The Bookshop Blogger #23
How do you like your bookseller, know-it-all or know-nothing-at-all?
Thursday 26 August, 2010
Have you been pondering the answer to the question I posed you last time? If you missed last time then firstly, where were you? And secondly, you know you can pick up past blogs in the archive? Anyway, the question was, what have a Renaissance painter and a Post-War financier got in common? Did you get it?
They both had biographies published on the 1st of July.
Well, what were you expecting? Some obscure yet brilliant thematic link between them? A thesis on how the church and state impacted on both of them? Maybe a socio-political treatise on art and finance?
I can’t, I’m sorry.
When I started working as a Bookseller, we were taken on only if we could demonstrate our bookishness. I had done my degree in English and so I looked after the Classic Literature section. Simple. Over the years, I have found that my hobbies have been useful at work too: gardening, art and interior design. But there are sections that are as alien to me as thrift to a WAG - like Economics, for goodness sake. And I’m not big on the Science section either.
But I am always amazed by the fact that our customers expect each Bookseller to have read every book. And they can be most unforgiving if you don’t have every bit of information at your fingertips.
The other week, a customer berated me because one of my colleagues hadn’t known the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction – it had been announced that very day and we had been…at work. I went and found the answer on the internet but on a site to which we don’t have access on the shop floor.
As she left, clutching her copy of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, from a stand which displayed the entire shortlist (The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison, Black Water Rising by Attica Locke, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, A Gate at The Stairs by Lorrie Moore and The White Woman on The Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey were the others in case you were wondering), she sniffed that I should make sure that my staff were better informed. My staff!
We can’t know everything, but we often have ingenious ways of discovering what we don’t know - it might just take a few minutes. But our culture is all about speed over accuracy or care and attention to detail, as the delightful woman with her book about a simple man drawn into the lives of great artists would testify.
And that rather tenuous link brings me to Caravaggio: a Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon. If you don’t know anything about Renaissance Art, then this is a great place to start because Caravaggio’s life reads more like a thriller than an art history book. Graham-Dixon brings the streets of Rome, Naples and Malta to vivid and brutal life and there are some wonderful paintings along the way.
As I said, I don’t know much about Economics, but reading literary biographies has opened up a world of other biographies to me and Niall Ferguson’s latest High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg has Ferguson doing what he does best, which is blending excellent journalistic skills with a warmth and empathy that made me interested in this complex and principled man, who, I have no doubt, is spinning in his grave at what Merchant Banking has become. I have just realised that this book has something else that will elevate it from just another business book – timing.
Talking of which, I am running out of time - I have a To Do List to complete.
