A customer walks into a bookshop and asks “Can you tell me where the self-help section is?” To which the bookseller replies: “If I told you where it is, that would defeat the purpose”. The reason why I relate this unfunny tale is that I stumbled upon a model “Self-Help” section while in London and bought a model “self-help” book. Hilariously entitled Easy Way to Quit Smoking, I purchased a copy despite many qualms against its gratuitous deployment of classic blackmail techniques. One of the mantras – “You are just a puff away from a pack a day” – is especially reassuring. Incidentally, our poet Ariane has also kicked the habit.
It’s not all “Me, me, me!”, however, as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron indicates, while the gravity of Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities spins us close to our dancing star. On a more serious note: due to consolidation within the book trade, whereby independent bookshops die slow, painful unnatural deaths, London is, alas, now the book-buyer’s Paradise – though precisely not the bibliophile’s. The latest to depart its terrestrial home and meet the Great Librarian above is the SPCK bookshop specialising in theological volumes. When will it end? (or when will the ending cease to end?)
