piece forgets is that bookstores are not libraries: like it or not, romanticise it or not, bookstores exist to sell books – not to offer ‘customers’ the chance to read them and disappear.
If Waterstone’s were to focus on customers sitting around for hours reading, then they would not sell enough books, which would lead to the overall price of each book needing to be increased. That retail stores have focussed on selling means that the price of books – even the pretentious ones – have gone down. To lament the sofa is to lament the existence of expensive books. To lament expensive books is to lament poor people being able to read them.
Stop moaning about sofas and realise that the by-gone (thank goodness) era of couches in bookstores (and the inevitability of reading only being for the polite classes) is over. Capitalism and the quest for higher profits has, perhaps unexpectedly, opened up opportunities for poorer people to read books. That’s all that matters. Stop lamenting the lost couch.
I think you trace a very tenuous line that sofas in bookstores means ‘the inevitability of reading only being for the polite classes’. The first time good books became available to a wider audience was with the penguin paperbacks in 1935, way way before the disappearance of sofas in bookshops, which was (as is clear by this article) relatively recent. There has not been a sudden increase in poorer people being able to buy books in the last few years. But there almost certainly was since the penguin paperbacks (apart from the dip again during the paper shortage of WWII). Before then good books were only published in hardback, which was and still is expensive.
I think very very few people sit down in a bookshop sofa and read the WHOLE book cover to cover and then not buy the book. Think how long it takes to read the average paperback novel. At least two or three hours. Do you really think most bookshop browsers would sit in a bookshop for that long and then not buy anything? Do you really think that the sales assistants wouldn’t come up to them and say something? I think it very unlikely and even if this happens very occasionally, certainly not enough to affect the overall profitability of books and hence the price as you claim so vigorously.
Also, as Ling mentions, the internet is what is killing bookshops. The only way for physical bookshops to survive is offer something different, perhaps a comforting environment that makes book buying in person more pleasurable than buying on the internet would do the trick. That is the one thing that bookshops do better than the internet, browsing and letting you have a read of some of it.
Is giving opportunities for poorer people to read books *all* that matters? To say that is to say that physical bookshops shouldn’t exist because it is cheaper to have an internet business. To say that is to say that only large chains such as amazon should exist and small independent bookshops shouldn’t – for they cannot compete on price with waterstones, let alone amazon. I think giving opportunities for poorer people is important. But it is not the ONLY thing that is important. Making sure that our independent businesses aren’t completely wiped out by large chainstores is also important. Making sure that there are still places where one can have a browse around the new books and buy it in person is also important.
I certainly think that poorer people should not be prevented from reading books. Libraries do a good job of preventing this. Cheap editions such as Wordsworth Classics do a good job too. I also think that people who don’t usually read books (who are not necessarily poor) should be encouraged to read books. Cheaper books won’t particularly encourage them; a cheap football ticket would not encourage me to go to a game. Something more needs to be done. Workshops to schools are good (sth we hope to do if we get some funding). Charities like Reading Agency and the Readathon scheme are also very good and, whatever you feel about it, television and film adaptations of books are also good at encouraging new readers.
There is no need to be aggressive. Ling is not a cigar-smoking aristocrat who talks of ‘plebs’ and ‘the Great Unwashed’ while stroking her impressive moustache while counting the thousands she has got in bonuses from RBS. (Though it would be pretty funny if she were…) She is merely a book lover who quite liked sitting in a sofa in a bookshop and has the perfect right to not do as you order her to do and instead carry on lamenting the lost sofa.
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