Bibliomaniac (eBook)

Tsundoku: An Introduction

Let’s start with a battle cry, but quietly, just in case you are in the library.

I don’t retreat into books, I advance out of them. I go into a bookshop with one fascination and come out with five more. I always need another book. I love their potential.

I love the moment of pulling an intriguing title from a shelf and exploring what’s within, perhaps E. C. Cawte’s Ritual Animal Disguise or Julian Symons’s The 31st of February – ‘an ugly vortex of horror at the limit of human tension’. On a perfect day I walk out of the bookshop with a canvas bag of known and unknown delights and find a tearoom, where I revel in each new purchase while tucking into a piece of Victoria sponge.

This is my holy time. Here is transcendence.

I have shaken off almost all of my other addictions, but never my insatiable desire for more and more books.

Books about William Blake.

Books about climate change.

Books about spider goats.

Books about the evolution of flight.

Books about avant-garde performance artists.

Books about Princess Margaret.*

Books about satanic transport cafés.

Those just happen to be the ones that have come home with me today.

In The Nature of Happiness Desmond Morris wrote, ‘One of my great joys is going on a book-hunt. Finding a rare book I desperately want after a long search, acquiring it and carrying it home with me, is a symbolic equivalent of a hunt for prey.’

Being both a vegetarian and clumsy with a spear, I find this form of being a noble huntsman suits me. As a male who is far down the Greek alphabet when it comes to my masculinity, my delusions of warrior status when searching for a Shirley Jackson rarity ennoble me.

I have many gazelles mounted on my bookshelves. I do not buy books for their rarity or potential profit, I buy them because I want them, although there can be an extra frisson of excitement when you find you have purchased a rare bargain.

Browsing a thirty-pence bookstall, I once saw a 1921 hardback copy of Relativity: The Special and the General Theory – A Popular Exposition by Albert Einstein. I had a modern copy already, but I thought it would be nice to have an old edition, an artefact that enabled me to contemplate who had been in these pages before me. It was a sixth impression, so I imagined there were many copies out there and it would be worth only a couple of quid. Later I found out it could be worth more than £300. To make my thirty-pence purchase even better, inside was a ‘bookmark’, an old Methuen marketing ad for The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: ‘Only the man who created TARZAN, the ape-man, could have written these amazing stories.’ Book-hunting is big game.

My entire life and my career have been shaped by books and browsing. It was my delight in finding such oddities that led to me putting on a series of comedy shows where, with accordion accompaniment, I would read from gory pulp horrors, Mills & Boon classics of love with lighthouse-keepers, and lifestyle advice books such as What Would Jesus Eat? and How to Marry the Man of Your Choice.

This led on to a long-running podcast series about books and authors with my friend Josie Long, Josie and Robin’s Book Shambles, and then to the science-book-based shows that in turn led to me making the long-running podcast series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox.

Books define me. They are even the reason I stopped drinking heavily. I realized that if I drank too much after a gig, the reading on the late train home was blurry and so became wasted time. In my finite existence I was missing out on comprehension due to intoxication, so I pretty much gave up.

Books are the reason that Brian Cox did not kill me when he first took me onto the moors for a harsh exercise regime together. He had already been training for three years; I hadn’t swung a kettlebell in my life. On our first exercise session we took some heavy ropes and other weights. Brian looked as surprised as a physicist can, when I was still standing an hour later. I was even able to walk a little. It was as if I had compounded the physical laws of the universe and walked through two doors at once.

On the walk back I explained that, although I take no formal exercise, I walk miles on every tour I do and, as I stop in every bookshop I see, the weight that I carry increases on an hourly basis. Sometimes I have to buy books just to make sure the weight is equal on both sides. The Fyodor Dostoyevsky fitness regime.

My life is summed up by the Japanese word Tsundoku – allowing your home to become overrun by unread books (and still continuing to buy more).

Shelf space ran out long ago. However high and teetering the piles become, my bibliomania is unstoppable. I cannot buy only one book. It is no books or many books, though it is never no books. I can walk by a bookshop and my mind will tell me, ‘Just keep on walking.’ Then another corner of my mind says, ‘Hang on, do you remember there is that one book you need for that project you are working on. Why not pop in and see if they have that one book and then pop straight out?’ And I’m gone, like the addict I am.

Are these books useful? Perhaps most painfully, I have at least ten books about decluttering your life for a happier future, strewn around my house.

I want to know about everything, so I know about nothing.

At one stage my house became so swamped with books that I donated more than 1,000 of them to Leicester Prison* and got rid of a further 5,000 more to charities. And yet I know that my house is still overrun, always on the cusp of being justifiable grounds for a divorce.

I am sometimes asked how I read so much. I commit the cardinal sin among some bookish people: I leave books unfinished. I hop in and out of them, grabbing an anecdote, an idea or a philosophy and then putting them on the teetering ‘to be continued’ pile.

Whether they are useful or not, I am in love with books. I sleep with many piled on my bed and sometimes one that has gently fallen on my face, as exhaustion overcomes my ability to travel any further. In my dreams I run riot in a chaotic Borgesian library. Someone once told me that my lust for books meant I had jumped from bibliophile to bibliosexual, but I think I prefer bibliomaniac.

I was lucky to grow up in a house filled with books. Books never meant boredom. If you think books are boring (and I presume you do not, or you wouldn’t be reading this book about books, or be in a bookshop weighing up whether you want it or not), then it’s my view that you simply haven’t met the right book yet.

From an early age I would go with my dad to book fairs, where he would search for works by Henry Williamson, best known for Tarka the Otter, and Evelyn Waugh, who enjoyed depriving his children of bananas during wartime (I’ll tell you more about that later). I remember seeing the Labour politician Michael Foot scouting for Byronic volumes, and once the Scottish eccentric and poet Ivor Cutler asking for rarities by Maurice Sendak, most famous for Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. On trips to central London with my dad I was usually the youngest child in the bookshops of Charing Cross Road and Cecil Court, looking intense in my NHS specs.

In the middle of 2021 I found myself at a loose end. I was meant to be going on tour with Professor Brian Cox, but the worries of playing arenas in a time of uncertain Covid variants meant that we decided to postpone it.

I had an idea. I had a new book coming out, The Importance of Being Interested, and it was a celebration of curiosity. It was a book that grew from my childhood immersion in The How and Why Wonder Book of Time, The Big Activity Book of Prehistoric Mammals and Usborne World of the Future: Star Travel, all of which eventually led to being able to read science books with hardly any pictures at all. I decided that I should go to where so many of my fascinations begin: the bookshop.

To fill the gap where the tour should have been, I would visit at least 100 bookshops across the United Kingdom. I swapped playing to 12,000 people in Manchester Arena for playing to twelve people in the Margate Bookshop.

Visiting all these independent shops highlighted to me exactly why the independent bookshop is such a vital part of the high street. These shops and the people who run them are the gatekeepers to stories we never knew we wanted to read; to ideas that might increase our happiness or help us deal with our sadness; to places that our mind never knew it might go. You can always have a proper conversation in a bookshop. You can skip ‘Looks like the weather’s on the turn’ or ‘Parking around here gets worse and worse’ and skip straight to ‘Have you read Klara and the Sun yet?’ or ‘There is a fascinating theory about self-driving cars and artificial intelligence – can you remember who’s just written a book about it?’

The bookshops have found out something rather useful about me too, and that is that I am a very profitable person to have along for an event. Sure, it might mean that they sell a few more copies of my book, but even if they don’t, they know their profits will go up because I’ll go away with a caseload...