The week in culture - The Independent- Friday, 12 August 2011
There was a lot of comment, during this week's riots, on the fact that the one shop in the Clapham Junction precinct not attacked by rioters was Waterstone's. Some people were rather inappropriately amused by this, as if it proved anything that the rioters didn't want to steal books. But not every bookshop was as lucky as Waterstone's. Although Bloomsbury did not suffer from the riots, in the early hours of Monday, a gang turned up on bicycles outside Gay's the Word bookshop in Marchmont Street. They smashed the front window of the shop, pelted the interior with eggs and cycled off.
Gay's the Word is the UK's only gay and lesbian bookshop. It has been open for over 30 years through thick and thin. When it opened, no mainstream bookshop stocked gay and lesbian books. In its early years, GTW faced malicious prosecution for stocking pornography, which it has never dealt in, as well as, sometimes, the hostility of the trade and aspects of the wider community.
Since then, chain bookstores have come to appreciate the value of gay writing, some of which has moved into the mainstream. Nevertheless, GTW is an unmatched resource, a treasure-trove of writing on gay subjects, academic, imaginative, new and antiquarian, pulp and high-minded. It keeps going, even though all bookshops are having a hard time at the moment – it had a bit of a wobble five years ago, and it was thought it might have to close. It pulled back, and with the help of some noticeably successful events, the future has started to look more rosy. (An Alan Hollinghurst reading was absolutely packed).
The bookshop is insured for damage, but will have to pay for excess and lost stock. Jim McSweeney, the longstanding manager of the shop, said that he believed the attack was opportunistic, motivated by the sight of rioting spreading, but probably motivated by long-running homophobia. He added that they had not had a violent attack since 2006, with the implication that a five-year gap between violent attacks on a bookshop was a great improvement on the previous state of affairs.
There are probably not many bookshops who have to assume that they won't be able to go very many years before calling the glaziers and the insurance company yet again. Bookshops are thermometers that measure the mental health of a community. A university campus without a bookshop instantly lowers its intellectual standing, and no ambitious student would want to study there. I would not live in a part of London without a bookshop on the high street.
Another bookshop, the Big Green Bookshop, has been blogging about the effects of the riots in Tottenham, and has shown us how a bookshop, too, can act as a moral compass within a community in disarray. When Penelope Fitzgerald writes at the end of The Bookshop that her heroine, having tried and failed to set up a bookshop in a Suffolk town, lowers her head in shame that "the town she lived in had not, it seemed, wanted a bookshop", her moral standpoint still retains its force. What we do to our bookshops measures our moral health.
The attack on Gay's the Word no doubt occurred in an atmosphere of increasing homophobic comment. But the licence some people assume to attack a whole class of human beings as engaged in a conspiracy of hatred is not, in my view, so very far from the playground insult "gay"; and that is not so very far from the sort of people who smash bookshop windows.
To almost every intelligent person, the act of throwing a brick through the window of a bookshop is quite inconceivable. Bookshops nowadays struggle anyway without the extra burden of repairs, excess, lost stock and perhaps even customers frightened away. Gay's the Word is an excellent bookshop, unique, and central to its community. It has got through worse than this in the past. All the same, it might be a very good idea if you care for a diverse, reading community in London if this weekend you went over to Marchmont Street and bought a book from them.
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