![]() ![]() Those shops would feel as if they stocked archaic diseases as well as unwanted books: upstairs for Poetry and the Black Death, and a smallpox opportunity pullulating beneath those musty bundles of The Cricketer, with small monochrome photographs of brilliantined heroes who strolled between the wickets and who had never heard of the one-day game, let alone Twenty20 and other manifestations of the devil's work. I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden? Everyone laments that such shops are rarer than they were, but I can think of some I'll be relieved not to enter again: the ones where the owners sat dribbling on their cardigans and glowering at any intruder where yellowing notices said "MIND THE STEP" where the air was seething with mould spores out to colonise your lungs where the doorbell gives one tuneless ding, like the crack of doom. ![]() ![]() Lost notions, forlorn phrases, time-worn ruminations, the received ideas and commonplaces of earlier times: these are what start new ideas growing. These books are seldom found in a modern bookshop among the three-for-twos. There might be a life-changing book inside by "life-changing" I mean a book that contains the seed of another book, one I might spend four or five years living with and then writing. I might try not to, but my feet (which look after my best interests) would just start turning of their own accord and walk me over the threshold. T here was a time I couldn't walk past a bookshop without going in. ![]()
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