August 2013
A few nights ago I watched an old film on TV. Nothing
unusual about that – in Greece
the TV channels (those that are left) wallow in the doldrums during the summer.
The good series have drawn to their conclusions, news programmes rely heavily
upon interviews on beaches or on city pavements that, together with the
pedestrians who are trying to avoid the facetious questions of the TV interviewer, are about to melt.
Two of the Greek channels spend entire weekday evenings
on Turkish serials that are immensely popular and seem to have had an
inordinate amount of influence on the current fondness of the Greek male for
heavy beards and bald heads, others show the same foreign series that are
showing at the same time on satellite channels.
It all gets very confusing especially when you
remember that Greeks are supposed to hate Turks, but then few people really
bother with TV in summer and it is too hot to carry on with the hatred anyway..
Me, I am going to pause here for a granita.
The old film, however, was one of my favourites.
‘You’ve Got Mail’ with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
The plot is quite Shakespearean in its way. Two
people, carrying on an email correspondence that becomes a cyber romance. In
real life, they have met and don’t much like each other, do not realize they
are getting quite cozy with each other on the Internet and each is involved in
an unhappy relationship. See what I mean? Very As You Like It. He owns a chain
of giant retail book stores, she owns a tiny bookshop that is threatened by the
opening of one of the superstores round the corner from her premises. True love
prevails and he learns that life is not
all about huge profits. Charming.
I adore films about bookshops. Remember the one in
‘Notting Hill’? Hugh Grant never managed to convince me that he really cared
much about his shop until Julia Roberts walked into it. His assistant was much
more true-to-type. A man with a real knowledge of books.
A favourite film of this genre was ‘ 84 Charing Cross Road’.
Starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins it was adapted from a book of
correspondence exchanged between an
American woman (Helen Hanff) and a London
antiquarian bookseller during WWII . The book became a classic, adapted for
stage, film and TV, but sadly not available in Kindle format. This was the original bookshop.
Yes I know – I always said I would never buy a Kindle.
But then one was bought for me, and I have rediscovered the infinite pleasure
of browsing for books. With a Kindle, you can get samples of books – and quite
generous samples too – delivered to your own device, to be pored over in
comfort and at leisure. You don’t even have to buy them if they prove to be
less interesting than you expected, or too expensive. Two thirds of the fun is
in browsing the virtual bookshelves, just as it was in a real bookstore.
Imagine the joy of browsing in one of these bookstores, in Portugal and Holland respectively.
But in the old days, sampling the books meant leaning
uncomfortably against the shelves, or squatting on the floor, or perching on
the bottom rung of the handy ladder. Kindle lets you take the samples home and
keep them too.
It’s almost as good as this:
It’s rather like re-living the days when I joyously
discovered the modern bookshop.
Books were always a big part of my life – at home we
had books everywhere including in the loo, and my first job after leaving
school was in a public library.
When I first lived in Greece,
books were for many years not top of anyone’s list of priorities; it came as a
revelation to visit Canada
for the first time and discover Chapters.
Chapters was the appropriate name of a chain of
bookstores across Canada, that offered not only a huge selection of books,
magazines and computer software, but the opportunity to browse in comfort at
one of the many convenient tables, or lounge on a comfy old sofa and read for
hours without being moved on or urged to buy anything. (There was even a
fireplace – albeit fake – to add to the sense of homely relaxation). You could
select as many books as you liked and take them to a seat, read for hours or make
notes on your laptop, and return the books to the shelves when you had
finished. You could get coffee, soup or tea and a muffin and there were toilets.
Members of staff would read to kids. You could also read magazines, with the
proviso that if you stained, creased or removed pages, you would have to buy
the thing.
Chapters was and I hope still is, highly popular with
seniors, the unemployed, and students. They do also sell quite a lot of books.
Similar user-friendly bookstores opened in the UK and there are even some in Greece.In Corfu there are some amazing book collections, mostly in private homes. I had the great pleasure some years ago of cataloguing the many books belonging to a very wealthy man with a superb villa (or two) in Corfu. I was able to handle antique books of great value and scarcity. Corfu was at one time a repository of many ancient and historic books and documents but so many of those were destroyed or looted during the Second World War. Other books. including valuable Venetian tomes, have literally mouldered away in abandoned mansions or have 'disappeared'. That makes me very sad, but them I am a devout booklover. I cannot bear to see them mistreated.
What a fascinating world that of books is. And now there
is the Kindle, a boon to those with deteriorating sight, a gateway to that
world that was in danger of becoming lost to someone like me who simply does
not see as well as she once did but still hasn’t lost all her marbles.
Time for a classic Greek frappe methinks!
