Second-hand books are wild books

Heinrich Mann, an obscure German novelist, once wrote that:  “A house without books is like a room without windows.”

It’s a fittingly compact phrase, and manages to switch spaces within tight confines, describing the perspectives made possible by books. The phrase enacts a heady narrowing, inherent in the solitary experience of reading, which is entirely different to claustrophobia, while opening out to that other symptom of a strange pursuit: the widening of experience.

The problem now, with people increasing frequenting the same franchises and large chains of bookshops, is that the views from house to house may be becoming more or less homogenous, and instead of opening up new perspectives, all windows back on  to the same scenes, stagnant and unvaried.

The organization of information, and the tangible effects of this organization, is something we are acutely aware of here at Newbloodart, as a company which bridges the digital and the tactile. And after recently visiting a wonderful second-hand bookshop, Lloyd’s of Kew Booksellers, we felt it important to celebrate it here at the blog.

At Lloyd’s you can find hundreds and hundreds of titles, from the classics to the curious. We encountered Capability Brown in Northumberland, The MGM Story, Good Words, A Dictionary of Trout Flies, Stirring Adventures in African Travels, Bernard Shaw’s The Sanity of Art.

The shop’s second room is dominated by a structure formed from four trees with shelves of books inhabiting the cavity of the trunk. It’s a structure both majestic and ramshackle, suggesting both the experience of a tree of knowledge and the innocence of a tree house. The rest of the shop is equally striking for the care of presentation and selection.Lloyd’s is a cabinet of curiosities and might well prove a useful and enriching resource for many of our artists. A note to Georgina Flood: in a box filled with Ladybird classics, the series from which many generations began their experiences of reading, we found a Ladybird devoted entirely to Livingstone himself.

As Charles, who works at Lloyd’s, pointed out, large chain bookshops and some digital platforms tend to provide pretty identical experiences, “it doesn’t matter what you buy – the experience is the same”. Whereas at Lloyd’s you can “come in for poetry and go out with history”.

In her ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure” Virginia Woolf describes some of the joys of the experience of the second hand bookshop:

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.”

Indeed the beauty, design and craftsmanship of the books is striking in contrast to the design of books now. Even when beautiful, their aesthetic coherence tends to be ruptured by the need to incorporate sound bites, authoritative recommendations and absurdly condensed summaries:

It seems we have to be told what a book is, in this case apparently “rigorous and profound” before daring to open it unaccompanied. Indeed it seems that increasingly our information is organized for us by others. If you or I were to search for information on, for example, the Spanish Armada, we may well come up with the same (Google) results. And this does not quite suggest the other losses, of encounter: a visit to a bookshop such as Lloyd’s means that we may not only come out wiser about Victorian Telephone Directories, but richer with all the street hauntings, all the possible experiences encountered along the way. (Of course Google is great for compiling a list of second hand bookshops to visit.

A miscellany of information is possible at Lloyd’s, where the books are divided idiosyncratically, separated into for example Botany, Tropical Gardening, Marx/Engels, African Fiction, Irish Interest, The World and even Company History, where you can read about the history of Selfridges. A faded Charles Dickens sticker on a shelf now labelled BIRDS traces a shift in the organizing principle of the shop over time, a desire for a spring clean, a fresh arrangement. As Charles says, the shop is both a reflection and extension of the owner, Ulrike Bulle’s character.

We were inspired by our visit to Lloyd’s and its personal quality. Most bookshops, as well as other platforms for art and information, now both maintain and dictate the status quo and a very narrow orthodoxy. We were refreshed by these different views, afforded by all such enterprises like (but of course different from) Lloyd’s of Kew. Do go visit.