Story Books

      

        In America, if you want to visit a bookstore your choices are simplified to either a Barnes & Noble or Borders. Wait, what? Borders is no longer a thing? Ok, so your choice is Barnes & Noble. There you will find lots of information about the newest edition of the Nook Tablet along with calendars, stationary, games, puzzles, coffee, muffins, magazines, and DVDs. A trip to a Barnes & Noble ensures a shiny pamphlet with lots of Nook related information, a coffee frapp with whipped cream, and a Seinfeld version of the Clue board game. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll see some books there too.

      But in London, for some crazy reason, the books are the primary focus of bookstores. And your choices are not limited to one chain store. During my summer in London, I made sure I visited every bookstore I saw. If I was with a group traveling somewhere and passed an interesting bookstore, I made a mental note of its location and revisited it another time. There was the used bookstore on Kensington Church Street on the walk to school, a few other shops in Notting Hill, and perhaps most impressive, the block in Covent Gardens that had four bookshops.

     Each of these shops had floor to ceiling books crammed onto bookshelves, stuffed in all directions with some books lying horizontally on top of the vertically lined books. There was little to no order, and it was difficult to find a specific title. Some paperbacks looked brand new and unread while others had yellowed and dog-eared pages. Some were missing their covers, and some had notes or bits of paper stuffed inside. In any given copy, you could find anything from an inscription indicating that the book was a present from a grandparent or even an insulting note. In one copy of a 1980s edition of The Great Gatsby, someone had scribbled, “You’re like a journalist the way you cut and paste, you’re awful.”

      One day, on the way back to the apartment, I stopped in an antiquarian shop on Kensington Church Street. Unlike the secondhand bookstores, this particular store specialized in rare and valuable books, and it looked the part. The books were well organized and several were encased behind glass panels. I found a first edition of Nabokov’s Lolita priced at £275. It was beautifully bound in green leather and its pages were golden leaved. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to touch it, but I quickly plucked it off the shelf and flipped through the pages. I then carefully placed it back in its rightful spot on the shelf. The book was beautiful, but I would have regarded a worn down copy of The Bell Jar with an interesting inscription equally impressive.

      After leaving the antiquarian shop, I decided to visit another type of bookstore that I hadn’t been exposed to yet, the chain store. Waterstone’s Books is basically the London equivalent to Barnes & Noble with several locations scattered across the city. But unlike a Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s is a bookstore that carries books and not much else. I walked around for a bit, and noticed something rather strange. The store’s workers were actually helping the customers select books that they might enjoy. This baffled me. If I were to ask a worker in a New Jersey Barnes & Noble to recommend any good books, I would be quickly escorted to the Nook station and showed a presentation of how I can now enjoy Netflix and Angry Birds on the all-new fully interactive touch screen Nook Tablet™ available for only $249. But in Waterstone’s, there were no tablets or e-reader or Starbucks. It was just like bookstores were supposed to be, like a Barnes & Noble circa 1995.

       I was leafing through a copy of Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test when a cute brunette employee approached me.

       “Do you need any help?” she asked in the delightful British accent that my ears had grown accustomed to.

        “Sure,” I said, “can you tell me more about this book?”

        “Are you familiar with Ronson?” she asked.

       Was I familiar with Ronson? Being the cultured person that I am, of course I was. After all, I knew that he had written The Men Who Stare at Goats, which had been adapted into a Coen brothers’ movie. I hadn’t read the book or seen the movie, but my dad saw the film and reported back to me that it wasn’t that good and that Brad Pitt played a gay gymnast or something like that. Clearly, I was a Ronson expert.

      Just to be safe, though, I replied that I wasn’t too familiar.

      “Well, this would be a good book to read if you want to stay current. There’s a lot of debate about Ronson’s work. It’s good conversation for when you’re at a dinner party.”

       I was immediately flattered that to her I looked like the type who attended dinner parties where literary discussion flowed as freely as the wine. I imagined myself at one such dinner party and the image suited me.

       Once I snapped out of it, I told her that I was more interested in something in the fiction category. We both agreed that Revolutionary Road and The Bell Jar were amazing novels and she suggested I read Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which she assured me was much darker than the sugar-coated film of the same name. I purchased the book, and I can happily report that I enjoyed it thoroughly. So, cute brunette who works at Waterstone’s, if by any chance you’re reading this, I very much appreciate the recommendation.

      Every book in London contains a story, even if that story isn’t written on its pages. It’s true that The Great Gatsby tells the story of decaying morals in the 1920s, but the copy with the inscription on Kensington Church Street tells another story that can’t be found in any other edition of the book, anywhere on Earth. Even my brand new copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s contains the story of the girl who helped me pick it out.

       As I was packing the morning of my departure, I saw Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography on my nightstand staring back at me. For the previous six weeks, this brick of a book and I had had a complicated relationship. It was the only required book for our writing class, and I think I speak for the entire class when I say that none of us much cared for it. Ackroyd’s writing style was rather dry and his historical account of London could sometimes go off into irrelevant tangents. But even so, London: A Biography had traveled the city with me from the comforts of my backpack. This book had a story, and I decided to leave it behind in the city where books are considered valuable treasures. Plus, the book was rather large and I needed the extra space in my luggage. With only five minutes left to vacate the flat, I scribbled inside the front page of the book:

      “London,

             It’s really been amazing, but it’s time for me to go home now.

                                                                                       Love,

                                                                                        Chris

             P.S. I hope whoever finds this book enjoys it more than I did.”

         

        With all my baggage in tow and London in hand, I walked down Crawford Passage for one last time. I decided to leave the book some place that had been very special to me the past six weeks. The place was Kung Food Chinese food, which served questionable but delicious cuisine. I carefully placed the book on the front step outside of Kung Food and said goodbye to London and London. For all I know, the Kung Food workers could have thrown it away and the book’s story could have ended right there. But I’d like to think that five, ten, or twenty years from now, someone could be standing in one of those secondhand bookshops reading my inscription and wondering about the person who had written it and what their story was.