Illustration by Christine Renney
The bookshop is big and busy. I feel crowded and I falter, unsure now why I came in; to buy a particular book or simply to browse?
I could easily stay here for hours, days, weeks, months, years. I wonder if all the books are here. A ridiculous notion I know, no one place, not even this gallery on five levels, could possibly house everything now in print.
I need an objective, a reason to move again and I wonder about all the books that aren’t here. Perhaps I should search for those but all that comes to mind is the playwright Joe Orton. I remember how he and his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, had defaced books from Hampstead and Islington libraries.
Would that work here? Obscene drawings in the inside covers of the paperbacks in the three for two section? I can’t draw but I could at least manage something akin to the Cerne Abbas giant, a stick figure man, erect penis bigger than his arms. But which book? ’Fifty Shades of Grey’? No, too obvious. Maybe I should write something short and concise and in block capitals – TOO BIG TOO MUCH or I’ll just scribble an angry and childish scrawl.
I don’t have a pen but they must sell them here and I set off to buy one.
On the fourth floor(20th Century Dramatists), sandwiched between Miller and Pinter I find Orton’s ‘The Complete Plays’. I pull it from the shelf and, hunching over it, open it and I quickly find a space beneath the titles. There is a good three quarters of the page blank.
I move my arm in a little arc and press my pen to the paper. But I can’t, I won’t, deface the defacer. I pull back leaving just a single blue dot.
hijacked amygdala 
I think you should go back to the shop and deface 50 shades! Oh, go on, you know you want to! 🙂
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Ha! Yeah maybe I will!
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You paint a vivid picture here, Mark – and I agree, there is something almost holy about the printed page. Well, in some cases!
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Thanks Chris. I’ve never defaced a book, but I suspect that there are a few out there that I happily would.
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😄
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It’s usually rare, for people to even take the time nowadays to go to a book store and just browse, because people are relying on visual inputs too much, because it’s easier to see something than to read about it. i’m glad, that there are people like you who still enjoy browsing at the bookstores, that way, books don’t go into extinction too soon…
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Thank you.
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Mark – you create worlds that make sense when the world we inhabit does not.
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Ha! I like that thank you Candice.
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I love this quiet scene.
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Thank you Cat. Hope all is well with you.
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Reblogged this on The Brokedown Pamphlet and commented:
Christine and I have a new post on Hijacked Amygdala.
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There is a form of comfort in a book
That is unlike anything else
Great read Mark
As always sheldon
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Thanks Sheldon.
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