There's a word in Japanese, tsundoku, which describes the habit of buying piles and piles of books, only to never read them. To enter a charity bookshop is to tempt tsundoku.
For over a year, I've volunteered in the book room at an Oxfam shop in Darlington; in that time, I've acquired 73 second-hand books, 51 DVDs, a pair of headphones, a shirt, and copious amounts of fairtrade fudge. The only thing I've not still got in my room is the fudge.
It seems tsundoku has gotten the better of me.
To be fair to myself, I have read 39 of those books, and watched around 30 of the DVDs, so they're not wasted purchases. Far from it; I feel like, for the value I've drawn from these items, I should've spent so much more than I did.
Oxfam prices all of its fiction from upwards of 99 pence. So, with nearly all of my second-hand books coming from Oxfam, that means I've spent roughly eighty quid on second-hand books this year.
I'm going to pinch an idea from George Orwell to put that in perspective: in his essay Books Vs Cigarettes, Orwell compares the price of various habits (including, obviously, smoking) with the price of constantly reading. Now, I'm not a smoker, but I have been spending a fair amount of money on leisure recently, so let's see how the two compare:
Over the last month, as I prepare to leave for university, I've been meeting up with a lot of the friends I won't get to see much of when the academic year starts. This has led me to spend
£24.79 on pizza
£73.52 at Wetherspoons (alarmingly)
£10.97 at another pub, and
£9.98 at the cinema
Which makes a total, for the last month alone, of £119.26.
Compare that with the mere £80 I've spent on an entire year's worth of books, books that I’ve already spent countless indulgent hours inside, books that can potentially change my whole life (as I know some already have), books that I can read and reread until their spines are worn out and my hair’s grey… And you’ll start to understand the true value of an Oxfam bookroom.
Here’s Orwell, who worked in a second-hand bookshop for a period, on the same subject: ‘It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. ‘Books’ includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand.’
But it's not just about price, is it?
Nope: there’s a whole extra experience about buying from a charity shop. To start with, there’s the browsing stage. At our Darlington Oxfam, we have some of the comfiest couches I’ve ever sunk down into, and we don’t mind people spending hours just losing themselves in all the wonderful literature we have in store. One afternoon, I read the entirety of Kafka’s Metamorphosis while slowly becoming a second-hand sofa.
And then there’s the finding stage: that moment when you find something (as I did with the Kafka collection) that just attaches itself to you like a barnacle, and doesn’t let go until you pop it on the counter, take out your loose change and pay for it.
These finds are inevitable in every charity shop: every book we slot on the shelves was initially picked up elsewhere, by someone who found something enticing about it that made them bring it home with them in the first place. A charity shop is a library of successful blurbs.
Reading something someone else has already read, especially an older book, is also a richer experience than reading a new book. Each crack in the spine foreshadows some memorable section that the previous owner couldn’t help coming back to, each fold of a page corner reveals some stopping-point, whether motivated by abrupt interruption or boredom, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll allow a little time to speculate about which reason it was, which makes for a kind of shadow-connection between you and the previous owner.
Recently, we sold a book originally printed around 1860; reading a volume that old is like shaking hands with a stranger you never had the chance to meet, sharing in mutual appreciation of the same document together.
Oh, and also, buying your books from Amazon gives even more money to the world’s richest man. Buying from Oxfam gives straight to some of the world’s poorest people, and lifts millions out of poverty every single year. A no-brainer, surely?
Whether you’re in it for the ethics, the price, the comfort or the… je ne sais quoi, you cannot go wrong with a charity shop.
Buy second-hand this September, and succumb to tsundoku.
Oh, and try the fudge.
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