Genetic bibliophilia

I am eternally grateful that my mother made me a reader. As a child, my passion for books quickly matched hers, as a result of her encouragement. I came to feel that I was bequeathed an estate that stretched in all directions, beyond the eye’s reach. Books gave me the conviction that everything was possible and the world was mine.

The two of us set off on missions every Saturday. A short distance from our house was a secondhand book exchange, where we would deposit our books, magazines, and comics from the previous week, get credit for them, and begin our hunt once more. The book store consisted of two large rooms that were long and fairly narrow. The length was subdivided into alcoves by genre—-crime in one, sci-fi the next, romance another—-so to step into an alcove meant that you were surrounded by books on three sides. The structure of the building, its length and alcoves, meant that little light came in. A few bare bulbs poked from the ceiling, but it always felt like dusk in that shop. The floor was a concrete slab. I would sit cross-legged, leafing through comics and magazines, and feel the cool press of concrete against my bare legs and bony ankles.

Mum headed straight for the paperbacks, particularly romance novels and anything that looked a bit racy. Apart from the children's section, most of the books in the shop were well-worn and reminded me of old people, with their creases, musty smells, and brownish age spots. Like our décor at home, the majority of the paperbacks came from the 1970s and carried the design ethos of that decade. The cover art seemed dominated by browns, yellows, and creams, with the occasional dash of orange or red. Many of the covers featured faded colour photographs of young women with knowing looks, long, heavy hair and liberal coats of eyeliner. Their lips shone pink and glossy, and the women were often bent at the waist, all the better to show how they filled out their microscopic shorts.

I preferred the more colourful children’s section, where I stocked up on Enid Blyton books and Archie and Sabrina the Teenage Witch comics. By nine or ten, I would radiate to the old Dolly magazines and the peculiar British “photo romance” magazines. These were a kind of comic-book style with photographs of real people instead of drawings, with white dialogue bubbles over their heads. I bought them more because they mystified me than interested me.

After stocking up, we would take our haul and head home to spend that afternoon and all day Sunday reading. Not only was Mum pleased that I was reading, I think she was relieved to have a companion who shared her interests. This, perhaps more than anything else, created a bond between us. Paradoxically, it may also have kept us apart.