Four Weeks in a Mezzanine

In the bookshop, you may have noticed a flight of wooden step that lead to gloomy apartments above. It was my happy task to bring order to the sprawl by building two four-stage frames. Plastic tubs full of ‘merch’, materials and, of course, books now rest there without, so far, any alarming creaks from the structure.

I don’t boast of DIY skills. The notion that, ‘If a job is worth doing then it’s worth doing badly’ strikes me as very sensible: the outcome’s the thing. My products function, though they never look good.

I did the drawings, ordered the cut-to-specification wood. It was delivered and then abandoned on the floor while I plucked up courage to build with it.

At the beginning of the current month I could put it off no longer. Peter True advised that uprights should be in place before the horizontal ‘trays’ were fitted. A perfectly satisfactory first rack was produced in a week.

I wish I’d taken that advice for the second, larger one. The trays I had made lay on the floor while the posts I’d jammed to the ceiling – wobbled. Out of the corner of my eye I watched one slowly detach itself and then fall – with increasing velocity – towards my head. I swore as if it had been a human assailant.

After four weeks, working early morning and late-afternoon, the project was completed. My thanks to Jay Collins, Ryan Parsons, Guy Sheppard and Peter True. It was all exhausting and somewhat hazardous. But what for?

Commerce relies on innovation. The same set features will interest nobody. Saturday Books no longer has the vast spaces of the ‘old place’, in Tower Street. It’s a quart into a pint pot now and our byword is – rotation. Customers will return to buy what they’ve had their eye on, only to find it – gone. More positively, fresh stock will appear, and the wanted book will reappear. Above all there will be a sense of work in progress and a genuine evaluation of what we choose to keep.

If there are plastic storage-boxes that you no longer use, please donate them.