I’m nine years old, and I’ve been given a book token for my birthday. My mother takes me to spend it. The shop, all polished wood and green carpet, makes me think of a billiard table. I’ve recently read and enjoyed Frank Herbert’sDune, a novel full of characters with names that strike even a nine-year-old as quaintly improbable (Duncan Idaho, Wellington Yueh), so I pick out the sequel,Dune Messiah, and then I grab the next two volumes in the series,Children of Dune andGod Emperor Dune. “Who are you trying to impress?” asks another shopper, before adding, “The best one’sBeach Party on Dune.” “I haven’t heard of it,” I say sheepishly, and he laughs.
Recalling this now, I can picture exactly what theDune books looked like, even though I gave up on the series halfway through the second volume. But it’s the book that didn’t exist that looms largest in my imagination;Beach Party on Dune really ought to have been written—hello again, Duncan Idaho—and sometimes I fantasize about finding a bookshop so profusely stocked that it’ll be there.
In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges published an essay in which he pictured a “total library” containing every possible book, and he returned to this theme in his story “La biblioteca de Babel”, visualizing a library that encompassed “all that is able to be expressed, in every language”. What I have in mind is a variant on this: a total bookshop, which includes, like Borges’s library, a faithful catalogue of all it contains, a panoply of false catalogues, proofs of the falsity of the false catalogues, proof of the falsity of the true catalogue…
I’m fifteen, and at the local bookshop, a single bright room with tall white shelves, there’s a large display stand dominated by Picador and Faber paperbacks, all of which look enticing. For a couple of weeks I eye upThe GreatShark Hunt—a chunky collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism, dense with trippy verbiage. (Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t buy it, but wonder if perhaps it was beyond my schoolboy budget.) One day, while flicking throughThe Great Shark Hunt, I’m distracted by a friend who wants to go and procure some Nerds—sweets that are like fizzy drips of candle wax—and it’s only when I am a hundred yards from the shop that I realize I have liberated the book. I now face the challenge of returning it, undetected. It would be easier to keep it, of course, and part of me is willing to pretend that Hunter S. Thom
