For reasons that are wearying to explain, living in a seasonal tourist trap brings with it the perpetual problem of what to do when the great open-toed masses descend. The desire not to be gummed up in other people’s frenzied attempts to construct their vision of leisure often leads us to make rash decisions. One of my friends rents out her house and decamps in hiking boots to the furthest reaches of the SomethingBerg mountains. Another simply resigns themselves to not seeing anyone until late January.
Because my misanthropy is outweighed by my resistance to inconvenience, I prefer easier options. One of my favourite things to do, as the afternoons grow longer and the mercury throngs ever higher, is to visit one of my treasured local bookstores. “Visit” is perhaps an inaccurate way of describing what such a journey entails. It’s on a ribbon of earth between mountain and sea where, in years gone by, the amenities were of the sort you’d only find by the seaside, the ones that sell utilitarian vanilla soft-serve and unfashionable sandwiches to pensioners. There’s a Bootleggers now, of course, and a waffle dispensary (who has ever been seized by the need for a waffle while at the seaside?) but it retains just enough of its originary crumminess to keep the baying hordes from dallying too long.
In any event, the bookstore, a large gabled and pillared house that graces the otherwise insalubrious beachfront, is sited in proximity to a rambling and sunny beach and so is not a priority destination for those who see “beach” as an activity in and of itself. Thus, you can be reliably sure of browsing with only the companionably initiated and the occasional sunburnt wanderer to contend with as you tramp through the labyrinth. The place is the antithesis of the orderly corporatised store: unseen speakers ensure that your journey through the maze is accompanied by wolf song or Comanche flute music. There are many thousands of books crammed from floor to ceiling in every room, so you proceed in a series of odd calisthenics, crouching or extending as circumstance demands.
For a book lover, it’s a haven. You navigate the narrow walkways, hardly noticing that hours have gone by, as your fossicking uncovers strange novels, forgotten novellas, mysterious chapbooks. The store smell is a heady composite of different inks, of old paper, of the earthy myriad dusts from other people’s houses. Raconteur Quentin Crisp’s observation that “dust is peace” never feels more accurate than when your nose is being tickled as you creep from one pile to the next. There’s only a vague sense of alphabetical order to the place, but with repeat visits you learn to avoid the fecund veranda piles of sordid-looking German romance, or that room with all the creepy old motivational books whose cloying covers scream of a thousand unknowable kinds of desperation.
I like the heroic shapelessness of this store. It’s an immersive refuge from a world where everything is so utterly managed and directed by the tide of other people’s opinions. There’s something quite wonderful about stepping out of time and getting lost amid all those words, pressed closely on either side of you, every page in search of a reader. A determined soul could go in there four times consecutively and emerge with four entirely different piles of books. The card machine is always broken, a fact I always manage to forget until I arrive improvidently at the counter with my 20 novels and then have to agonise over which precious to sacrifice.
The world of old artefacts is entirely unguessable, and in this regard it is fundamentally different from the world of new things. New things claim novelty while invariably trading on a sanitised and homogenous form of predictability. They cluster by theme, or angle, vying for your attention by employing an easily recognisable uniform. You can look at a pile of new objects and conclude much about the industrial workings behind them. With books, what sells is what is familiar, so the covers inevitably look the same, and the buyer is encouraged to make their choices from a selection of new books that resemble books they’ve bought or read before. It’s comforting, in a world of too many choices, but it’s also off-putting in terms of what it assumes about you and your capacity for new and unexpected experiences.
You’ve no doubt experienced this yourself: how often do the “If You Liked This You Might Enjoy …” suggestions from your chosen content-rental service actually recall the thing you enjoyed? I’m disinclined to believe the gurning endorsements and giddy book-cover epitaphs with which something new beckons my attention. I once started watching something that swore blindly it was “For Fans of Slow Horses”. It felt more like a hack job produced from someone’s dim memory of overhearing two strangers discussing that excellent TV show.
The contemporary insistence that the consumer experience ought to be a feeding trough of familiarity makes it all the more necessary to seek out those experiences that allow you to test your own wits against formidable forces. Ergo, my bookstore sanctuary. As the year gallops unstoppably towards its end, I’m going to look for more opportunities to drop in.
From the December issue of Wanted, 2025
