a quick rant

I am depressed this evening. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a branch of the “UK’s leading bookseller” to stock a classic piece of literature such as Death of a Salesman. It’s not as if I was looking for some obscure, was I? I mean, I’m not being elitist by expecting a high street store to have a copy of one of the most famous pieces of American theatre? Am I? It can’t be that obscure – they used references to it in Seinfeld!

I needed a new copy as I’m going to be covering it with a bunch of A-Level students as part of their course and I seem to have misplaced my copy (for ‘misplaced’ read ‘lent it to someone who seems to have forgotten where I live’) so I went in to my local Waterstone’s expecting to have to choose from a range of editions (and possibly translations.) But here’s the thing – they didn’t have a single copy. But that’s not the thing – not really. Yeah it was surprising but it’s hardly enough to make me depressed. A little disenchanted maybe, but not depressed. So what is the thing?

Take a look at the photo above.

You have now seen the entire Literature section of my local branch of Waterstone’s. The whole literary canon reduced to a single block of five shelves – four if you discount the top shelf which contains only study guides. I remember a time when they needed more space than that for plays by Shakespeare – now he has to make do with sharing his space with Tom Stoppard.

In a shop filled with floor to ceiling shelves upon shelves of biographies, with whole walls devoted to travel guides, it seems impossible to believe that they need to put Stanislavski beside Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It pains me that anything calling itself a bookshop would have more varieties of Dilbert compilations than Sartre writing? And while we’re on Jean-Paul Sartre; does no one else find it incredible that we can go from Willy Russell, through Sartre to Tennessee Williams in less than six inches of shelf?

I don’t know who to blame. Is it the shop’s management who decreed that classic literature doesn’t sell in Coleraine? Maybe it is a wider problem brought on by the rise of the warehouse booksellers and the demise of the local independents? Could it be that the people where I live just read cartoons and ghost written celebrity autobiographies? Whichever or whoever or whatever, I cannot help but feel sad.

But in a moment of delicious irony I went into the tiny little second hand bookshop on my way home. Despite the lack of shelf space, 'helpful' staff, and comfortable chairs I was able to find what I was looking for in seconds. It cost £2 and had been carefully annotated in pencil by a previous owner who was obviously directing a production of the play – now when the big chains start offering that as a service I may forgive them.