Books

If there was one shop I'd recommend you go into on the High Road, it would be 'The Kilburn Bookshop', although of late it's been looking a bit down-at-heel. Now I know why. This lovely unassuming shop is to close at the end of the month. Why oh why? I've asked around and was told that the owner has been talking about winding things up for several years. This March is the end of the road. The good news could be that there is 30% off all stock - if that counts as good news.

How do the little tiddlers of the books industry survive? How on earth does an independent bookshop keep going these days? I know of three round here - West End Lane Books, The Willesden Bookshop and The Kilburn Bookshop - soon to be two. Now that my favourite is cutting its losses and closing its doors, I feel angrier than ever about the collapse of bookselling as it use to be and the 'net book agreement' (the ending of which led to, for instance, 'Harry Potter' being £15 cheaper in the big shops than the little ones). Only a fool would pay over the odds. I am one of those remaining fools and I can only say in my defence that fools (cf. Shakespeare) are sometimes credited with wisdom.

There are the second-hand bookshops, such as the ones I knew in Edinburgh as a student, which seem to get by on a budget of air and rolling tobacco. Perhaps they sell an expensive first edition once a year (on the internet of course) and that tides them over for the next year. Then there is Word Power on West Nicholson St, Edinburgh, which has always seemed to do a healthy trade to me - it's proximity to the university must help, but what really impresses me is that it has its own strong agenda (calls itself a Radical bookshop). This must count for something. Somewhere you can go and find unusual books that surprise and challenge you.

The other great bookshop from my university days was Barnardos on South Clerk St. This was, I suppose, the mirror-image of Word Power: it sold back to the public the books of which the academics had tired. The prices were fair for second-hand books, the variety was astounding. Many of my favourite books came from there. I still wish I'd bought a copy of Robert Alan Jamieson's 'A Day At The Office' I found there - it was a signed copy, though, and the inscription (a personal one) was to somebody else. Why had it ended up in a charity shop? I felt bad about buying it, so I didn't.

I'm not wholly against the bullies in the playground of bookselling - I would be a hypocrite to denounce Waterstones or Amazon, having bought books from both. You have to admire their clout. I also take the point made by many that their local bookshop before the advent of better was a terrible store with no inspiration, nothing new, nothing you wanted to read and one smelly dog in the corner. The local one in our hometown (once, back in those sepia days, regarded as a treasure trove of good books) now sells mostly DVDs and my parents resent the way the owners are always sitting in each others laps. If Posy Simmonds hadn't done so already (The Literary Life), I'd suggest she satirised the whole scene with her wicked cartoonist's pen.

Then there are the blogs, doing their bit for the extinction of the face-to-face bookshop encounter. If you want to include a link to a book you've mentioned (I know because I've done this already), you're almost bound to link it to Amazon, because that's the first that comes up, silly, and we don't have time to go one better (the whole of the Internet seems built upon the idea of being 'short of time' - though we had a lot more time before it arrived, I remember those halcyon days). There is even the readymade add-on that links books you mention directly to their Amazon page...