The Unknown Unknown by Mark Forsyth

Author:Mark Forsyth
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

THE GHOST IN THE BOOKSHOP

Bibliomancy works (or seems to work) because we can’t help but find God in random things. It’s that moment of discovery, in the back of the bookshop, when your hand pulls out some funny little tome, with a funny little cover and you say to yourself: ‘Yes. This is what I’m going to read next.’

It doesn’t matter what the book is. It’s the one that caught your eye. Or perhaps it’s just the one that caught your hand. But in a Good Bookshop that is good enough. In a Good Bookshop all the books are good.

Half of the art of bookselling is about choosing what not to have in your shop. It is not enough to have good books, you must not have bad books.

If a bookshop contained every book ever written, what are the chances that you would find the one book you need? Well, they’d be perfect if you already knew what you needed, but, as I have been saying, that is not the point of a bookshop. That’s something for the internet. No, the perfect bookshop is small, small and selective.

You should be able to go in blindfolded, reach out your hand at random and find something wonderful. I mean, I’m not actually recommending that you go in to a bookshop blindfolded and try this. You’d probably knock something over. Or accidentally punch a bookseller in the face. But you see the principle? Small and perfectly stocked. One of my favourite places to buy books used to be a stall just off Hampstead High Street where about seven boxes were laid out. I wish I could have read every book they had. But they are no longer.

The ideal trip to the bookshop, the perfect, perfect, can-never-exist-in-this-world visit to a bookshop works like this. I find the shop down a narrow street in a town that I have never visited before. I go in, and there is only one book. Just one. It is laid out on a table in a plain cover. I cannot even see the title. I buy it, and it tells me all the secrets of the universe.

I know that can never happen, but it might make a good first chapter for a novel.

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