The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read Online Free Page A

You need to go.’ He returns the book to the table before buying a couple of Agatha Christies whose gaudy covers attract the attention of many browsers.
    In taking a distinctly scenic route back from a declared ‘coffee and croissants top up mission’. I scan some of the stallsand spot a 1884 edition of Pall Mall Magazine . I note that Father Christmas is depicted in what we, these days, assume is his traditional garb; a bulky red coat with white trims to go with a large white beard. I’d thought that the look had come later, derived from Coca-Cola ads. This makes me buy the magazine for 10 francs and I am later pleased to discover that it has in it ‘Aepyornis Island’, a short story published for the first time by HG Wells. It also has Letting in the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling, illustrated with a demonic looking Bagheera and Mowgli pictured as a naked Aryran child with a rather pert bottom. It’s not what you might expect from the Victorians. Or maybe it is.
    I return to our stall where a middle aged couple are intensely inspecting the books, many of which are now crammed together in boxes, with their spines facing out, so as to avoid the ravages of the sun. I hear snippets of their conversation, which is in English, and I soon gather that it is Ian McEwan and his wife. Living in France, the author has recently published Black Dogs , which is partly set in the Cevennes whose foothills are 40 miles to the north of Montpellier. The book is concerned with the lives of June and Bernard Tremaine that epitomise the tug-of-war between political engagement and a private search for ultimate meaning. The catalytic event in the Tremaines’ lives occurs on their honeymoon in France in 1946. In an encounter with two huge, ferocious dogs – incarnations of the savagely irrational eruptions that recur throughout history – she has an insight that illuminates for her the possibility of redemption. A novel of ideas with the hard edge of a thriller; highly recommended. I have a first edition of this book at home in addition to a paperback of McEwan’s first collection of short stories. I’mquite a fan and let him know. He offers to sign my copy but I haven’t got it with me. (I go through phases of separating my private library of books from those to be flogged off.)
    His wife, seeming to take umbrage at her husband’s fame, wanders away and Ian McEwan decides finally to buy a couple of Henry James Penguins, one of which has been recently recommended to him. I later recount the story to a much valued customer in my bookshop who, it turns out, was a friend of McEwan when they both taught English as a foreign language in East Anglia.
     
    (Distance travelled: 2 miles. Takings: 870 francs (courtesy of one Dutchman, four Frenchwomen and nine English people, including a famous writer). Fact learned: Markets are about endurance and chance encounters.)
Household Waste Recycling Centre, Llandegai, November 2007
    I look into what is essentially a giant paper-compressing skip. What am I doing here with this family heirloom, a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1911? The pages are still legible inside heavily disintegrating red covers. But the CD Rom and more modern editions have made mine moribund, it seems. The charity shops reject such volumes. I can’t give them away.
    Taid, as a student at Manchester University, bought the set second-hand in 1919. He’d been invalided out of the front line trenches in the First World War not with war wounds but with severe goitre, which was subsequently treated with success byan early form of radium irradiation. From a modest background, Taid had made his purchase – which I think of as being the equivalent these days to a top of the range Apple Mac – with funds from the Government. He’d applied successfully for a Kitchener Scholarship, a grant given to those who fought in the war. It enabled him to enter higher education; he even professed never to have been so well off