Thought Socks

Cromer, a town quite close to my home, is recognised by many for it’s magestic, surprisingly massive church, a world famous (Or at least Norfolk-famous) chip shop and excellence in the crabbing industry. However, apart from it’s actually-very-beautiful-indeed sea view, which encapsulates a wonderful pier, it isn’t well recognised as a town of beauty: The main street is an ugly jumble of grey concrete - a nasty, grungy miscellany of traffic fumes and failed industrialism -, the smaller, sorrounding streets even more so. When you Flickr search ‘Cromer’ every result is an image of the pier, the sea, the view. The lens agreeably doesn’t once point in the other direction.But pluck up the courage to venture off the main street, past Budgens, that chip shop, the arcades and you’ll find a handsome, glowing golden, wordy reward. Courageously plow onwards as the smog thickens and the street darkens further, take a left, and opposite a throbbing generator and a few overflowing bins, you’ll see a little door, a plaque above it: ‘Bookworm’.

Bookword is a wonderful secondhand bookshop. Since an early age books have been as important a part of my growing diet as food, and since an early age my parents took me to Bookworm: there is of course an eclectic but extensive children’s section. And still, all these years later there aren’t many greater pleasures than a visit to that tiny little bookshop; a crisp £20 at the ready, as well as a willingness even to embrace the constant flow of classical music (Which I now will only associate with one thing).

One of the great things about secondhand bookshops is the price: that crisp £20 note could get you 8 books, depending on what you choose and it’s condition. This especially can be said of Bookworm, whose price/condition ratio is unusually wallet-friendly. The same amount of money hardly qualifies you for 3 books from any conventional, new-book touting merchant.

Some would no doubt argue (Were an argument such as this taking place) that obvious pricing differences aside, a wider range of books are available at most normal bookshops, which is true, and that this makes them better. I, riled and unthinking, might argue back, my voice higher than usual, ‘What? Secondhand sellers have a much wider range in terms of publishing time span!’. This, in most cases, would be a correct but unnecessary point. When I want a recent book I go to Waterstones (In truth I don’t, I get it from an independant bookshop with a cry of ‘down with chains!’), as I’m sure other secondhand book-buyers do, and none of us will dispute that doing so is more practical than waiting around for a copy to pop up in our secondhander. I will agree with argument a few sentences above: ‘normal’ bookshops are better, but in one way only: you may easily find and purchase most extremely popular and recently published books from them. The secondhand bookshop, no matter how it wants some, does not expect this sort of business. They are a different kettle of fish, and their utter brilliance lies elsewhere.

The glory of the secondhand bookshop lies in their sheer unexpectedness, for who might know which dusty fruit the shelves will present this time? To me a secondhander is like a raffle, but one you win every time. The glory lies in he fact that what you might find is not bound by popularity and time, that the prizes in the raffle span a whole millenia of literature, something no commercial bookshop will ever have.

So I urge you: go and find that little door you always passed but never really noticed. Find that little sign reading ‘Used books’, and go in. Visit often. Love it. Treasure it. Cherish it. Give it the business it so needs to survive.

For those of you who don’t live near a secondhand bookshop, or are too lazy to leave the house, or have evolved to fear natural light, there are internet options: Ebay and Amazon both offer used books as well as new. AbeBooks offers a huge selection comprising solely of used books, as do the aforementioned Barter Books. But remember, despite maintaining the monetry advantages, internet ordering removes that wonderful unexpectedness I described above.