What most people know about the American librarian Melvil Dewey is his phenomenal classification technique, the Dewey decimal system, which is still used in 135 countries. Less well known is how he liked to classify people, too. In a chapter entitled “Dubious Dewey”, Martin Latham describes how the great librarian created groups from A to D, banning all in the D group – Jews, African-Americans, Cubans and the “new rich” – from his Lake Placid resort. He was also a prolific groper of women. Latham speculates that Dewey’s hypocrisy, and his “obsessively domineering persona”, were what caused his lifelong constipation and piles.
This is a book that is down on banning, rigidity, abuse of power and all kinds of snobbery, bookish and otherwise. It celebrates stories, scribbling in margins and the collecting, cherishing and even kissing of books – something done with surprising frequency, apparently. Latham, a bookseller for 35 years, currently runs Waterstones Canterbury, where he proudly filed the biggest petty cash claim in the chain’s history to pay for the excavation of a Roman bath house under its floor. But this is not one of those funny “anecdotes from a bookshop” books that have recently been popular – though anecdotes there are aplenty. It is rather a history and celebration of all things bookish, from Alexander the Great’s unusual habit of reading silently in an age when all stories were oral stories, through printing, chapbooks, book hawkers and beyond.
The Bookseller’s Tale is a heady mix of history, philosophy and amusing little fancy-thats. Wang Jei, the first named printer known to history, rubs shoulders with Marie Pellechet, a collector of incunabula. Latham discusses his father’s book collecting, which he believes is “connected to his own father and mother abandoning him as a baby”. There are passages on working class and women’s reading, and on the abundance of monkeys’ bums in illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages. We also learn that cliche is “the sound a group of often-combined words makes as its metal letters drop into place on the compositor’s tray”; that people in Orkney have eight words for wind; that George Orwell, Nancy Mitford and Alice Munro all worked in bookshops; and that the Queen plays on rocking horses.
Fans of the Dewey decimal system will be appalled by this book, which haphazardly crams knowledge into every corner. But those who enjoy browsing in paper-scented bookshops, run by eccentric old storytellers with yarns to spare, will come away with something unexpected, reassuring and possibly worth a kiss.
• The Bookseller’s Tale is published by Particular (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
