Alexander McCall Smith is the
author of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’, which celebrates 15 years in print
this year Photo: Chris
Watt
Some years ago I went into a house without books. It was in the Cayman
Islands, and it was not an inexpensive place – a modernist cube right on the
shore, with white carpets throughout to match the white of the beach that made
the front garden. Large windows, wall size, looked out over an almost clichéd
Caribbean view: turquoise ocean, a reef, sea-grape trees. But no books; wherever
I looked, there were no books.
If it is bad enough going into a house with no books, how much worse is it to
arrive in a town with no bookshop. That experience, unfortunately, has become
quite common these days.
If books are part of the soul of any house, then bookshops are the equivalent
for a town. A High Street without a bookshop is a street given over to the
purely material needs of shoppers – food, clothing, hardware: there is nothing
for the soul.
Of course, economics has little time for all this. Bookshops exist because
people want to buy books in them, and if they do not want to buy them there,
then bookshops will close. Economics ultimately pays scant attention to cultural
claims.
The owners of bookshops understand this only too well. For them, one of the
most threatening developments of the recent past – and which saw the closure of
400 bookshops last year – has been the rise of online shopping. It is just too
easy – and who can say they have resisted the temptation – to press a button and
have a book drop through the letter-box the next morning. And if it is pointed
out to us that buying books this way will bring bricks and mortar shops to their
knees, we may say: “Yes, but the convenience…”
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