Jonathan Coe is coming to Vevey

 Jonathan Coe at the '4+1 traduire' Festival

You might be wondering why I am getting very excited about Jonathan Coe's visit to Switzerland. (He is here as part of the "4+1 traduire" festival in Vevey.)

He is the bestselling author of nine novels, including The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls, and most recently The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

Personally I liked Maxwell Sim and reviewed  it on WRS. The narrator in the title writes in the style of a new and unpolished author. I was thinking, 'I am not sure if I can take another 300 pages of this', when he turns to the reader and says, 'Do you think you can read another 300 pages of this?'. My instinct was to answer 'No' but the story had hooked me and I didn't give up.

Later in the book other characters share the narrative - there are memorable exchanges on web forums and in letters - and either Maxwell Sim's style improves or Coe's style comes through as the book is certainly well written. The story concerns Sim's ill-fated journey to Scotland as a toothbrush salesman, and explores isolation in the age of Facebook.

Jonathan Coe also plays with literary convention. Without wishing to give it away, the last chapter of Maxwell Sim asks the question, 'Why do you feel emotion for characters you know are fiction?' In The Rain Before It Falls the book's narrator is a character who is describing photographs. Many people might groan when they read words like 'literary convention' but these books are funny and grounded without being trivial.

If you are interested to come to the event in Vevey it's on Friday, March 9th. The programme is here. I understand from the event organisers that Johnathan Coe will be signing books afterwards. Otherwise why not pass by your local independent bookshop and pick up a copy of one of his books.

1Q84

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

Do you know the feeling of looking forward to a particular meal so much that the moment you sit down to eat it you no longer feel hungry? That's how I felt about 1Q84 the new book by Haruki Murakami.

Murakami is one of the authors whose new books I always read. The wait was particularly tortuous as this book was published in German earlier in the year and only came out in English in November 2011. I saved it for Christmas and read the first chapter on the plane.
'This is brilliant', I thought, then I couldn't bring myself to read another word.

Only in January did I sit down and read it.

Murakami fans will be familiar with certain elements. There is a girl with magic ears, an entire scene devoted to the making of food, a slight dislocation of reality. In this case the heroine gets stuck in a traffic jam and her cab driver advises her to use the emergency stairs off the expressway. He warns her that by doing so she will be leaving the world as she knows it in 1984 behind.

In another part of Tokyo a writer and his editor are discussing the entries for a writing competition, in particular the story Air Chrysalis by an unknown high-school student called Fuka-Eri. They like the story but feel that it needs more work to win the prestigious prize it has been entered for. They decide to ask Fuka-Eri's permission to improve the text.

From this beginning I was thrown into the world of 1Q84. This is not a small undertaking. It is three books in one, or 1000 pages. Because the world is so compelling it is difficult to come up for air. You want to read and read, sprint through it, despite its length. The detail is well imagined that you do get lost, you are there with the characters, seeing the same things and weighing the same options.

In an important way the book didn't meet my expectations. In his previous novels Murakami has always drawn the most sexy women. Not classically inviting, prehaps, but with some indescribable allure. 1Q84 does deliver sex, probably too much of it, but without Murakami's trademark mastery of the language of attraction.

Otherwise, the story is sublime. Wildly imaginative and well told. Definitely worth the 3-4 weeks it took me to read.

It is also a beautiful book. The hardcover export version (pictured) has a semi-transparent cover with a see-through title.Inside, the page numbering which shifts positions on the page margins and is sometimes written in mirror writing. There are other small features that are worth the effort to look for.

In the bookshop I often recommend Murakami but I always suggest the easier titles first. First time readers might consider opting for Norweigen Wood or A Wild Sheep Chase.

The Perfect Book Blurb

The perfect book blurb has to contain the words, '[this book] has that Certain Something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody in the neck.' I think we're only going to stock books whose jackets read like this.

This is from a real book jacket published in 1906.

Book Making, Book Keeping

A friend of mine dropped by the shop today. I mentioned that I have a job interview tomorrow. He asked me what the job was for and I said that it was for the job I used to do before opening the bookshop.

I explained to him what that it was a marketing management position and outlined the pros and cons for accepting it, particularly in regards to the bookshop.
He thought about this for a while and then said:
'I see. So it's for the status and because people listen to what you have to say.'
'That's right' I agreed.

Then I realised that he was referring to the marketing job and I was thinking about the benefits of being a bookseller.

Prehaps office life has changed in the last four years. Or maybe I have.

A Book About Fonts

A book designer I know is soliciting opinions on the capital Q of various fonts. She says that this letter is seldom used so type designers often use it to showcase the font's philosophy.

I chose the Q pictured which comes from the Bauhaus typeface. I have to say that I find it pretty ugly. We can think of the Zen circle drawn freehand with a calligraphy brush. All that spontaneous energy poured into the creation of something not quite perfect, prehaps in black against a dramatic red background. This Q opposes this spirit. It is technology as it swings away from human experience. 

I have been thinking about typeface alot since I read Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfiled. It's really a book of stories about individual fonts. It starts with comic sans, the typeface reasonable people love to loathe, which came into being to make MS Help more human; it narrates the story of Helvetica, the Swiss typeface invented 60 years ago which has since become the corporate face of The Gap, Hoover and gave birth to, or was ripped off by, Arial; it describes the creation of Metropolitan, the font used on the Paris Metro, and many more.

Whether we have articulated it or not, we all have an opinion on font. While this books does occassionally stray into geekery, I found it interesting to see how my own opinions on a font compared to the aims guiding its creation. The book could possibly be improved by a little humour, but it is a beautiful book to read with elegant typesetting and lots of font samples. 

If you are interested in this book then please get it from your nearest independent bookseller. US residents can find a list here.

Incidentally, the Books Books Books logo is set in bold Helvetica to show the Swiss origins of the shop and as a reminder to adopt an adventurous vision.

Books Books Books

Many people think that owning an independent bookshop involves sipping cappuccinos and making literary small talk to a crowd of less fortunate readers. Surprisingly, that's not true. Mostly it involves shoveling books from one side of the shop to the other. What keeps you going is the idea that if you can just shovel fast enough then you might eventually get paid for it.

I wouldn’t say owning a bookshop is badly paid, as that would assume you actually earn something. I didn’t eat lunch for the first year I opened my shop. The only money I spent was on a Sunday morning when I bought my kids pain au chocolat from the local bakery. I lost 10 kgs while they developed an addiction to calorific pastries.

So why torture yourself?  Part of that answer for me, and I suspect for other booksellers too, lies in the wonder of walking into a bookshop. When I was a young lad my mother used to take me and my brother to Hammick’s bookshop in Farnham. It seemed incredible to me that I could walk into this shop and take any book from the shelf and sit down and read it. I still remember the large ladybird cushion where we would spend hours reading Hal and Roger adventures or the latest in the Fighting Fantasy series.

I loved the smell in that shop. I loved the little cardboard slips with the stock information typed on them. I loved the wooden counter where we reluctantly relinquished our books in order to allow the woman to sell them to us. The shop was constantly busy and I remember being conscious that there were many more shelves outside the children’s' area - shelves that I couldn’t yet reach the top of – full of boring books of the kind adults liked to read.
‘You’ll read them one day,’ my mother assured me.I didn't believe her.

Of course, Farnham Hammick’s is long gone. There is a Waterstones in the Lion and Lamb courtyard, a WH Smith’s on West Street and the out of town supermarkets with their cut-price hardbacks. Not many towns boast a bookshop, particularly a bookshop where the owner, or some quixotic assistant, has hand-picked every title with a certain audience, even a certain customer, in mind. Where the chairs and tables are unique to that establishment and not replicated throughout the country, or even the planet.

Before I opened my shop, I read two excellent publications from the British Bookseller’s Association and its American counterpart. These were quite old editions of their ‘How To Run A Bookshop’ manuals. I remember reading in one of them about this new thing called ‘The Inter Webs’. The author cautiously opined that it might eventually have a small impact on the retail book trade. There was something so tragically wrongheaded about this prediction that I found myself laughing. Yes, the cruise missile did hit the house, but miraculously we picked the best china out of the rubble and were able to enjoy a cup of tea.

But before we get misty-eyed, it is worth saying that this is not a lament, it’s a hurrah. Hurrah for the people who love books so much that they still continue to sell them, despite the competition and the dash for digital. It takes a certain kind of reader, too, who can find the time to visit a shop and browse through the titles on display knowing all the time that it might be possible to buy the same titles cheaper online.

I see the bookseller and the reader as a couple enjoying a last waltz as the band plays on and the ship slips beneath the waves. On the horizon the moon rises and its beams pick out lifeboats being hastily rowed away by discount book purchasers. Forget them. I am interested in knowing what brings the couple here, why they can't let go and what hope the future holds. I am interested in the magic of books and the shops that sell them.

The Joy of Books

You would have to be pretty insane to try this. But if I can find half-a-dozen volunteers I am ready to give it a go.