Lament for a Lost Sofa

17 Oct 2009

Ling Low

When a branch of Ottakars opened up in my hometown about ten years ago, I was snobbishly high minded about its various distractions. Among the bookshop’s colourful and – I thought – superfluous diversions there was an interactive contraption in the children’s section, and shelves full of toys on prominent display. I thought all this a cheap and cynical ploy to get people to stay in the shop. But then, I was the kind of child who liked lining up Penguin Classics in alphabetical order*.

Alongside the bookshop’s child-friendly amusements, there were adult-friendly sofas and chairs which reconciled me to it somewhat. In particular, there was a sofa which was located just opposite the Erotic Fiction section. If you sat there for a while, you would see male customers veer towards the shelf, then sidle to an indeterminate point nearby as soon they saw you perched there. Fortunately, the Science Fiction section was the next shelf along, and provided a handy refuge.

I rather liked that sofa. More than its opportune locale, there was something nice about having sofas in general in a bookshop. Sofas seemed to say, “Come in from the cold and sit awhile. Enjoy that feeling of being surrounded by things to read and look at. Ignore the screams of children fighting over the big interactive toy.” With sofas, you could spend time idly browsing: whether you were getting sucked into the first chapter of a really good book, or furtively reading a self-help manual.

Ottakars was, in time, taken over by Waterstones. And bookshops were overtaken by the internet. Now, I hardly ever go into a bookshop to find a particular book. It’s easier to look online first, in the internet’s cheap and infinite stockroom. But I still go into bookshops to do that kind of idle browsing which can lead to unplanned purchases. Picking up an appealing volume by chance can lead to finding a book you’ll love. That’s a feeling which can’t be replicated by an automated message that tells you, “Customers who bought this, also bought that”.

When I drifted most recently into the bookshop in question, I found that all the sofas had disappeared. I took the absence of the one near Erotic Fiction to heart the most. But further investigation revealed a deficit, a veritable desert, of sitting furniture. Even those round step stools (usually my last resort) were missing. The interactive centrepiece of the children’s section was gone too, and there was not a single fun beanbag to be fought over.

I don’t know when this erosion of sofas happened. It may have been gradual. But to make the cynicism of it all the more apparent, the coffee shop upstairs was resplendent in sofas, behind a cordon clearly demarcating its territory. Entering the coffee shop with an unpaid-for book is one of those taboo things. Though I’ve never seen it written down, I’m sure there’s a rule that you have to buy the book first. Then you have to buy a coffee.

I know that bookshops are being squeezed hard at the moment, and that the recession has added to their asphyxiation by the internet. Encouraging customers to ‘sample’ the books might lead to bent spines, creased corners, etc – books that cannot be sold. But it would be nice to go into a bookshop and not to feel as though it exists solely to process the purchasing of minor celebrity biographies and cookbooks. It would be nice if there was a place for the wayward reader.

More than that, it is necessary if bookshops want to survive. If we can’t handle books and browse through their actual pages, then bookshops will have nothing over online stores. And then they really will be reduced to warehouses full of celebrity biographies, cookbooks, and celebrity chef biographies. As this won’t be to the advantage of anyone apart from Antony Worrall Thompson, it is crucial that bookshops fight back by improving their reading environments. As the first part of the bookshop rescue plan, I propose that all sofas should be returned to the shop floor, with extra padding if possible. Let’s start with the one next to Erotic Fiction.

*By author surname, in case you were wondering.