The joys of bookshop browsing
Guardian Blog - Posted by Sam Jordison

Searching real shelves is the most satisfying way to find literary treasures – but can it survive the rise of Amazon and ebooks?

Left - Prospecting for literary treasure in a bookshop. Photograph: David Levene

Among the many things that will be lost if The Man gets his way and the supermarkets, Amazon and ebook readers succeed in driving independent bookstores from our streets will be proper browsing. All those Amazon recommendations, Facebook friend requests, tweets, reviews, and yes, blogs, sometimes get too noisy. It is a relief to go into a bookshop and quietly pick up a book. It satisfies my hunter-gatherer vanity. And there's the simple pleasure of judging a book by its cover – which, contrary to popular cliche, is effective and fun.

I say that particularly, because – bucking all trends – a new independent bookstore called The Book Hive has recently opened near my house in Norwich and reminded me that fossicking is by far the most pleasant way to find a book. The shop offers clear advantages above and beyond sticking it to The Man. Even ordering books is an enjoyable experience. They arrive the next day, without extra charge, and when I pick them up I can take my daughter along and let her roam around in the children's section, playing with the plastic vegetables the owner Henry has thoughtfully placed there. I can also share a coffee with Henry and gossip about local poets who allow their infant children no toys other than the leaves and bits of wood they find for themselves out in the Norfolk boglands. The shelves and tables, meanwhile, are mines of serendipitous treasures.

Recently I've picked up a book of excellent writing about Berlin and Len Deighton's hilarious Action Cookbook, but the book that really proves my point about the benefits of browsing is Robert Graves's Lars Porsena – On the Future of Swearing.

Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing
by Robert Graves
150pp,
Oneworld Classics Ltd,
£9.99

Although I've read a few other Graves books, I'd never heard of this odd sidenote in his prolific career. I would never have read it had its elegant cream cover not caught my eye in The Book Hive, but I'm very glad I did.

The title gives a good impression of the sly humour within. Porsena, you see, as well as being an Etruscan king famous for warring against the early Romans, was the star of a poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay that starts with the lines "Lars Porsena of Clusium / By the Nine Gods he swore …" The perfect man, then, to lend his name to a book supposedly lamenting the fact that "swearing as an art is at present in low water".

While complaining about this lack of good cursing, Graves provides a pitch perfect – cough – mickey-take of the strict censorship laws in place at the time he was writing (1926). He makes the point that nearly everyone has been effing and blinding since the beginning of time, and that that's no bad thing. Naturally, he also offers some excellent examples of taboo-busting along the way. There's a very good story (almost certainly untrue) about a young man hosting a dinner for all the Sidebottoms, Longbottoms, Netherbottoms and similarly named individuals he could get his hands on, where he treated them all to rump steak. There's also the fantastic suggestion to unsettle a stranger on a train by telling them "You will have a dangerous illness in three weeks' time – and then refuse to explain why you say so".
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