On Charing Cross Road, the shop on the side street, and why the used book market is a map of reading itself
The secondhand bookshop is an archive of what people have finished with. That makes it, unexpectedly, a record of what people once thought they needed.
The secondhand bookshop is an archive of what people have finished with. That makes it, unexpectedly, a record of what people once thought they needed — the management textbooks from the early 2000s, the self-help categories that rise and fall with each decade's particular anxiety, the copies of novels that were briefly pressing and are now available in quantity for a pound. You can read the intellectual biography of an era from a good secondhand shop, if you know how to look.
Charing Cross Road is the traditional address for London's book trade, and several serious shops remain: Foyles, Cecil Court nearby, the specialist dealers in the streets around it. What the road does not contain, any more, is the density of secondhand and antiquarian shops that made it specific to itself through most of the twentieth century. The economics changed; the rents changed; the shops moved or closed.
What remains — and what London has in abundance — is the secondary market distributed across every neighbourhood. The Oxfam bookshops have become, inadvertently, some of the best curated secondhand sections in the city, because their donations come from specific neighbourhoods and their stock reflects those neighbourhoods. The Bloomsbury Oxfam is different from the Notting Hill Oxfam; both are different from the charity shops in Dalston.
The serious secondhand shops that remain — Judd Books in Bloomsbury, the dealers in Cecil Court, Skoob Books in Brunswick Centre — survive because they have a position: a particular expertise or a particular community of regulars who rely on them. This is the same way that any independent shop survives. The position has to be specific enough to be irreplaceable.
What the used book says, beyond its content, is that someone else wanted this and has finished with it. That is a form of recommendation that no algorithm can replicate — not because it is more reliable, but because it is human and particular and leaves evidence of itself on the page.