Working in a bookshop, seeing all those titles, breathing in the foxed paper, handling the first editions, above all realising how much reading there was to do in life and how little time you had for it was troubling. It’s a truism – do anything you love for a living and you will love it that bit less. For a bookworm this wasn’t an unqualified pleasure. Later, after leaving drama school, I got a part-time job in a second-hand bookshop round the corner. The composer Shostakovich said when it came to literature you should know less but know it back to front But the books – covering every available surface – were the main thing: proof (at least it seemed then) of a life well spent. Cats (one had to be ginger) would saunter from room to room and there would occasionally be hints of some Elizabeth David-style French casserole wafting in from a distant kitchen. The image I had then of a golden future was a book-lined sitting-room with an old, unused piano and a fire crackling away in the grate. As a young man in the 1990s I would watch arts-documentaries such as Arena and The South Bank Show and salivate over the crammed bookcases their subjects always seemed to have (characters in Woody Allen films, another early passion, seemed to have the same). Buying my first was in any case a betrayal of my earliest, analogue dreams. In a ‘sensitive’ update of Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die, the original description of a Harlem strip club, ‘Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough’ becomes ‘Bond could sense the electric tension in the room’ – not necessarily a cliche that would have passed muster with Fleming, or should with us. Nor does it seem clear that publishers’ revisions are being done by skilled writers. If in copyright, the author and their estate can be strong-armed by the publishers if out of copyright, laying your hands on the right edition will be a minefield. Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Charles Dickens – any one of them feels vulnerable now. Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is that their work is never done. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything? With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me.
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