A crisis in Space

Lately, backstage at the Erudite Space has turned into something of an obstacle course. Our crates of donations perch even higher and more precariously than usual, with bags more sitting in corners, under desks and even lurking in the dumb waiter. And still donated wares come. I start recalling the pictures in Dr Seuss books. No matter how rapidly we sort them, label them, sneak a quick peak at some of them (yes we've all been tempted...well, mostly me, actually), and then put them out on display...and indeed, no matter how enthusiastically our punters buy them, the piles still grow and the room for manoevre becomes ever more thin, divided and frankly triangular.

And then the lad who brings donations from the city's various drop-off points turns up with an entire carload of books. As I help unload, I notice what interesting tomes they are, and in what excellent condition compared with the usual fare from that quarter. It transpires they come, not from the drop-off points, but from a Canadian family, who are quitting Blighty and returning to the Great White Space.

"I can't blame them, with the weather we've been having..." and therein lies, apparently, the cause of the Erudite Space's predicament. Our sister shop on the coast, who usually take our surplus if we think it'll appeal to the Holiday Reader, are presently flooded out. There is no alternative route for excess donations that will still sell, and so here they all sit with us, patiently waiting 'til the coast is clear.

Ripper

Sometimes people waiting at stations do odd things that stick in your memory. During one particular wait, standing in a shelter, I became aware of the sound of paper being ripped. Oddly, this was not followed by the obvious next steps of crumpling or binning the paper. And the ripping was being done at a slower, more deliberate pace than I am used to.

I looked up from my newspaper to follow the sound. It came from a magazine being read by a smartly-dressed middle-aged man, who happened to be sitting facing away from me. As I looked, he read one page, then having read it he very deliberately tore it out of the magazine, then into four squares, and then slid the four ragged pieces into the plastic sleeve in which the magazine, obviously some kind of professional publication in the field of his work, had been delivered. The next page received the same treatment. And the next. Most of the pages, as is usual in that type of publication, were liberally illustrated with photographs of smart, smiling people who were obviously "moving on up", and whose tales of success were being used partly by themselves as a networking excercise, but mainly by the industry "pour encourager les autres".

I began to wonder what particular industry was being featured. The cover of the magazine was obviously long gone, and I was too far away to read the articles. What I could tell, though, was that it would have been perfectly possible, and far quicker, to simply turn each page rather than tear it into quarters. The magazine would then have easily fitted back into its plastic sleeve, rather than forming an ungainly lump as it was now beginning to.

The reading and slow tearing went on until the entire magazine had been devoured. The shelter was quite crowded, and I wondered if anyone else had noticed this little tableau, and if so whether they, like me, had begun to find it disturbing. How often does anyone in the normal course of life deliberately rip up an image of somebody's face?

Perhaps I'm just a bit too sensitive. Perhaps dealing with people was not a strong point of this particular individual, or the line of work in which he found himself. Perhaps I'll not look up right now, because I am just too damn curious about what this man does for a living, and want to catch the words on the front of that sleeve in the split second between its being turned over, and being slipped into a briefcase...blink!

Human Resources Magazine

Erudite space

It must rank as my favourite shop in town. And they're looking for people to work in it! Payscales are purely Imaginary, but in this case that's not the point.

I picked up a form and took it home to fill in. It took me days to get round to it: after all, what possible skills could a lapsed astrophysicist with a sideline in environmental campaigning bring to bear for working in a bookshop? Two weeks later I returned the form, with something vaguely convincing filling in the blank space. Then nothing happened, and I forgot all about it.

Until about a month after that, when a voice with a gentle Edinburgh accent arrived on the answerphone asking if I was still interested. I returned the call and fixed up a visit.

The funny thing about shops is the contrast between what you see on the orderly, presentable floor-space, and what lurks beyond. It's not unlike Backstage at the theatre, and in this case there are two whole floors of it. A dumb-waiter links them with the shop area, landing discreetly behind a revolving display of witty postcards ("Why should I tidy my room when the world is such a mess?"). In an office piled high with brightly-coloured former displays, shelves of incongruous objects (flower-pots, weighing-scales, lampshades...) and stacks of recycling-type boxes lurching under their weight of donated books, we arranged my shifts. I was to come back the following Tuesday morning.

The most straightforward thing to do is stock the shelves. Starting with "Politics", "Philosophy", "Business and Economics", "Science", "Sociology"... the weird thing about this is how many of the books turned out to be familiar to me: I'd either read them, seen them cited in books I'd read, read something else by the same author, or heard of them as classics of their kind. Perhaps it was just beginners' luck. Then there are entire shelves on "How To..." just about everything from tracing your ancestors, through winning at Bridge, to origami, knitting and boatbuilding. I seem to be the most agile person who comes in on either Monday or Tuesday so a lot of the shelf-stocking falls to me.

The following week they let me loose on the till.

The best bit is, nobody ever has to come in and browse secondhand books: it's not like, for example, shopping for food or clothes, which can be a bit of a treadmill: eat, work, get latest fashion, repeat... Here, by contrast, is a shop full of people who have only come in because they are genuinely interested in what we have to offer. Which, you could say, is the chance of stepping off the ordinary path, even if just for a short while, and into the wide, Imaginary dimension beyond.