The Joy of Books (Post-Lockdown!)

It fell to me to write the first lockdown post here on Novel Points of View, and it falls to me to write the first (individual one) since lockdown ended. And here I am, musing on the literary lessons I’ve learned. Now I’m in a position to say the thing I missed most over the past few months: it’s bookshops.

Of course I haven’t been short of books. I’ve read a lot of them and somehow seem to have acquired a whole lot more. But we could drink during lockdown and yet people flock to pubs; we could watch sport during lockdown but really, it isn’t the same without the fans. And so it is with books.

I was probably in bookshops a couple of times a week in the days BL (Before Lockdown). I would head to them if I had time in hand, or to kill, or just if I wasn’t in a hurry. I rarely went in with a specific book in mind. I would browse and almost always buy. 

In theory you can browse online, too, but even Amazon’s look inside facility is limited and my experience of bookshop websites is very much that they’re geared to a search for a specific book. I continued my downloading habit but I really missed the delightful perplexity of being confronted by rows and rows and rows of books, only to have one jump out and beg me to buy it and read it. 

So, when lockdown lifted I was right in there. I prefer independent bookshops and, alas, they aren’t adapted to Covid-safe procedures in the way that, say, supermarkets are. Any one-way system will stall when someone wants to spend time staring at a shelf, not to mention the tinge of guilt associated with picking something up if you aren’t going to buy. Maybe I’m a little bit too much of stickler for the rules, but during lockdown I bought a lot of things I didn’t really want because I’d picked them up thinking they were something else (kidney beans in a spicy sauce rather than plain, for example). 

In bookshops I get round the pick-up-and-look problem by excessive hand sanitising, although the in-shelf browsing is a little more difficult. Social distancing just isn’t possible, and though keeping your face covered obviously helps, it’s still a bit awkward having people shuffle past in a confined space (or, indeed, being the one doing the shuffling). 

This, then, is the new normal, one we’re all going to have to live with. And for the pleasure of browsing a bookshop…I can do it.