I always believed that the future of a society was in the building of libraries. The access to as much wisdom and knowledge that any one person could manage. I thought I knew: horror was the product of stupidity, and knowledge is an anecdote to stupidity. Maybe for a time I thought of libraries like I thought of hospitals, places to cure the sicknesses of the soul that I seemed to find everywhere. And I had visions of a new Athens or Florence. I left these conclusions reluctantly and now I can’t make anything of them.

I suspect that many people have held this daydream, I’m sure some still do. I don’t think much of it’s naïve and I still have sympathy for it. I think one day I realised that old books were falling apart and people were facing life and death. The books I loved had no lives in them, only evidence of some.

Durham university has its own Waterstones on the road to the cathedral and colleges. It’s only a short walk from the larger shop on the junction in the high-street. Some people I have talked to didn’t even know it was a Waterstones, thinking it was another souvenir shop because of the university merchandise in the overtly visible large front windows. I’ve seen it written that the rationale of the university owned store was to have a dedicated place for students to find books both niche and essential for course work. It has a larger section for academic and non-fiction work not found as extensively in the main shop. Perhaps, not so subtly, the shop has a wide temporary collection of reduced books, banking on a student’s academic interests and unstable finances.

I ordered a book to collect from the shop, needing the book that day and without the delivery fee. I asked the man behind the desk. He doesn’t seem to fully understand before going to a back door on the other side of the room. When he comes back he hands me the book and I pay with a giftcard. He scans it and tells me there’s 3p left on it, I laugh and he doesn’t. It’s a small room with the occasional student entering, walking past the different printings of classics and untouched university merchandise and up some discreet stairs with a sign saying “more, more, more” halfway up.

Upstairs is the room with literary criticism and art reference with a small turning stand with uniform books on revolutionary artists (you would feel bad not taking as an idyllic set) and two girls sitting in chairs facing each other. They’re having a conversation filled with bold claims with long silences for looking vaguely at nothing in particular and I go to the next room. All history: local, national, and global (emphasising the dictators and conflicts relevant to the national and seemingly personal to the local). A student manages to reach out to a biography of some admiral or other but hesitates. Under Stalin’s many gazes he turns and leaves without anything. 

There’s a small room through a small opening in the bookcase. It is only a few meters wide and it is dedicated to books on gardening and home improvement (hardly pulled off the shelves by students). The room has someone working slowly on a desk facing a window. They work on a laptop but not on gardening, they sit with no books beside those over them. And I never see their face.

And there are reduced books, presumably given their last chance for sale. Reasonably solid prices for the books that simply haven’t found their readers yet and those scraping together quids for biographies of unremarkable 16th century bureaucrats. All from the Waterstones from down the street, the one not gatekept by untouched university merchandise. Knowledge to be disregarded, hoping they will remain useful to the scholars of tomorrow. And proudly beside this a black sign with ornate and bold writing “THIEVES WILL BE PROSOCUTED”, with the company logo stamped beneath. And the room changes and I remember that with a 3p gift card I can’t be here. And I walk away from that sign and the reduced section, down the stairs, past the students beneath the bookshelves and past the untouched university merchandise but I notice someone. It has a middle aged woman with a camera around her neck looking at the central wooden mannequin. And I walk back onto the street.

Image: Evan Bench via Wikimedia