The Second-Hand Bookshop

There are few places I enjoy getting lost in quite as much as a second-hand bookshop. Not one of those beautifully curated establishments where every book stands neatly upright, arranged alphabetically, with tasteful lighting and little handwritten recommendations. I'm talking about the other kind.

The ones where books are stacked three deep, where the shelves are sagging slightly under the weight of decades of accumulated literature, and where the organisational system appears to have been devised by someone with a passing familiarity with the alphabet.

And possibly a grudge against it.

I was wandering through one recently, and it struck me just how much I enjoy the experience.

Even when it's frustrating.

Especially, perhaps, when it's frustrating.

The promise of something unexpected

One of the great pleasures of a second-hand bookshop is the potential to find something you didn't know you wanted to read. I often enter with a vague idea. Perhaps a particular author, a genre, or a book I remember someone mentioning but then something catches my eye.

A title that picques my curiosity or a familiar author. A battered paperback with a cover that reminds you of something you read when you were seventeen. and then the ritual:

You pick it up.

Read the back.

Open it somewhere in the middle.

Read a paragraph or two.

Perhaps it's interesting. Perhaps it isn't.

Back on the shelf it goes.

And then you notice something else.

Before you know it, twenty minutes have passed and you're standing in an entirely different section, reading about a subject you had absolutely no intention of exploring when you walked through the door. Wonderful.

A little sensory magic

And there's a particular smell to old bookshops. Ageing paper, dust, cardboard, perhaps a hint of dampness. It's not quite the same as the smell of a new book, which has its own appeal.

Old books smell as though they've lived... they've been opened, read, carried, lent, forgotten, rediscovered and eventually passed on.

Some have inscriptions inside the front cover. Others have names written in fading ink, occasional underlining, or a forgotten bookmark. Small traces of previous lives.

And the second hand book store has a particular sound, or rather, the absence of much of it.

Books seem to absorb the noise around them. The outside world becomes slightly muffled. Conversations turn into low murmurs. You hear the occasional shuffle of feet, the soft scrape of a book being pulled from a shelf, the faint rustle of pages. Nobody seems in much of a hurry (have you ever seen someone hurry through a second hand bookstore?).

And there's a peculiar little social ritual that takes place in the narrow aisles.

Two people approach from opposite directions. There's a moment of negotiation. A slight sideways shuffle. A half-smile. A nod.

One person steps aside, the other squeezes past. No words required, just a small moment of shared understanding between two people who would rather be looking at books.

The exquisite irritation of disorganisation

Of course, there's a downside. You find the section you're looking for. Science fiction, perhaps.

There are hundreds of books. Isaac Asimov is next to Jean Auel. Stephen Baxter is somewhere near the bottom. A book by David Brin is lying horizontally across three other authors, and there's a promising-looking title wedged so tightly between two enormous hardbacks that extracting it feels like an archaeological operation.

And then you discover that the book you were looking for isn't there.

Or perhaps it is. Somewhere. Maybe behind another stack or on a different shelf, madeningly possibly in another aisle.

You know exactly what you want, but the shop seems determined to prevent you from finding it.

And yet, while looking for it, you discover three other books that look interesting.

One of which you pick up, read a few pages of, and decide to buy. The book you came for remains undiscovered. I'm not entirely sure whether that's a success or a failure.

But I know I've enjoyed myself.

The pleasure of wandering without an outcome

We spend a remarkable amount of our lives trying to be efficient. We search for the quickest route, the most relevant result, the best recommendation, the shortest possible path between wanting something and getting it.

If I know the title of a book, I can probably find it online in seconds. A few more clicks and it's on its way to me. (buy in the next 20 minutes for same day delivery!) Efficient. Convenient. Predictable.

But a second-hand bookshop offers something rather different. You don't have to know what you're looking for. You don't even have to find anything. You can spend an hour wandering, picking up books, putting them down, changing direction, following a thread of curiosity and then abandoning it because something else has caught your attention (squirrel!).

Shock! There is no particular objective and nobody is measuring your progress.

You aren't required to produce an outcome. And that, I suspect, is part of what makes the experience so restorative. Your attention belongs to you. And rather than responding to an email, a notification, a deadline or someone else's priorities. You're simply following what interests you.

The value of what we weren't looking for

There's another thing I love about second-hand bookshops. They're full of books that have already had a life. Some were bestsellers. Some were probably bought with great enthusiasm and never finished. Others might have changed the way someone thought about the world.

Now they're waiting for another reader.

I have a personal theory that a book's energy is depleted by reading and placing it on a shalf with other books recharges it... read for the next reading

A book doesn't cease to have value because it's no longer new. Its ideas haven't necessarily expired. The story is still there, waiting to be discovered by someone who hasn't read it yet.

And sometimes the right book finds you at a rather unexpected moment because you happened to turn left instead of right, looked down instead of up, and noticed a title peeking out from beneath a pile of paperbacks. A small accident. A moment of serendipity.

A little more wandering, perhaps

I eventually left the bookshop with a book on Kierkegaard and another on Chomsky. I'd spent a thoroughly enjoyable time browsing, occasionally muttering about the arrangement of the shelves, discovering authors I'd forgotten and books I hadn't known existed.

I could have found a specific title much faster online. But that wasn't really the point. I'd gone there "just" to look around.

And, somewhere between the overstuffed shelves, the smell of ageing paper and the quiet company of other browsers, I'd found something else. The pleasure of allowing my curiosity to lead for a while.

Perhaps we could all do with a little more of that. Not everything enjoyable needs to be productive. Not every search needs to end with finding what we set out to find.

And not every hour needs to have something to show for it. Sometimes it's enough to wander among the shelves.

And see what catches your eye... is that a second hand record shop I see over there?