Scribbles in the Margins Read online

  The new book can spur strong feelings too, though this time of a less reflective, and more exultant nature. To prise open a weighty new hardback or fan through a paperback can be to expose ourselves to an infusion of bracing, fresh pages. This scent feels almost beyond description because its identity as ‘new book’ is so tangible in its own right, but it is closest to vinegar on fish and chips. That this comparison is with an edible, supremely evocative entity is probably no mere coincidence. The new book is tantalising and unleashes the same juices as does a favourite meal when placed down on the table in front of us.

  One book can remind us of another and lead us to discovery. The picture section in a brand new autobiography’s yeasty fragrance takes us instantly to the television or comic annuals we loved in our youths. Reaching for one such bygone volume, we may find the scent to have changed, now evoking an elevator just after a smoker has exited. It seems suddenly logical: of course the smell of a book changes over time. It develops and gains character, reacts to its surroundings. There appears to be no science to it – opening the exact same edition of the same novel on the same page, one copy can evoke old buses, and one Play-Doh. When all of these aromas mature and collide, a book room reaches the divine status of being identifiable as such with eyes closed. Its volumes have draped themselves across its atmosphere.

  This is not a fetish. It matters because of the visceral pleasure it brings, and because it shows that books strike senses beyond just our sight.

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  Feverishly awaiting the next book in a series

  A curse of adulthood is the waning of anticipation. We have given up on even striving for that Christmas Eve feeling. One sacred survivor is the adult who feverishly awaits the next book in a series. They have their Christmas Eves back, perhaps even once a year.

  This fever strikes young and persists. It has roots in the prolific collections, not necessarily series themselves, that make us feel assured and safe in our early years as readers. There are whole meadows of comfort when, as a pre-adolescent, one realises how many books a prolific author has written. Then, to look on library or shop shelves and see a train of similarly liveried books is to feel a hundred hugs from a book-loving father. Such certainty breeds a faith in books, and especially those titles which feel like a habit. Affinity eventually turns to wizardry obsession and queuing at midnight. This transfers seamlessly to the flutter a series brings in adulthood.

  There is also now conservatism in the comfort: time is precious, risks not worth taking, we need books we will love, books that deserve feverish anticipation. First we hear the rumour there is to be another, then an author interview hints at news. A release date is set, previous volumes casually or seriously revisited in preparation, and pre-orders made. Future happiness and distraction has been purchased, and little chinks of Christmas Eve poke through when least expected. The thrill of the new and the comfort of the known, entwined and ours alone.

  Once hooked by book one, we are embroiled and implicated. We need to know what happens next and then next again, to know how things turn out. Each time, we are reacquainting with characters, catching up and falling back into the rhythm of the book. This is a reunion, and like any reunion it can at first be awkward. Then the comfort of the recognisable begins to charm us: the story, the style and the characters; the cover, typesetting and feel. A series strikes our need for continuity and belonging, dropping us on the doormat outside our favourite front door.

  Too quickly, the book is over. Then comes the satisfaction of introducing this latest recruit to the rest of its family, as if placing a further trophy in the cabinet. It is soon time to look forward to another instalment, to another Christmas Eve. Doom may one day greet the dreaded phrase ‘last in the series’, but deep down you know that your author can’t do that to themselves, and certainly not to you.

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  Hurting with laughter as you read

  Up it rises from the stomach. It tiptoes through the chest, tickles the throat and emerges as a wheezy splutter. Cheeks twitch, a snort escapes. It is a different kind of laughter to that which decorates shared merriment. In public and in unison, laughter is outward-facing and expressive. With a book it is personal and discreet.

  This is especially true when reading in public. To stifle laughter while sitting on a bus is, joyously, the closest adulthood brings us to the impossible giggles of the classroom, those eruptions that were like fireworks in our mouths. Breathlessly, we were unable to recall what had prompted our sniggers and avoided eye-contact with our partners in crime. On that bus now, we put down our book and look away, laughing into the window.

  Laughter can be plucked from any genre The odd comic image prowls among horror, and sharp dialogue pricks the pages of an intense, petrifying thriller. In those instances, mirth is relief. Where it is more frequent and consistent – the travelogue, a droll novel – laughter between us and the book becomes a cosy, extended course of in-jokes. This is private amusement, and the act of holding up the book represents a screen keeping it personal, a yawn behind the back of a hand. It is a unique form of laughter. In the pub or the cinema, or at the theatre or stand-up gig, chuckling runs to a timetable, poking a reaction from us when it sees fit. Book laughter allows us to take a joke in our own time, and interpret humour for ourselves. There is no granting of permission to laugh, only an enriching intimacy.

  It is wonderful to observe a bookcase and know that among its stately spines with their shoulders back and chests forward, are slapstick, sarcasm and foul-mouthed toddlers. Such a realisation recalls the first time a stern relative is spotted mimicking a figure of authority. Within earnest pages crouch guffaws and chortles, delicious secrets waiting to make us feel helpless and teenage once again.

  23

  Libraries

  Whatever the shape and architecture of the building, a library is utopia realised. Whether stout bricks with the gentle grace of a mourner or Brutalist chamber clamped onto the side of a school this is a structure brimming with promise and nourishment. On main street corners or among tidy hidden precincts, with castle doors garnished by chiselled mottos or slender windows traced by blinds, each one of them performs the same purpose of human enrichment and sanctity.

  The world indoors never differs. Devout librarians create urgency from thin air, pecking at keyboards or shuffling overdue lists, chaperoning creaky, varnished carts around and filing the returned like new mothers placing their babies in a Moses basket. They pause for fond looks at the jackets of preferred books.

  Each spine with its shelf-mark code in familiar typewriter font, each date-stamp a footprint of readers gone before and each shelf with its alphabetical ordering – these things align to provide the orderliness so cherished in a library. There is safety and structure among the stacks. Everything has a place, and you have found yours.

  Beyond the Romance section with its thick hard volumes by Ellas, Joannes and Paulas, and behind the audiobook and DVD racks turning gently as a lollipop lady’s baton, the children’s corner shimmers. What magic, for the new kid on the book and for the rest of us to look back upon and savour. It is all there: the cavernous boxes of large square books which clack when inspected by mucky fingers; worn and sagging bean bags to dwell on; laminated posters to aid counting progress; Fact Books about flags and dinosaurs; and teenage fiction with its effervescent front covers. A toddler settles himself upon his father’s lap and demands to be read to. To those glancing on, it is a reminder of the majesty an early library visit possessed. Those hours were a quiet buzz, the library card a secret pass. How could it be possible to ransack a room of its books, and then carry them home and place them in yours? You didn’t even get into trouble. In fact, you were encouraged to undertake such a task in broad daylight. Among such areas are lives mapped and shaped, their owners’ hearts lost to books forever.

  Upstairs in the Reference Room, amidst wooden cases and long thin drawers, amateur historians plot muddy fields on maps, and an uneasy middle-aged man studiously cons
ults back issues of Which? magazine. A sleeping pensioner, here to read the newspaper, wakes himself with a nod. Back in the main library, a mum on her lunchbreak returns the kids’ books late, a well-tuned smile deployed to avoid a reproachful look from the librarian; a bored lady in her seventies pops in for another crime thriller to make slow living-room clock hands dance. Earnest students find partial silence and spare plug sockets to revise and fret, and the disenfranchised use an internet simply unaffordable at home to complete job application forms.

  For such a slow, hushed place, time skips along in a library, and it brims with life, whether that life crumbles or thrives. These places are havens and stimulants. Their success cannot be measured in how many times books are beeped, or in their cost per head. They are communities and refuges, growers of knowledge and vibrant democracies. Imagine closing them down for margins and savings. What ruin. Go delight in one before some twenty-first-century barbarian miser has his way.

  24

  Large bookshops

  For all that the village church feeds our soul, an occasional cathedral trip is required. We need to feel part of something wider, to be reminded that our pursuit of books and reading is neither niche nor perverse. The large bookshop reaffirms our faith, provides connection with the literary community and offers splendid opportunities to stand around reading entire chapters for free. Its floors, folds and coves are hiding places in which hours can be happily frittered away. The world turns and the high street screeches along, but Sport cushions the noise and Travel deposits you somewhere bright and quiet. There is no security guard’s tap on the shoulder; after all, this is a bookshop.

  To enter a large bookshop is to become slightly disorientated and stumble around in the dithering manner of a stunned wasp. Choice overwhelms – an unceasing corridor with wondrous doorways. The floor plan is a long-read in itself, the presence of customer lifts a further complexity. There may be a magazine section teeming with deluxe £7 works of comeliness, a whole wall of Ordnance Survey maps, and another solely dedicated to vividly coloured foreign-language dictionaries. Even the sure of mind and strong of will are weak before such decadence: we may have entered for a particular title, but then another fixes us with the glad eye and seduces its way into our home.

  Such surrender and temptation are easy and they pull us across the shop, loitering in the luxury implied by twenty or thirty copies of the same volume, in handwritten staff recommendations and in three-for-two offers, where the first book is merely a gateway to the third. Tables decked out like paper picnics set another hurdle, and we are far from athletic in their presence. There is such completeness in a large bookshop, such detail. The answer is probably here; it is just that you have forgotten the question.

  Christmas brings an invasion of hesitant brothers with titles on a list and determined grandmothers looking for ‘that one by the lad in the hat off the TV’. This onslaught lends the shop a rare fizz of anxiety which enhances peacetime January all the more. The pursuit of gifts welcomes a different batch of people to our planet. As they stomp around, snatch gratefully and queue in uncomfortable radiated heat to pay, they may pluck a book for themselves and resolve to land there again, in their own time.

  Outside of that season of high stress, there seems to pervade a hypnotic calm in a large bookshop. It is quite unlike the hurried atmosphere in any other high-street outlet. People dawdle and saunter rather than stride. The whole experience is so civilised that it can make us stand perfectly still, forget this troubled world and reflect to ourselves that, yes, everything is going to be all right.

  25

  Discovering an author with a back catalogue to catch up on

  Out there, sleeping on shelves and buried in cupboards, are favourite authors we don’t yet know we love. The thought is tantalising. Fate must intervene to turn our heads in their direction – a recommendation by a friend, a written reference from another trusted writer or a chance find in a charity shop.

  However the words of the previously unfound writer reach us, niggling feelings of time wasted and Where have you been all my life? hang on their coat-tails for a little while. Then a truth washes over us. Progressing and imbibing the first of theirs we have read, a realisation dawns that an author scarcely ever stops at one book. There may even be a list of other works within the pages of this first foray. Better still, an old title’s ‘also by’ list will have been constructed mid-career – turns of direction and changes in pace yet to be charted. The heart soars. The end has no end. A new world beckons.

  Having a list to work through adds a layer of pursuit. If an author expired some time ago, there is work to be done and thrill in the chase. Visits to second-hand bookshops now have a side mission beyond escapism, and the discovery of a chased author in the faraway nook of a charity store brings a gold-rush kick. Online trawls begin broadly but one day come to fill vital gaps – that 1938 first edition, that copy with a Foreword by George Bernard Shaw. Perhaps, to curb excess, rules are needed: no writer should be read at the exclusion of all others, so we resolve to read only our new love’s pre-war fiction. It won’t last, of course, but for now ours is the bounteous meadow with winter whole months away.

  We order and guzzle our author’s first three novels, noting the subtle shifting of styles. From this vantage, it is possible to speculate what informed such swings: did the coming of conflict lead to the darkening of this book’s mood?; the finding of love sprinkle lightness upon another’s? Physically, shifts in time can make your retrospective collection of editions and reissues a ragtag one when placed together, spine heights rising and falling like the crumbling turrets of an ancient fort. Cover designs fluctuate from art-deco lines of the 1930s to 1970s camp, the author’s name growing in size and then shrinking again, perhaps reflecting shifts in appeal, fame and fortune. Not that this feeling is confined to yesteryear writers in starchy suits. The belated discovery of a modern author with form offers the pleasures of a past, present and future. They can be traced backwards, read until caught up with and then anticipated, which is a fresh branch to this delight. Our author may even be popular, and incite mutually admiring conversation. Perhaps, consciously or not, we have shunned her, and now can rejoice in our error.

  What a thought, that there is someone out there, waiting to be discovered, and perfect for us.

  26

  Watching a child learn to read

  What must a toddler think as she is read to? Realms are shaped for her by black specks, loops, hooks and dots. Perhaps she imagines her reader to be a mystic bard, conjuring odysseys from the marks before them. Time slides and eyes widen. The bard becomes a codebreaker, deciphering frights, giggles and happily-ever-afters from these strange tracks.

  Her reader’s whispers sink in. Those eyes start to recognise parts of the code dropped elsewhere among everyday life. The ‘s’ shapes in ‘bus stop’ have been discarded from a snake’s hiss; on a marmalade jar are stray ‘mmmms’ from Goldilocks’ perfect porridge. There are no boundaries between the worlds inside and outside of pages. Fantastical stories and wild creatures are melded with daily rigmarole and park swings. It would not be a surprise to the young read-to if a giant chewing on a towerblock was encountered en route to nursery.

  Something has now stirred in the transfixed child, and a connection is made between a word and an image. It is faint and tantalising – French radio on Medium Wave or a faraway steam train – but it matters. That word ‘dog’ or ‘car’ or whatever the moment chooses is what eventually grows into a life of reading – the struck match that becomes an inferno. The child may as well have invented each noun or adjective herself, such is the joy running across her face as she reads and repeats. It is infectious, a back-to-basics rapture like someone buying you an ice cream or shouting ‘echo’ in a tunnel.

  Soon, lines are tied together and speech marks turn from falling debris to voices. All the while, a trusty finger charts the way in fits and starts. Self-satisfied looks to parents now unfold. In turn, parents attribute s
ignificance to each moment and allow smug thoughts to cloud their brains. As they stare into a literate and literary future, the child turns on the television and shouts ‘bottoms’. Still, it has started, and nothing will ever be the same again.

  27

  Re-reading an old favourite

  The circumstances are nearly always spontaneous: a lust for easy contentment, a feeble recent read that needs to be fumigated from the brain, or an eavesdropped mention of the book in question. It is rare that re-reading is planned, possibly because there is a quiet mutiny residual in this delight – it defies the thirst to proceed ever forwards in the quest of reading as many works as possible, and ignores ever-blossoming piles of newly-acquired titles.

  Within those circumstances, emotional requirements may be buried. This is seldom an act pursued during a period of elation. Often, we re-read for a hug not a high-five. We have a need to return to what we know. A book which first showered consolation upon us in teenage years is a shelter during adult bouts of anxiety. Or, lonely times lead us back to a familiar character.

  Teased from the shelf, the known book nestles into our hands as if coming home. Its spine is cluttered with forks of lightning and curls at the edges like haunted house wallpaper. There are tiny hackings in the cover, and varicose veins. Here is a book loved like a child’s blanket or ragged teddy. Indeed, it may be a title first encountered in young days. Or perhaps a book read first a few years earlier, and then read again and differently; freed from the burden of keeping a novel’s plot under surveillance, there is room to further enjoy characters, nuances and language. When not reading in earnest, new sleights of hand are detected, references understood and fragments of humour relished. The worry that a re-read will not be as good the first or ninth time most often comes to nought.