The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner (3 page)

We grab coffee, experience the early morning chill. We then take a tour as the rising sun reveals the sheer variety of goods on offer. Plenty of clothes and bric-a-brac along with an eclectic mix of junk and antiques. The place is lent an exotic flavour by the rugs from North Africa, Rai music blaring out. All classes of society will soon be caught up in the age-old customs of surveying and scrutinising. In catching the mood of the market, we adopt an easy stroll while casting a keen eye. By observing some of the early transactions I ascertain that haggling is very much de rigour.

In spite of the variety of stalls and merchandise about, it is still with a slightly embarrassed air that we set up, unfolding the pasting table upon which the books, mostly paperbacks, are laid out. To my relief, nobody bats an eyelid. The books are casually surveyed. A few people linger to take in the titles and
only one elderly gentleman chooses to express surprise over their language. In opening a shop one year later, I am met with considerably more scepticism from passers by. One guy even insinuates that the shop must be some kind of front for
ill-gotten
gains. I try to look affronted but take perverse pleasure from the thought.

Our spirits receive an early boost when a man, with dishevelled hair that gives him a somewhat professorial air, snaps up our entire collection of Sotheby’s Art Auction catalogues. Great. We’re in profit.

Although it’s only nine in the morning the alleys are thronging with punters. As the sun rises higher, we understand the advantage of being in the row of cars opposite us, for they lend the sellers a modicum of shade. We are forced to beat a retreat into the van and cast envious glances at people who erect makeshift awnings. The covers of some books curl under the fierce sun and there are sporadic gusts of winds that have me reaching for elastic bands to stop the pages from being blown about. Conversations are started with neighbours and an inchoate camaraderie means that we mind each other’s stands to permit toilet breaks and ‘getaway’ tours of the market when boredom thresholds are reached.

‘Ah,
Travels in the Hindu Kush
. I’ve been there,’ a Dutch holidaymaker informs us. ‘Buy it to remind yourself of the experience,’ I reply as he leafs through it. I fail to convey the intended humour for he takes seriously my comment. ‘You really can’t compare the two. You need to go.’ He returns the book to the table before buying a couple of Agatha Christies whose gaudy covers attract the attention of many browsers.

In taking a distinctly scenic route back from a declared ‘coffee and croissants top up mission’. I scan some of the stalls
and spot a 1884 edition of
Pall Mall Magazine
. I note that Father Christmas is depicted in what we, these days, assume is his traditional garb; a bulky red coat with white trims to go with a large white beard. I’d thought that the look had come later, derived from Coca-Cola ads. This makes me buy the magazine for 10 francs and I am later pleased to discover that it has in it ‘Aepyornis Island’, a short story published for the first time by HG Wells. It also has
Letting in the Jungle
by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated with a demonic looking Bagheera and Mowgli pictured as a naked Aryran child with a rather pert bottom. It’s not what you might expect from the Victorians. Or maybe it is.

I return to our stall where a middle aged couple are intensely inspecting the books, many of which are now crammed together in boxes, with their spines facing out, so as to avoid the ravages of the sun. I hear snippets of their conversation, which is in English, and I soon gather that it is Ian McEwan and his wife. Living in France, the author has recently published
Black Dogs
, which is partly set in the Cevennes whose foothills are 40 miles to the north of Montpellier. The book is concerned with the lives of June and Bernard Tremaine that epitomise the tug-of-war between political engagement and a private search for ultimate meaning. The catalytic event in the Tremaines’ lives occurs on their honeymoon in France in 1946. In an encounter with two huge, ferocious dogs – incarnations of the savagely irrational eruptions that recur throughout history – she has an insight that illuminates for her the possibility of redemption. A novel of ideas with the hard edge of a thriller; highly recommended. I have a first edition of this book at home in addition to a paperback of McEwan’s first collection of short stories. I’m
quite a fan and let him know. He offers to sign my copy but I haven’t got it with me. (I go through phases of separating my private library of books from those to be flogged off.)

His wife, seeming to take umbrage at her husband’s fame, wanders away and Ian McEwan decides finally to buy a couple of Henry James Penguins, one of which has been recently recommended to him. I later recount the story to a much valued customer in my bookshop who, it turns out, was a friend of McEwan when they both taught English as a foreign language in East Anglia.

(Distance travelled: 2 miles. Takings: 870 francs (courtesy of one Dutchman, four Frenchwomen and nine English people, including a famous writer). Fact learned: Markets are about endurance and chance encounters.)

I look into what is essentially a giant paper-compressing skip. What am I doing here with this family heirloom, a complete set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
published in 1911? The pages are still legible inside heavily disintegrating red covers. But the CD Rom and more modern editions have made mine moribund, it seems. The charity shops reject such volumes. I can’t give them away.

Taid, as a student at Manchester University, bought the set second-hand in 1919. He’d been invalided out of the front line trenches in the First World War not with war wounds but with severe goitre, which was subsequently treated with success by
an early form of radium irradiation. From a modest background, Taid had made his purchase – which I think of as being the equivalent these days to a top of the range Apple Mac – with funds from the Government. He’d applied successfully for a Kitchener Scholarship, a grant given to those who fought in the war. It enabled him to enter higher education; he even professed never to have been so well off before or after his time as a student.

I do the deed before learning several months later that the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
11th edition, 1911, is considered to be one of the most collectable. Damn. I discover further that it is a much sought after edition; the first to be published as a whole set at one date. It is seen as the most scholarly edition, with contributions by over one thousand authors writing in their fields of expertise. All have an abundance of illustrations including numerous foldout maps in both colour and black and white.

I confess to my ignorance and this act of vandalism.

We have come to the sea to taste tielle – a small spicy pie of octopus in tomato sauce – and show the children the water jousting tournaments in Sète harbour. Since the beginning of Sète, the men have practised a spectacular type of combat, which has been passed on through the centuries: jousts. Standing firm on their plank with the bowsprit overhanging the boat with its team of oarsmen, these knights, as they are called all along the banks of the Etang de Thau, brave one another with only a wooden shield and lance for protection. The tip of
each lance is fitted with a triple steel point. The aim of the competition is to knock one’s rival into the water.

The spectacle is yet to begin so I can’t resist a ‘really quick, I promise’ visit to Sète’s
Les Puces
, a scaled down version of Montpellier’s complete with the North African influence. The family is keen to return to the harbour so I can’t mess about. In jumping from car to car, I pick out some tatty green Penguins – crime titles – in a pile of mostly French books dumped in a higgledy piggledy fashion beside an equally disordered pile of clothing, much of which will be discarded when the market closes at midday. In rummaging about, a red hardback by P.G. Woodhouse, lacking its dust jacket, comes to the surface.
Love Among the Chickens
, 11th printing. It’s in a pretty parlous state but my enthusiasm is rekindled when I open it to find an inscription on the title page:
To Joseph Wilkels in memory of a delightful two months at the Picardy. P.G. Wodehouse Sept 10 1934
referring to his stay at The Royal Picardy – Le Touuet-Paris Plage.

This will sell it.

Built upon and around Mont St Clair, Sète is situated on the south-eastern hub of the Bassin de Thau, an enclosed salt water lake used primarily for oyster and mussel fields. To its other side lies the Mediterranean. We eat some of its food after the ‘jousting’ entertainment. Before leaving Sète, we visit Cimetière le Py and find the tombstones of Georges Brassens, singer and songwriter, and Paul Valéry. Best known as a poet, Valéry is sometimes considered to be the last of the French symbolists. Anne tells me about ‘Le Cimetière marin’, a poem based on Valéry’s musings by the Mediterranean where he spent his boyhood.

(Distance travelled: 70-mile return trip. Profit (two years later): 1350 francs, sold through abebooks.com on account of Wodehouse’s inscription. Fact learned: Business can be mixed with pleasure, sometimes.)

A single duvet on a double bed. It means that Jennifer has left. Eddy sees this but averts his gaze out of a nebulous notion of decency. Partly to put distance between us and so mitigate the mutual discomfort, I am making coffee in the kitchen area. The relationship has partly defined me for almost six years: we do, we don’t, we will, we won’t. It is going to be a testing time; reacquainting myself with the personal pronoun.

Avoiding eye contact by concentrating my efforts on not spilling the coffee, I hand Eddy a cup with an air of exaggerated calmness. There is a flurry of words about resignations and a change of scenes. Excited by the prospect of leaving it all for Paris, I, too, become garrulous. Coach timetables are scrutinised as the hypothetical seemingly turns to something more substantial. Little attention is given to the television which is left on so as to provide background noise should conversation dry up. But there is little chance of that happening while grandiose plans of book dealing and travel are being made and, to some extent, made up. Getting carried away, he almost misses the last bus back home. It’s nice of Eddy to have called. Our friendship has history and form.

We used to catch a bus and then the tube out to Heathrow Airport, ostensibly to watch planes. What we mostly did was wander Terminal 2, covertly helping ourselves to a panoply of baggage labels as well as anything else such as key rings and badges – all items offered by the airlines to passengers as freebies, which was how we also viewed them. Our Heathrow jaunts were considered self-made teenage entertainment in the late seventies; a successful Saturday afternoon culminating in a bag chock-f of tangled, multi-coloured paper that spoke of exotic destinations. Eddy was stopped on one occasion. I’d done a runner, leaving him to his fate. On the bus home, he relates the ‘bollocking’ that he’d been forced to endure.

Eddy has tipped me off. A Virginia Woolf? I don’t seek out the pub immediately, deferring an anticipated pleasure. I walk in
desultorily fashion until Corcoran’s catches my eye. It is strange to walk off a French street and into an Irish pub. Irish by name but certainly not exclusively Irish by its patronage – inside is a mix of Brits and Parisians. Ireland is a country loved by the French; English boozers not commanding in gallic hearts anywhere near the same degree of romantic reverence. It can’t really be a Celtic thing either; the continent is hardly overrun with Welsh or Scottish pubs. Maybe it’s the Guinness label and their pure marketing genius.

The bar staff are unfailingly polite, graduates, perhaps, of a Guinness finishing school that produces clean-cut personable young men. In addition to pulling pints, they provide a social service for tourists and the homesick. This evening, I don’t class myself as either. I’m here for business.

I order a pint and sit down in the corner to the right of the pub’s door. This is where Eddy says he saw the book. The décor is typical: plenty of old pictures, mirrors, bric-a-brac, frames of old Guinness bottle labels and books to which I am drawn. There is a row of books on a single shelf running above my head. A frisson of excitement. Always the same. It’s not just the thought of finding a valuable book. It’s curiosity’s pull. Corcoran’s library comprises mostly small hardbacks lacking dust jackets.

Sipping Guinness, I survey the books whose spines have faded into a uniform appearance of greying grubbiness. On closer examination, beneath the dust, are the distinct hues of brown, green, red and blue. Book club editions, some with Boots Booklovers’ Library labels. George Eliot’s
Romola
in BCA plonked beside
Board of Traffic Offences
, third supplement to the 15th edition. And there, as Eddy has said, is a copy of
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf.

Taking care not to dislodge the surrounding titles, I reach
up and extract it from the shelf. There is no dust jacket but it is a first, the book published by The Hogarth Press in 1927. I wipe the dust off the blue cloth, revealing gilt title lettering on the spine. There are no inscriptions. People still aren’t paying me any notice while I casually reach up to replace the book. Sipping more Guinness, I try to gather my thoughts.