Bookshop Reveries

In 1936, George Orwell wrote an article titled ‘Bookshop Memories’, in which he described some of his experiences while working in a secondhand bookshop in London. As a former Londoner who has worked in secondhand bookshops and fairs in Lahore, my first reading of this article was accompanied by a deep sense of familiarity. Because several decades later and thousands of miles away, the dotty old customer who is looking for a book and doesn’t remember its name or author but does recall that it had a red cover is still with us.

One of the things that has puzzled both Orwell and myself are the types of customers who ardently declaim on their desire for a certain volume, leave their contact details, and then keep their phones switched off for the next six months. Those who do leave their phones on and actually answer it, thank the bookseller profusely for his efforts, promise to visit soon, and then are never heard from again. It makes me wonder why people bother to make such requests at all. Did they do so as a formality, never expecting that the book they sought would be found? Did they never really want the book in the first place but liked the idea of hunting it down, perhaps in order to convince themselves that they were ‘book-lovers’?

This tendency reflects another aspect of the literary public that Orwell noted: the absence of really bookish people. Granted, the number of English-speaking people in Lahore coming from a literary culture is probably much smaller than the literary population of London a century ago, so one should not expect too many people walking into a bookshop to be able to differentiate a great writer from a mediocre one, or a good edition from a poor one. And not everyone is by profession an antiquarian, or by temperament a scholar. However, laziness plays its part too, for many buyers cannot even correctly name the title and author of the book they are looking for, if at all. One would think that in this age of easy Internet reference, such errors would not occur, and that book buyers would be armed with information regarding the different versions of their chosen text and the various editions and translations available. But only a tiny number of readers I have encountered ask about translations, when any serious reader of books would give such issues much attention. Of course, given the relative poverty of available editions one rarely has the option of choosing from amongst many alternatives, but the fact that virtually no one asks about them is disquieting. Some customers, even when informed that the lovely old hardback edition they have selected is abridged and poorly translated in comparison to the new paperback, will opt for the former. Unfortunately, how a book will look on one’s shelf or feel in one’s hand is sometimes more important to a buyer than the fidelity of the text to the author’s vision.

Which leads me to the book collector, the type of customer who picks up books seemingly just for the sake of doing so, and who rarely reads at all. Now, some book collectors pursue “special” or "rare" books: limited editions, signed editions, illustrated editions, etc., the stated purpose of which is to possess and display a library of beautiful or valuable objects- a literary museum of sorts. Considering the craftsmanship of some 19^th century books that appear from time to time, I can understand this predilection. But I once came across a wealthy old gentleman who was casually picking out dozens of books in a matter of minutes, and none of the books were rare, beautiful, or even especially noteworthy reads. When I leadingly commented on his wide-ranging reading habits, he looked at me blankly and said, “Oh, I don’t read them.” Sadly, this type of thoughtless acquisition merely to fill shelf space I have also witnessed being carried out by those who should know better: librarians.

Such ignorance is not limited to the buyers of books; Orwell observed that most booksellers knew little of the insides of books, and this observation, naturally, applies to Lahore, since most booksellers here cannot read English with any competence, never mind inform potential buyers of the differences between the various editions of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This illiteracy should not be taken to mean that good books are unavailable, however- with time, experience, and a good memory, a bookseller can develop a reasonably astute judgement of a good book, though this is derived more from the slight correlation between a book’s greatness and its popularity than from any personal acquaintance with the text itself. An experienced bookseller once asked me to judge a certain lot of books he had acquired for his shop; he had selected just over a hundred books and asked me to weed out the ones I thought were not worthwhile. I ended up removing only four or five.

Still, there are huge gaps in the booksellers’ knowledge, but there always will be, and for sellers everywhere. For buyers this can be both bane and boon. Someone who wishes to acquire the classics of 20^th century psychology may be unlikely to find Sigmund Freud or C. J. Jung cheaply because these writers are well known, but he or she has a good chance of finding an innocuous volume of Milton H. Erickson or Albert Ellis at a reasonable price. Conversely, asking a bookseller if he has plays by Menander is unlikely to be fruitful, for most booksellers do not know this playwright, and are unlikely to remember if they have his work in stock. Even the computerization of inventory is no guarantee of accuracy. A few years ago while browsing a modern bookshop, I noticed that a couple of books, both of which I had read and appreciated, were in the wrong sections. I informed the staff of this error, who turned resentfully to their computer and protested that it assigned the books to the locations where I had discovered them, and thus there was no error to correct. Unsurprisingly, the books remain in their incorrect locations to this day. Another time I found a book by Raymond Chandler ten minutes after being told by shop staff that they had no books by him. Since errors are a natural attendant to human affairs, I would not have thought much of it if the staff member in question hadn’t boasted about how he knew the stock so well.

For all these reasons and more, I rarely ask booksellers if they have a certain book in stock, and never do I take their computer databases or websites as the final word. Real book-lovers look for themselves, and often, and everywhere. They do not rely on booksellers, friends, or anyone else, though they will utilize whatever resource is available. They do not care much what the weather is like, how far away the bookshop is, or what time it is. They do not concern themselves with parking problems or traffic problems or with any other trivial obstacles. If there is a riot in the streets, their first thought is how to circumnavigate it and still reach the target in good time. They stalk every book fair, scour every shop, and prowl every bazaar. Naturally, many people have responsibilities and schedules and circumstances that disallow them from spending a disproportionate amount of resources looking for books, so perhaps it would be uncharitable to withhold from them the (meaningless) title of 'book-lover'. The number of people fulfilling the questing criteria listed above are so few that I can count the ones I know on one hand; to this small select group we should perhaps give the designation book-hunters, a super-category that represents those whose bibliophilia is a central aspect of their lives. The book-lover consults the bookseller. The book-hunter is consulted by booksellers. He studies book-catalogues in his spare time, is familiar with the stock of fifty shops, and does not tire.

An irritating habit of secondhand booksellers is the propensity to stamp their business details inside every book and/or scribble the price in ink, a practice which instantly devalues the book and adds not a jot to its beauty. The excuse usually given by booksellers for this practice is that the stamps generate business. The idea of using a removable sticker or some other promotional method seems alien to them; perhaps they want their ugliness to be remembered by future generations. Hardbacks with no dustjackets are sometimes given treatment which is appalling: the title pages are torn out and glued to the front board. Either that or a fat black marker is used to scrawl the title across the front in a style comparable to that of a blind graffiti artist. And one routinely comes across books inexpertly glued, unnecessarily taped, and fated to end up in worse condition than when before they arrived. It does little good to instruct the booksellers regarding such matters, though some are more willing to listen to reason than others. When I explained to one seller that I would not buy a book so defaced even if it was incredibly important to me and being offered for ten rupees, the blame was predictably shifted to someone else, and weeks later the same seller was at it again. Many months later, however, this seller showed me some new stock and proudly stated that he had refrained from his usual artistic endeavours this time around, as indeed he had. So it is not the case that advice always falls on deaf ears- just usually.

Unfortunately, I have encountered a number of readers and collectors who treat their books in no less a disgusting fashion: gluing dustjackets to the boards, for instance, or excessive (and usually inane) annotations. Some collectors even stamp their books with their own pretentious monograms (though this practice can be useful in tracing books that have been stolen). However, since these persons have no intention of selling the books on and the books are their private property, I can more readily understand their abusive natures. But what on earth was going through the mind of one woman who took hundreds of perfectly acceptable paperbacks, removed their covers, glued them to cardboard, and then reattached them to the text block?

Now, I am the first to remind people that books are, for the most part, written to be read, not drooled over or coveted for their own sake. But this does not justify the largely unnecessary mistreatment of books just mentioned. The reverence for books and what they represent seems largely absent here- a book is treated as a disposable commodity, not as an object of power, a repository of knowledge, an immortal testament of an ancient genius. And I sense that the new generation of readers, of which so many are fond of the illegal download, tend to treat books in the same way, albeit unconsciously. One can often see browsers mishandling fragile books- licking a filthy finger and swiping it across cracking pages is common, for example. Clumsily grabbing a book from its shelf and later shoving it back forcefully in the wrong location while ripping the dustjacket in the process is not infrequent either. Returning books to shelves upside down or back to front (or not at all) is routine.



A major feature of the secondhand book trade in Lahore, and one which is dominated by unseemliness, is haggling. Some buyers believe it is their sovereign right to acquire a book at the price that they dictate, oblivious of the costs to the bookseller, the price in the market, or the self-demeaning practice of begging for discounts. The fact that they would never dream of haggling at a petrol station or in a supermarket only leads them to vent their loud demands and borderline insults in a small struggling shop where the proprietor is less easily disposed to boot them into the street. And rarely does it stem from need: I once witnessed a customer marshal considerable time and energy to batter a bookseller down to his own price level, only to confess to me afterwards that the original price was rather cheap. Inside every self-proclaimed working-class hero there seems to be an autocrat trying to claw out. “This book has two rupees printed on it.” “That is the new price from fifty years ago. This book is now out of print and we have priced it at two hundred rupees.” “No. I will pay two rupees.” Beyond giving the customer a gentle lecture on inflation (which no Pakistani should need) there is little that the bookseller can do at this point except tolerate such an overbearing attitude without looking too disgusted. The commonest solution is to (usually carelessly) obfuscate or remove old prices from the books. Unfortunately, there are booksellers who savagely scratch off the prices even of relatively new books, not caring that customers may one day discover that the books they bought secondhand can be bought for less brand new. And I have seen books where the data on the title and copyright pages indicating that the book is just one volume in a set has been removed. Exactly how a bookseller thinks he can get away with such deception is boggling.

A friend of mine once returned a book which he had discovered to be missing a number of pages from the Introduction. The bookseller at first stated confidently that the book had been complete when he sold it: “we check these things”. A few minutes later, and seemingly without any shame, he modified his narrative by complaining that he did not have time to check hundreds of books for completeness. Somewhere between these poles of improbability I recall hearing the confession that he had noticed the absence of pages from the Introduction, but had thought it unimportant. This swift switching of bookselling spiel was clumsy lip service to the idea that the customer is always right.



Customers, of course, are usually not right at all, and are themselves prone to an array of dishonourable behaviours ranging from declaring that the book they want is worthless (why are you reading it then?) to claiming that it is easily available (what are you doing here then?). And then there are the pompous readers who claim that no one is ever going to buy the book apart from themselves; they leave the bookshop with a smug plan to return for it some time later to prove their point and acquire the book at a lower price while simultaneously illustrating their esoteric and cultured taste. It is therefore always delightful to see their confused expressions and shattered confidence when they stroll into the shop some days later and realize that the book they wanted is gone. "Who took it? Who was this person!" babbled one disbelieving customer to me; I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was none other than myself.

Some customers, who have the dubious distinction of being regulars, like to take advantage of their familiarity with booksellers and take books on credit- which is perfectly acceptable if the buyer doesn't take years to pay, declare his refusal to pay the full amount, or renege on his payment altogether. But the vast number of practices used by buyers to obtain books are imitated by booksellers, either when they themselves are buying stock (booksellers routinely lie to each other), or when they tout books about which they know nothing to prospective buyers in a manner usually adopted by life-insurance salesmen (“you need it”). The techniques used by buyers and sellers are the same old routines, ranging from the uninformative "I'm a student" to the usually false "it's available at so-and-so place for less". And since haggling is near-universal, no matter what the profession or financial status of those engaged in it, the practice seems to be more of a cultural trait rather than a reflection of genuine need.

In the final analysis, there is much (attempted) deception on the part of both buyers and sellers, and the role of haggling is a prominent catalyst. A modicum of balance, if that is the word, is achieved by the custom amongst secondhand booksellers of overpricing their books, knowing that the majority of customers will haggle. The buyers walk away thinking they have achieved a victory with their 20% discount. The bookseller smiles and knows better. Some old-timers are aware of this practice of price-inflation and haggle for this very reason; so in order to eliminate needless bickering I once implemented in a bookshop a massive price reduction while still pricing the books at a level that the proprietor would be satisfied with. I was new to the trade at the time, and my employer, while permitting me to try this experiment, warned that it would be a waste of time, and that customers would not care what I was trying to do. He was right: our regular customers, who knew that I had reduced prices across the board, rather than pick up books at the lowered prices with gratitude, proceeded to attempt to haggle the prices down even further. Others simply disbelieved, or pretended to disbelieve, that any reduction had occurred at all. In the end I acknowledged defeat and re-raised the prices in disgust.

Booksellers who don't price-tag their books also appraise a customer before quoting a price; someone who looks wealthy may be quoted a higher price than usual, for example. There are, of course, booksellers who price fairly, and book purchasers who never haggle, but their quiet, civilized transactions tend to be drowned out by the cacophony of verbal combat that one can routinely hear at various bazaars. And I have observed that these combatants tend to do themselves a disservice when they employ deception to squeeze out a few extra rupees. Buyers and sellers who lie, haggle needlessly, and do not pay promptly are not invited to look at new stock, and sometimes books are even hidden from them. “A bookseller has to tell lies about books”, wrote Orwell, expressing a sentiment that numerous booksellers in Lahore adhere to. But while lying to customers may seem to be the advantageous thing to do, it is not the right thing to do, and thus its overall advantageousness is questionable. Unfortunately, ethical conduct is usually far from the minds of booksellers, many of whom have no compunction about buying and selling stolen, pornographic, or banned material. The fact that customers don’t care much about where their books are coming from so long as they do come isn’t helpful; I have witnessed customers directly asking booksellers how to go about liberating books from libraries, photocopying books, and the like.

There is an aphorism that one hears from time to time in book circles: “Someone who lends a book is a fool, but someone who returns a book he has borrowed is an even bigger fool”. For some distressing reason, this statement is usually followed by knowing smiles and nods of agreement, almost as if the listeners are in tacit agreement with the concept of theft. Correspondingly, there is a disturbingly high number of people who not only have no qualms about buying or selling pirated books, but seem totally unaware of the existence of copyright law.



Once a bookseller, noticing a rare book in my hand that I had picked up from a stall at a book fair, forcibly snatched it away from me and proceeded to buy it for himself. Later, he offered to return the book to me, ostensibly in embarrassment, but all the while knowing that I would reject the acquisition of a book gained under such circumstances. The fact that this bookseller liked to publicly praise me and once declared that he looked upon me as his little brother seemingly made no difference once the prospect of profit paraded itself before his myopic sight. Indeed, I have heard more than one bookseller declare that friendship and family cannot be mingled with business, thus providing the rationale for all sorts of reprehensible practices. Predatory behaviour of this sort is one of the reasons that I no longer visit the Sunday bazaar on Mall Road early in the morning: the scene of seasoned booksellers and book-hunters scrabbling and jostling each other as tightly packed sacks of books are overturned and their contents dumped to the ground like refuse, is too reminiscent of the sight of vultures clashing over a carcass.

Despite the crudity of a culture which turns an object of beauty into a ragged and forlorn thing, a not insignificant number of buyers and sellers recognize decency when they see it. I once paid a bookseller more than what he demanded for a book, because the book was rare and his price very low. He never forgot that gesture, and has occasionally repaid me with generosity in other transactions. Nor is he the only one to do so. As one who both buys books for reading and sells them for profit, I have discovered that heartfelt generosity and principled business practices are sometimes recognized and returned in kind. On the other hand, I have known schemers who don’t hesitate to take advantage of other people’s honesty.

[quote]Books by Cicero are hardly flying off the shelves and being urgently discussed around milkshakes by teenagers[/quote]

By all accounts, the secondhand book trade is not what it once was. Many booksellers have ceased to deal exclusively in books for the general reader, and have moved into more profitable areas- textbooks or children’s books, for example. This decline is usually attributed to the rise of technologies which vie with books for the attention of young minds. Those of an older generation lament the demise of a reading culture (assuming that it ever existed) and decry the reading habits of today’s young. I admit that I too, before being more familiar with bookshops and their denizens, sniffed at the possibility of any serious reading going on in Pakistan. In this I was mistaken. Now, books by Cicero are hardly flying off the shelves and being urgently discussed around milkshakes by teenagers, but I was, and still am, continually surprised by the frequency with which people walk into bookshops asking for what I would regard as serious books. Their numbers may be considerably lower than the Harry Potter and Paulo Coelho crowd, but they do exist, and where there exist eighteen-year old kids of low-income families wishing to read Karl Marx and Charles Darwin for self-improvement, there is hope that such readers will evolve their reading habits and one day put their knowledge to good use. The oft-heard complaint about the new generation is as old as books themselves, and is more a stock topic of conversation than an empirically-based observation of society’s intellectual ills. In my experience, the view that the younger generation no longer reads, or does not know what to read, is usually opined by old men who regard the acme of educated reading as being Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, a work which is all but irrelevant now. In truth, young people often tackle books which the older generations know nothing about and therefore tend to dismiss. Thus, almost all the people I know who read Michael Foucault or Marshall McLuhan, or who are interested in science fiction classics by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, are young people not beyond their thirties. Some writers (Marx, for instance) are perennially popular, which is perhaps unsurprising for a country with serious class divisions and, supposedly, perpetually on the cusp of revolution.

Yet, despite the perceived decline in reading, a number of new and prominent bookshops have sprung up in the last few years. Well-lit, clean, and comfortable, they have helped to fill an important gap in the market, importing new releases and some classic titles that are difficult to find secondhand. But while the atmospheres of these shops are congenial, and the efforts of their owners to stimulate reading amongst the young and discussion amongst adults are praiseworthy, these shops usually cater to mainstream tastes and those with deep pockets. They are, at best, supplements to the wide-reading book-hunter's regular haunts; prosperous lovers of fiction and children with wealthy parents will frequent such hangouts, but the scholars and hunters will rarely do so. For it is not in these book-boutiques that one will find a biography of Inayatullah Khan Al-Mashriqi, the Collected Works of Lenin, or anything from the Loeb Classical Library series. For such discoveries one must be prepared to dedicate many hours to wandering in filthy alleys and poking about in dusty warehouses. And few people are serious enough about books to get their hands and clothes dirty. Book-lovers complain about the difficulty in finding books, but since they do not have the tactical instincts of the book-hunter, they are simply ignorant of the dozens of secondhand shops that are scattered across the city and what can be found there. Many are totally unaware of the existence of the Sunday bazaar, which has been extant for decades and which offers a variety of reading matter unmatched by any single bookshop.

[quote]People look for Charles Darwin or Richard Dawkins, but not Gregor Mendel or John Maynard Smith[/quote]

Therefore, the arrival of these new retailers has boosted the availability and awareness of certain titles and genres, but there is much scope for improvement in both supply and demand. People look for Charles Darwin or Richard Dawkins, but not Gregor Mendel or John Maynard Smith; Stephen Hawking, but not John von Neumann; Plato, but not Sextus Empiricus; H. G. Wells, but not Olaf Stapledon. Of course, the availability of and knowledgeability about books is a key factor here. Books by Hawking and Plato are not too difficult to find, and every bookseller will know these names. But books by von Neumann and Sextus are not commonly found, and most booksellers will have never heard of them. Is the demand for books keyed to the supply, or vice versa? Perhaps there is a positive feedback process at work, whereby the limited availability of books narrows the range of demand, which in turn reinforces the supplying of books which cater to those demands. Whatever the reasons, it is fortunate that the secondhand book market is not a closed loop which always accommodates the lowest common denominator. Despite the popularity and concomitant profundity of rubbish, great books are to be found, albeit with some effort. Indeed, so many great and rare books can be found here that one sometimes hears booksellers and buyers both opine that “all books eventually come to Lahore”. But this is laughable nonsense, uttered by those whose knowledge of books is trivial.

I will not dwell too much on the all too prevalent fondness for romance novels, nauseating self-help books, and pseudoscientific junk that includes palmistry, astrology, alchemy, and other twaddle. I suspect that most people in most places read trash, and the overwhelming popularity of such subjects is by no means restricted to this country- I recall reading a statistic years ago revealing that the majority of paperback sales in the United States were romance novels. And the prevalence of unscientific and irrational beliefs amongst the populace is also a problem in more literate Western nations, hence the efforts by scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan to popularize science and puncture popular superstition.

[quote]When the massive, lavishly illustrated two-volume slipcased edition of Baring-Gould's out-of-print The Annotated Sherlock Holmes is placed in your hands, the feeble term "electronic book" is recognized for the contradiction in terms that it is[/quote]

I should add the caveat that these observations of mine are personal in nature, and thus there are limitations to what can be legitimately extrapolated from them; they do not constitute any sort of authoritative report on the literary life of the city, much less the nation. And one should always bear in mind the evolving nature of reading habits- those treading in trash today may tackle the T’ai Kung tomorrow.

George Orwell’s overall experience of working in a bookshop was a seemingly negative one, since he confessed that he would not like to work in such a place permanently. The experience made him lose his love of books, for the smell and feel of them, and the sight of thousands of volumes became slightly sickening. In a way I can understand how he felt, though perhaps his reasons were not my own. There is something depressing about spending two hours at a book fair and spotting not a single worthy purchase, gazing at row upon row of frivolous fiction and other works of mediocrity which you would not accept in your library even if they were given to you freely. The opposite position, that of being in a bookshop surrounded by innumerable masterworks, can have a negative effect too when one realizes that one will never get around to reading (or affording) them all. But this latter sensation is a transient feeling, and one that should be placed in context; in my case working in bookshops has made me appreciate books more. I never used to pay much attention to old books which I was certain could be found online. But that changed when I began routinely handling books that, because of their physical design and unique features, heightened the pleasure of reading. So the practice of downloading books I have more or less abandoned when physical alternatives are available. One can read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories online for free, but when the massive, lavishly illustrated two-volume slipcased edition of Baring-Gould’s out-of-print The Annotated Sherlock Holmes is placed in your hands, the feeble term “electronic book” is recognized for the contradiction in terms that it is. Indeed, my library has swelled unexpectedly since I became an antiquarian, for working in the field has exposed me to books I never would have come across on download websites. The well-stocked bookshop affords the chance meeting with a long-forgotten volume of brilliance, the random encounter with a valuable tome for which downloads or even reviews are unavailable online, the unexpected exposure to ideas and entire fields of study of which one was hitherto unaware.

"Everything is available online," I have heard many times. But this is a completely false doctrine, uttered only by those whose knowledge of books is nonexistent. Not only are many, many important books not available online, but the quality of those that are is often appalling. A well-printed volume from the 19th century usually puts a 21st-century PDF to shame.

Working in a bookshop has its perils as well, one of which is the danger that one loses respect for books as cultural artifacts and sources of enlightenment and begins to look upon them as sources of revenue. After a time, when one is so familiar with books that they no longer surprise and can even appear tiresome, when one is pressured to lie about them daily, when one contemplates parting with volumes from one’s own library for mere money, then one needs to reexamine one’s attitudes and guard against losing the love of literature and language. And there are times when the daily banter and brawling become so wearisome that one longs to escape and participate in cleaner combat elsewhere- such as on a battlefield. Fortunately, books themselves often come to the rescue- a spectacular book appears: a book to be kept and never sold, a book to be read immediately, a book to be caressed and pored over. The arrival of such a tome washes away one’s weariness and reaffirms the life of the mind.

In recent years the prices of secondhand books have escalated. Whether this is due to economic misfortunes or changing reading habits is uncertain, but a natural consequence is the further development of the haggling art. While a lot of professional hagglers are anything but poor, it cannot be denied that there exist financially struggling families for which the prices of school textbooks are a great enough burden without the added expenditure of more general books. Booksellers, too, often struggle to make a living in such a climate (the idea that booksellers always buy their stock at wholesale rates by the kilogram and make huge profits is not true). But despite all this, one occasionally comes across the young woman who declares that she would rather spend money on books than on clothes, or meets the bookseller who gives an unexpectedly large discount to a struggling student. Thus, despite the economic privations of the country at large, the poverty of choice, and the arrogance and ignorance often exhibited by buyer and seller alike, there are treasures to be found- amongst readers, amongst sellers, and most importantly amongst the books themselves.