For all that the village church feeds our soul, an occasional cathedral trip is required. We need to feel part of something wider, to be reminded that our pursuit of books and reading is neither niche nor perverse. The large bookshop reaffirms our faith, provides connection with the literary community and offers splendid opportunities to stand around reading entire chapters for free. Its floors, folds and coves are hiding places in which hours can be happily frittered away. The world turns and the high street screeches along, but Sport cushions the noise and Travel deposits you somewhere bright and quiet. There is no security guard’s tap on the shoulder; after all, this is a bookshop.
To enter a large bookshop is to become slightly disorientated and stumble around in the dithering manner of a stunned wasp. Choice overwhelms – an unceasing corridor with wondrous doorways. The floor plan is a long-read in itself, the presence of customer lifts a further complexity. There may be a magazine section teeming with deluxe £7 works of comeliness, a whole wall of Ordnance Survey maps, and another solely dedicated to vividly coloured foreign-language dictionaries. Even the sure of mind and strong of will are weak before such decadence: we may have entered for a particular title, but then another fixes us with the glad eye and seduces its way into our home.
Such surrender and temptation are easy and they pull us across the shop, loitering in the luxury implied by twenty or thirty copies of the same volume, in handwritten staff recommendations and in three-for-two offers, where the first book is merely a gateway to the third. Tables decked out like paper picnics set another hurdle, and we are far from athletic in their presence. There is such completeness in a large bookshop, such detail. The answer is probably here; it is just that you have forgotten the question.
Christmas brings an invasion of hesitant brothers with titles on a list and determined grandmothers looking for ‘that one by the lad in the hat off the TV’. This onslaught lends the shop a rare fizz of anxiety which enhances peacetime January all the more. The pursuit of gifts welcomes a different batch of people to our planet. As they stomp around, snatch gratefully and queue in uncomfortable radiated heat to pay, they may pluck a book for themselves and resolve to land there again, in their own time.
Outside of that season of high stress, there seems to pervade a hypnotic calm in a large bookshop. It is quite unlike the hurried atmosphere in any other high-street outlet. People dawdle and saunter rather than stride. The whole experience is so civilised that it can make us stand perfectly still, forget this troubled world and reflect to ourselves that, yes, everything is going to be all right.