James Daunt, on the future of books, and Waterstones

 From an interview with James Daunt on Radio 4's The World at One, today. 

“The digital reading experience [..] is quite alluring. You get this nice bit of plastic, and we’re all of us susceptible to new bits of plastic, but actually, you don’t have any physical residue. You don’t have the physical book at the end of it. And for me the great books that I’ve read, and the books that I treasure, part of it is the physical book that remains with me. It’s the feel of it, the weight of it, the typeface, the cover, the paper. I mean, I know all this sounds extremely fuddy-duddy but I really sort of passionately believe that. We remember the first book my first girlfriend gave me – I married her so I can say this – is a really treasured piece. It’s a paperback but it sits there.”

“We need much, much better bookshops. You should be walking into my bookshops and have a thrill of expectation as you walk into them. You should not really be able to walk past my bookshop without thinking ‘Lord, I’ve only got five minutes, if I go in there it’s a disaster because I’m going to stay there half an hour.’ Is that the case now? Well, our sales figures would suggest our customers are not behaving in that way.”

Radio 4, The World at One, 15/8/2011 (available for seven days)

Interview begins at 24:42

Given that the Daunt Bookshops are quite the nicest bookshops in London, eliciting precisely that “damn, if I go in there, I'll stay there” response that Daunt talks about, I hope he can do the same for Waterstones, which was very much like that when the chain first got going, and before it so horribly lost its way. My local Waterstones (formerly an Ottakers; we lost our original and rather better Waterstones in the amalgamation) is a wretched shadow of a bookshop, which rarely has anything I would would actually want to buy.

Sweet Thames Flow Softly

There is a remarkable section at the beginning of Chapter Three of Peter Ackroyd’s Blake, his biography of the radical poet and print-maker, William Blake, in which Ackroyd describes the walks that Blake would have made through eighteenth-century London, in particular a walk north from Soho, up the Tottenham Court Road to a place called Willans Farm. I thought when I first read it that Ackroyd’s true subject was  London – it showed already in his choice of subjects for his novels: Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem – and I wasn’t overly surprised when Ackroyd produced a book called London: The Biography, shortly followed by Thames: Sacred River and, this year, London Under. However, if truth be told, I’m not sure Ackroyd has ever really improved on the description of Blake’s walk when it comes writing about London’s history. Over the years, his non-fiction about London has become less a commentary about the city he clearly loves and more a recitation of facts: he has research assistants and one has a sense he is now regurgitating what they feed him rather than meditating on his own knowledge and experience. Thames: Sacred River was oddly repetitive in places, while London Under, his most recent on the topic, is a slim book of observations ranged under various subterranean headings, touching on the sewers, the underground, the archaeology of London and, of course, its lost rivers, such as the Fleet, the Walbrook, Tyburn, the Westbourne, and other lesser known rivers, such as the Effra. It is enjoyable but, frankly, slight.

Yet, for all the carelessness, for all the sense of recapitulation of knowledge gathered by others and already used elsewhere, Ackroyd nonetheless understands some fundamental truths about London, the city where he has lived all his life, not least that it is a fantastically storied city, above and below ground. Lives are layered upon lives, in the here and now as people live surrounded by strangers, and reaching back in time. As Ackroyd says, in London Under:

You are […] treading on the city of the past, all of its history from the prehistoric settlers to the present day packed within 24 feet of earthen fabric. (1)

It is an unknown world. It is not mapped in its entirety. It cannot be seen clearly or as a whole. [..] So the world is doubly unknowable. It is a sequestered and forbidden zone. (2)

The subterranean world can be a place of fantasy, therefore, where the ordinary conditions of living are turned upside down. (5)

Ours to plunder

Here’s what I hate about Writers’ Houses: the basic mistakes. That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

In her article, Here’s What I Hate About Writers’ Houses, on the New York Review of Books blog, April Bernard engages with a conundrum that I often worry away at, the role of the writer’s house as shrine, or more accurately,, the role of some writers’ houses as shrines. I’m trying to remember the last time I visited the house of a ‘famous’, that is to say, ‘dead’ writer, simply because it was a writer’s house. Other things might come into play; architectural design perhaps, or a really lovely garden, but would I honestly visit a writer’s house just because I admired that particular writer?

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One answer would be possibly, in exceptional circumstances – a really good example of why I might would be Hemingford Grey Manor House, owned by Lucy M. Boston, and instantly familiar to anyone who has read the Green Knowe books. Her house was pretty much her only subject and visiting it might help me visualise the layout of the house more clearly. Yet, although I live a two-hour drive away, I’ve never yet felt a strong enough compulsion to make a booking and go. For that matter, I also live about an hour and half’s drive from Kipling’s home, Bateman’s, a Jacobean manor house. I’m told it’s lovely and I’m interested in seeing it for the architecture. The association with Kipling would be, I suppose, a bonus, but I can’t think that I’d want to visit purely for that association unless I was a Kipling obsessive. It is interesting though, if you look at the website, that the first selling-point is ‘Soak up the atmosphere in Kipling's book-lined study’. Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to let me take the books down and look at them, which might tell me something useful about Kipling. I suppose there is a chance that by soaking up the atmosphere, I might inhale a stray passing scrap of Kipling’s DNA but I doubt that is going to provide me with much insight into Kipling’s approach to writing. Better, if I must, to go out and tour some of the places he wrote about in Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, to get a sense of the landscape and the history on which he drew for those stories.

Instead, people make a pilgrimage to see a desk that hasn’t been used in however many years, and is almost certainly not laid out quite the way the writer would have had it but instead to look like a writer’s desk (because who among us has not tidied our desk or study before taking photos of it?), in a room that may have been ‘restored’ to how it was when the writer used it, or rather, to how it was when someone took a photograph of it. In the end, this tells us nothing while deceiving us into believing that we have learned something valuable about an author's writing practice.

I used to feel rather the same about the Guardian’ feature on ‘writers’ rooms’ which, every week, showed the place where a writer worked. Or rather, I never quite knew what to do with the feature. Some writers, particularly the ones with very old houses, seemed to me to be showing off, while others, and Simon Armitage was a case in point, seemed to know perfectly well that the whole thing was ridiculous yet they still did it (though I remember being intensely amused that I could at a glance identify the provenance of his shelving as I have quite a lot of it myself). Throughout, there was that peculiar coupling of voyeurism and aspirational shopping for real estate that Bernard captures and which, I think, is a gigantic expansion of ‘what kind of pen and notebook do you use’, as though using the same tools, recreating the same space, will ever make you write like a particular person.

Of all the rooms I saw, the one I most identified with was Seamus Heaney’s, because it was in some ways not so far from my own working space, but I couldn’t have worked in it – too white, too bright, and too many surfaces with ‘things’ on them. Even if I had recreated it, it wouldn’t let me work like Seamus Heaney, any more than my working space would turn Seamus Heaney into Maureen Kincaid Speller. And looking at it tells me little about how Heaney works and thinks. Paul Kincaid is a great admirer of Graham Swift’s work, and got quite excited when he saw the photograph of Swift’s working space, mostly because it provided a solution to getting the best out of his own office space. The point is, of course, that Paul’s working space still looks nothing like Swift’s, and that’s the way it should be, because he isn’t Graham Swift.

And having said all this, I should record my own working space for posterity, so here it is. No visitors, except by appointment.

To the left, behind the door, my desk, looking back towards the door, then towards the window. (That large furry blob is Rosa, by the way.)

 Then turning round the room, clockwise.

Finishing back at the door. It's not a large room but it suits me.