The old bookshops of Leeds.

After reading on Friday that printed books were losing the Darwinian struggle against their leaner, meaner, cleaner digital mutations, and bookshops were closing down faster than pubs with electric pumps (which prompts a strange thought – why do we prefer our bodies filled manually but our minds by methods more immaterial?) I decided to do my #HomeTourist Saturday trip to one of the few second hand places left in Leeds. Along the way I indulged in a more internal voyage; less a trip down memory lane, more a ramble down the back passage of reverie. Only a decade or so ago there were half a dozen independent booksellers within walking distance from where I live now. I wonder how many people remember any of them?

One of the weirdest used to be where Purple Rinse is now. Every square foot was packed with random wonders, mainly American hardbacks – publishers over there seem to have a similar contempt for the concept of carbon footprint as the motor industry. Their product unfeasibly huge and wastefully thick – piled in tottering towers against the walls or heaped on broad aluminium shelves that evidently were built for some more industrial purpose. The proprietor had no sense of the value of books, everything seemed priced according to some unrelated variable such as weight, colour, font size, or ratio of footnote to main text. Nothing cost more than a quid though. I’d often emerge with a couple of carrier bags crammed with the latest Philip Roth, Kathy Acker or Norman Mailer, along with a batch of incredibly obscure academic literary deconstructive theory fresh from the presses of unheard of Mid-Western universities – bulk buys of textual junk to flip through over a pint in the Vic and then abandon. I never spent more than a tenner at a time. My idea of heaven.

Another odd place was down the small street opposite Browns that now leads to Tescos. There were no windows. A yellow note taped neatly to the door simply said in tiny Times New Roman, Bookshop. Mind your head. Perfect sign I thought, and still makes me chuckle. The door led down some wooden stairs to a large, stuffy room lit in the old Grandways style, bright but slightly sulpherous, so that visitors had a distinctive Satanic pallor as they pored over the paperbacks. The funniest thing about this place was the lack of any literary pretension. Books were stacked on tables that lined the walls and ran down the middle of the room, making a kind of three dimensional “M” shape. Underneath the tables were boxes, sliced open and gutted, contents displayed above. Efficient, orderly, but not exactly attractive. The guy who ran it, a wiry old bloke in heavy round specs and a tweed suit that reeked of cocoa, seemed to have a tangential relationship to reality and spent most of his time slowly side-stepping his way along the tables with a sticker gun marking each and every book £1.99. I bought one book – a reverse dictionary with quite possibly the ugliest typography and most hideous design imaginable – that had been stamped eight or nine times. The shop didn’t last long.

The most famous second hand book seller in Leeds was probably Miles’ Antiquarian Bookshop. This was where the Leeds Met Uni business school is now, next to the pub that used to be The Cobourg – I can’t keep up with that place, it seems to change identity every other month, from Irish to Japanese to Hawaiian. I spent almost the whole of my first weeks serious pay check in Miles’ (leaving just enough in my pocket to purchase the twelve inch version of Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids from Jumbo Records). It was the first proper bookshop I discovered for myself and I suppose is the archetype for me of what a good bookshop should be. The wooden shelves were high and sturdy, the stock lavish and well ordered, and the place smelled of polish and print with a distinctly foisty undernote that got stronger the further into the back room you explored. There was never any other noise than slow shuffling along bare, blackened floorboards and the intermittent caress of moist fingertips turning fresh pages. It was run by a pair of oddities, a mild old fellow who always wore a pristine white shirt and black braces, who would chat quite amiably for hours if he caught your attention – but always brought every conversation around to his favourite topic, the reign of Richard III and the evils of those usurpers he called The Tydders – and a fierce silver haired, massive boned matriarch in a blue starched pinny who was the human equivalent of a recording angel. Every Saturday for years I’d spend hours in that place, not leaving till my pockets were empty and my bag bulging, but not once did she ever regard me as anything but potential thief. Which I suppose I cannot blame her for. One time when she was on holiday I did the unforgivable; I sneaked a copy of William Barratt’s The Illusion of Technique between the folded pages of my Socialist Worker and waited till the temporary assistant had gone into the back room on an errand. Previously I’d bought Barratt’s Irrational Man and had cleared the shelves of any existentialist volumes I could find, even the obscure Berdyaev I’d happened upon while rummaging through the Russian Revolutionary history section. The Illusion of Technique was nearly Ten Pounds, and on the proceeds of my glass collecting endeavours was way beyond what I could justify for one book, even one I knew was going to blow all my mental fuses and short circuit my conceptual universe. After weeks of agonising and dithering, visiting the shop almost daily to anxiously check the New Stock shelves (I knew that once the thing had been relegated to Philosophy it was safe, but the New Stock had a fast turnover) I spotted my opportunity.

The book was mine. I justified my criminal act as both utilitarian (the greater good was served by me extending my education) and politically righteous (I was redistributing wealth, in my favour certainly, but it wasn’t like I’d not contributed to the profit margin – most of the cash I made from fourth form to upper sixth went directly into the tills of Mr Miles, Antiquarian Bookseller.) The lady owner could see into my soul, however, my thieving, morally bankrupt, intellectually corrupt, philosophically compromised soul. And though she could prove nothing – these were the days before CCTV, thankfully – she had me down as a wrong sort, not safe to roam amongst her shelves unmonitored.

I continued to buy books at Miles’ and they continued to sell them to me, but I was no longer welcome. Miles’ stopped trading quite some time after. I still blame myself.

The shop that opened next door to Miles’ for a good few years was probably my favourite. The name escapes me. Probably it didn’t even have a name. It didn’t really have much at all to be frank. The ground floor was small, nondescript, pokey. A few shelves selling trashy novels, cheap stationery and gushing greetings cards. The only slight incongruity was a couple of shelves placed out of sight at the back of the shop in a shady corner laden with outrageously explicit gay porn. Next to the porn was on open staircase and a sign that said, Beware! The staircase wasn’t designed open. It had simply collapsed and nobody had bothered to fix it. There was still a pile of plaster and debris where the last chunk of wall had given way. I once counted the stairs to the upper floor. Nine. There were meant to be thirteen. The handrail looked precarious. Neither of the assistants ever took any notice what was going on at the back of the shop, out of concern for the modesty of the men who prowled the porn I guessed.

I remember my first ascent, glancing over to the tills expecting with every groaning step to be reprimanded or rescued, wondering if I should cough to gain their attention, thinking that it was so obvious that nobody should be risking the climb and that was why I hadn’t been spotted . . . but benign indifference was all the attention I received. The upstairs room was a bit of a shock. The phrase, “it looked like a bomb had hit it” seemed coined just for this moment. There were book shelves, nine or ten I counted. Two had collapsed face down on the floor, backboard dislodged but still intact, any remaining books hidden beneath. Another couple had unaccountably ended up in the middle of the room with the shelves face up, rows of dusty paperbacks slumped at an odd angle. Three of the standing shelves seemed to have been attacked with a heavy implement, smashing the side panel, so the individual shelves collapsed on one side and most of the books scattered on the floor beneath. The floor had missing boards.

This was heaven. And the books were a joy; Selected Works of Lenin and Mao from a Chinese press, What Is To Be Done and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, not like any books I’d seen before, stiff cream covers and an embossed red star logo, containing the starkest of information – as if decoration or any embellishment beyond the slightest serif were anti-revolutionary, bourgeoise degeneration – and inside the blackest text on the whitest, glossiest, bareist paper, slippery and cool as noodles . . . and piles of odd, radical therapy theory, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, early transactional analysis stuff, Arthur Janov, Ouspensky, Robert S. de Ropp . . . marvellous stuff. I can’t imagine how they’d get away with it these days.

There were a couple of shops around the university too, the one in Leeds Met was basically just course text books and a few remaindered goodies (I got a lovely copy of the second volume of Bukowski’s letters there, Living on Luck, much better writing than the novels!) The one over the road from the Parkinson Building was a different kettle of anticapitalist fish. Strangely for a shop that concentrated on radical lefty thinking the only book I still own that I bought there is Harry Browne’s free market libertarian How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. I found this in the cardboard box of jumble they always put outside the front door, filled with donated stuff they didn’t really know what to do with. Cost me 20p. It’s a classic. All my anarcho-syndicalist/autonomist green books got sold years ago to the academic remaindered shop that used to be where the new student flats are next to the Quaker Meeting House. I miss that place. Always gave me a good price for things I wanted shut of and when they closed down the owner gave me all the shelving, twenty four wooden stacks (I’d just moved into a new house and was busy doing it up so had to store the shelves in the garden. It was late October. I went to the pub after a hard days sanding and stripping. When I came back the shelving was gone . . . I’d forgotten about “chumping! But that’s a different story.)

The place I miss the most is probably the shop that was down a side street just off Hyde Park corner. Messy, smelly, shabby and badly organised, but it was a great place to spend an hour browsing as it stocked the most bizarre range of books imaginable – I once noticed a rare copy of Aleister Crowley’s dreadful book of poems, White Stains, next to an anarchist history of the Kronstadt revolt. I bought the history, left the literature. One of the nice things about this place was it was genuinely a service for the local student population. I often came across stuff in there that I’d recently seen on friends shelves. I knew they would have got a fair price and the shop would make a small profit from selling it on to another impoverished student so all was well in LS6; vital course texts were circulated and I always knew who could stand a round at the Fav that evening.

I’m sure there were a couple more shops around Hyde Park Corner but they didn’t last long and I can’t remember much about them. The only other place before the Oxfam shop was somewhere on St Michaels Lane; I’m pretty sure this was simply someone’s front room that had been fitted out with wall to wall shelves. It wasn’t open very often.

Just shows how Leeds has changed in the last decade or two. I wonder what would happen if I tried to sneak a book into a gentleman’s club?