Emily Rhodes

I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip. Trying to fit everything you will need for the next six months inside something small enough to go on your back should be a liberating experience, but I found it alarming to say the least.

I am beginning to lose my patience with the weather. I suspect I am not alone in feeling utterly dispirited by this endless onslaught of rain. We have just come out of the wettest April on record, and still the rain falls … It’s too terrible for words. Except that nothing is too terrible for words. Words do rather a good job of getting things right. So I have turned to words – to written words – to seek advice and find inspiration in the dreadful wet weather. The weather is so deeply ingrained into the English psyche that it is no real surprise to find its presence equally pronounced in English literature. From an admittedly biased and cursory survey of some of my favourite books, when rain appears it seems to be urging one of two things.

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The reason for the panic is thus: the great majority of classic works of literature are old — think Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes — and, therefore, out of copyright. That means that anyone who has the time and inclination can publish Dickens online and nobody can come after them screaming copyright theft. So an eBook of Great Expectations, for instance, can be found, easily, for free.

Chances are you’ve read, seen, or at least heard about The Hunger Games, the young-adult book and film sensation by Suzanne Collins. The crux of the story centres on The Hunger Games itself, an annual event in a dystopia in which twenty-four teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death – the winner is the sole survivor. Unsurprisingly, this has proved rather a controversial storyline. While the film has smashed box office records and the books have sold over 23 million copies, the books are also among some of the most complained about works in America. (Albeit in good company with To Kill a Mockingbird and Brave New World.) Key to the controversy is all the violence.

Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a good thing, yet I worry that it is the paperback’s quiet humility that has so endangered it. Everyone in the book world seems to agree that the rise of eBooks is at the cost of paperbacks. Towards the end of last year, Victoria Barnsley, C.E.O of HarperCollins, said that for paperback fiction, ‘the market this year is down 7 per cent in retail value. I put this almost entirely down to the sale of eBooks’.

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and what could be a more thoughtful present for one’s mum than a good book? Especially a book that features a happy relationship between a mother and her child. Surely it beats an overpriced, overcrowded Sunday brunch out somewhere, or a bunch of panic-bought, petrol-station flowers? With this in mind, I have racked my brains and scoured the bookshelves for some good motherly books to recommend. But I’m sorry to say I’ve come up with very little. The shocking fact of the matter is: literature seems to be nearly devoid of role-model mums. At first I thought of recent books, alighting on The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín and Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud. Terrible mothers the pair of them.

March is a strangely active time in the book world. Like plants that have been slumbering through the cold winter, books are beginning to wake up and stir themselves into action for the joys of spring. Please indulge me with the slightly dippy analogy, as I think it’s surprisingly pertinent. After all, spring tends to be the time that books by ‘budding’ new authors are published, and when people are more inclined to amble to a bookshop and ‘leaf’ through some books. This is a time to remember that books are of course derived from trees, even etymologically stemming from a word meaning ‘beech’. Maybe this literary spring awakening shouldn’t be such a surprise. A bookshop in spring is intriguing.

Chances are you’ve already seen this incredible round-up of the ten most beautiful bookshops in the world. This recent post on hip US blog Flavorwire has enjoyed remarkable success, inspiring several articles and a huge amount of praise and discussion in various forums worldwide. Over here in Britain, the Guardian’s article about it received nearly 200 comments. If you’ve not yet looked at the photos, you’re in for a treat. These bookshops are beautiful, breathtaking, almost miraculous places. And the astonishing amount of buzz created around the post reassures me that I’m not alone in thinking this. Evidently, I’m just one of several thousand bookshop-lovers.

In the musty old bookworld, prizes are terribly exciting. Yes, book awards will never reach the world-televised-designer-frock-paraded-on-red-carpet level of the Oscars, but any keen bookish person was waiting with baited breath for the announcement of the Costa Book of the Year last Tuesday night. The Costa Prize was the acme of literary excitement of the year so far. (Granted, we’re only a month in.) It has been the hub of excited discussions both in bookshops and across the literary press. So I thought it only fitting to join the fray. I’ll come right out and say it. I am sick to death of reading the endless whines about the silliness or eccentricity of the prize for making the judges pick a winner across genres.

When I read an article in the Telegraph recently, which pointed out that Oxfam is the third biggest retailer of books in the UK, I got a shock similar to when I learnt, last year, that The Bookseller had named Sainsbury’s chain bookseller of the year. It feels peculiar to think of brands like Oxfam and Sainsbury’s as lead players in the book world. If I think of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, I think of the big chains like Waterstones, Blackwell’s and WH Smith. And I think of the independents, like Daunt’s, Foyles, and other small local shops. Supermarkets and charity shops are completely different operations.

Amazon reported that Christmas Day was the ‘biggest ever day for Kindle downloads’. Evidently, this year, many people are going to begin to read eBooks. Shaking off the doom-and-gloom that a seller of printed books inevitably feels at such a prospect, I can’t help but notice the nice timing. All these people are trying out a new way of reading for a new year. Falling into a habit of reading isn’t such a bad thing. (Far better to be the habit of reading a certain format, genre, or author, than to be out of the habit of reading altogether.) But sometimes it doesn’t hurt to shake things up a bit. January is traditionally a time of change, of resolutions, of giving up one thing and taking up another. This New Year, why not resolve to read differently?

Last week saw poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdraw from the shortlist of the TS Eliot Prize. Their refusal to be in the running for this prestigious award was on the grounds that the Poetry Book Society, which runs it, is sponsored by hedge fund manager Aurum Funds. Oswald said that she thought ‘poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions’. But, in this austere time of government cuts, when many arts organisations like the Poetry Book Society are about to lose their funding from the Arts Council, can we really blame them for accepting some ready cash from a hedge fund? Well, judging from the angry comments following any article in their defence, yes we can.

Call me superficial, but I would far sooner buy a beautiful book than an ugly one. It’s something to think about when Christmas shopping — a concern that’s only magnified when it comes to buying a book as a present, rather than for oneself. It’s also something to bear in mind in the broader context of the battle of physical books versus eBooks. Sales of eBooks are soaring ever upwards, making even the most old-fashioned of publishers think that they really must be the way forward. Why is it that so many readers don’t mind losing contact with books as physical things in favour of scrollable words on a grey background that only exist inside a pocket-sized computer?

This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some titles evidently smell particularly sweet, there can be some rather unexpected bookish twins. Last week, several children — and a few doting parents — rushed into the bookshop to ask if we had Inheritance. I had to quell my initial instinct to show them Robert Sackville-West’s Inheritance, his very good book about Knole.

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the book world. Last week there were a few bookish grunts of dissatisfaction when Terry Pratchett beat Martina Cole to the Number One slot. Pratchett’s Snuff sold 31,904 copies and Cole’s The Faithless only 31,136, yet there were cries of foul play. This was because some bookshops had broken the embargo on Cole’s book and sold it the week before publication.