Godfrey Mason, an Englishman with a very Flemish walrus moustache, runs the English Bookshop at Ajuinlei 15, Gent, Belgium. It’s prima facie as good as any in Bristol or London, but I choose to judge second hand bookshops on an esoteric evaluation of the contents of their bargain bins. Anyone can work out which buzz-authors to feature prominently in a display window; a solid working knowledge of the truly worthless publication is a different matter altogether. Best-selling titles by Danielle Steele and Virginia Andrews may clutter the shelves in multiple copies but these are not bargain binners. These hacks will continue to be read by generations. Pulp horrors by Guy N. Smith and Shaun Hutson will always be picked up by people like me for their camp, violent content and wonderfully lurid covers. And Stephen King is a good writer who deserves to be read. No, the rain-lashed pavement bargain-bin is a unique and oddly complex world. Its contents are by necessity painfully dated and drearily obsolete. It is a damp, depressing, yellowed hinterland of specifically useless old shit.
Here’s some of the results of Mr. Mason’s decisions:
Scandal! – Janet Street Porter
-I couldn’t get past her face on the cover to tell you what this one was about. (One feels obliged to talk in the past tense about something so anachronistic and downright vulgar)
Survivor – A Tribute to Cliff – Tony Jasper
-This is a book about Cliff Richard.
The Secret Life Of Sooty – Geoff Tibballs with foreword by George Harrison
-Sooty was a hand puppet bear operated by Harry Corbett, and later, his son Matthew Corbett, on the British children’s television programme The Sooty Show. The irrelevance of this volume cannot be overstated.
Surrey Walks: An Illustrated Guide – Walter Jerrold
-This book was published in 1907. The illustrations are hand-drawn. I grew up in Surrey, and I’m afraid that Mr. Jerrold would be most disappointed to hear that so many of his favourite haunts are buried deep beneath the M25 Orbital. “A most refreshing diversion into the village of Chessington may be attained via the Pilgrim’s Way…” etc. Nope. Not any more pal.
Advanced Microwave Cooking For All Occasions – Harriet Anderson
-Variations on this delusory theme are available everywhere.
Inside the shop the shelves bulge in elegance and order with sections on the paranormal (“In Search of Lake Monsters” by Peter Costello stands out as a sober and scholarly work among countless manifestly incorrect prophecies of Armageddon for the year 2000); killing people on the sly (“Ninja Secrets Of Invisibility – An Illustrated Manual” by Ashida Shim; contains loads of photos of men not knowing there are ninjas standing behind them); the age of steam, deep sea diving, prison camps, fiction, gambling, geography and economics (“Who Owns London” by Shirley Green – answer: the Queen, the City Corporation, some Aristocracy and a bunch of oligarch ex-Soviet double agents, but she stretched it out a bit). In short, Mr. Mason runs a very well-stocked and charming English book shop in Europe and he knows exactly what to throw away. How did I go about thanking Mr. Mason for this rare pleasure? I have brought seven books on tour with me and read none of them. You can’t digest much of substance when the world is hurtling past you at 80 mph. It’s a well-documented problem, hence the recommendation of ‘page-turners’ and ‘holiday reading’. I sheepishly left the shop with a 3 euro copy of "Nemesis" by Shaun Hutson. I paid with a 50 euro note. Sorry Mr. Mason. I should have bought the book about Sooty as well. I can now think of a number of friends who would have found it briefly amusing.
