What is it about Saturday Books?

It’s me, I guess. I say this with absolute humility: the fact that serious books have been sold now in Dudley for fourteen years, more-or-less continuously, is a result of myself as the one constant factor. And yet it is all those others, other people besides myself, who have enabled the position we hold – a bookshop in a working-class town that has generated a community around it. Of those several other people, the majority have been young. While some have asked for work post-finals, others just want to fill in time before starting A-levels, and earn a bit; it is notable that both groups may begin by just seeing a job there. They go on to work with passion, and retain contact after they have left.

So what is it? If I sold hoovers the kids would naturally demand higher (proper) wages. They work for more hours than I pay them, even continuing at home into the night.

People ask me what got me into bookselling. My career was that of a bog-standard English teacher, twice rising to head of department, but in small, obscure places. My account of it – I was just too keen on the books I taught – may only serve to deflect from a host of personal failings. Also, with this ‘love of literature’ stance I could not hope to please everybody. So when family commitments lessened I opened a shop. Only one customer, an old grammar school master, ever spotted the continuance from English teacher.

Much of my dad’s book collection, which I inherited and which provided the basis of initial stock, had dates written in flyleaves, 1949, 1947, 1948. Discharged from the army, teaching in a northern town, a bachelor still, in the evenings there can have been little to do in his rented room, other than read. And read he did. Psychology, Philosophy, Criticism, but novels more than anything. There was an early mass edition of Animal Farm (which I sold for £30!) among many others. The long campaign in Burma had probably loaded him with the time for the classics, readily available in in the outreaches of Empire, where he took his leave.

Time as an embarras de richesse – I had the same thing in a sixties boarding school, and then as a teacher in the African Sahel and High Veldt. I read. Just now, I suffer the same poverty of time as everybody else, but must read, because reading is life-changing and can give meaning to the most torrid wastes of boredom and disaffection. It is a natural course then, to identify and extend that necessity for everybody else. If I can I fill the gap. And so, Saturday Books.