Booksellers Are Magic
Publisher Leigh Wilson writes on the magic and importance of booksellers and independent bookshops
When was the last time you talked to a bookseller?
It might seem strange that at Spiracle we do. While it appears to stand for connection, the digital has divorced the buyer from the seller in so many ways, and audiobooks are of course no exception. One of our motivations from the days when Spiracle was just a tiny idea was to reconnect buyers and sellers, writers and readers, publishers and listeners.
But until this summer, booksellers didn’t feature prominently in those reconnected pairs. Our Audiobook in a Card scheme, piloted over the summer and now broadening out to dozens of independent bookshops all over the country, has changed that.
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The scheme is based on our belief that booksellers make a difference. At the beginning of Mark Bowles’ novel, All My Precious Madness, which was our October Edition, co-published with Galley Beggar Press, the narrator, Henry, remembers a night spent in a bookshop. He is working in the shop at the time, and worries that he has left the light on when he closed up for the day. He goes back to the shop to check, and stays for the night. A bookseller in an empty shop, he choses a book for himself rather than for a customer — a collection of poetry by Paul Celan. This is what he experiences:
I had never read this book before, but each word glowed with meaning as it never would again. In fact, I have never since been able to fully access these poems, as if a gate had been placed in front of them. But that night the gate was open and I simply received them like gift, a libation that irrigated my body and mind.
Henry’s night alone in the bookshop produces a miraculous, not to be repeated experience of reading Celan’s poetry. He experiences a kind of magic — black marks on a page become alive to him. His night in the bookshop was ‘as luminous and vivid as a dream’.
That this miracle happens while Henry is working in a bookshop is no accident. Bowles’ novel — as brilliant and unique as it is — is not alone in using the difference that a bookseller can make. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, from 1936, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, from 1978, Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and John Le Carré’s last novel, Silverview, both from 2021 — in all, the bookseller’s principles, the values they incarnate, are key.
Even when a bookseller in a novel is responsible for making bad things happen (as in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, from 1923), the idea that booksellers should make things better is necessary for the irony to work.
Our Audiobook in a Card scheme puts booksellers centre stage because we know they have the power to transform our reading and listening for the better. Booksellers are helping us to build the Spiracle Collection and to encourage publishers to make their books into audiobooks for the Audiobook in a Card scheme.
Leigh Wilson, Publisher
