I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page A

enormous amount of time spent staring out of the
window. I can’t write in Times New Roman because it looks as though it’s
already printed. This comes from starting to write in the Palaeolithic era, on
an Olivetti portable typewriter with finger-darkening ribbon-changing, a bottle
of Tippex for corrections and carbon paper to make copies. I must use a font
that is provisional, resembles typing and so is susceptible to savage editing,
then printing out and scribbling and printing out and scribbling until you are
sick of the sight of the thing and can’t believe anyone else would want to read
it, by which time your editor is sending armed men to retrieve the MS from you by
force.
    Once
surrendered, everything is out of your hands. The published font is nothing to
do with me; even the cover only allows me power of veto. I don’t design it. On
my brand-new Kindle, Galgut’s words were identical in their meaning to the ones
that appeared in the paper product. As a work of literature, it was the same
act of imagination as when he had originally typed it. The cover, paper,
binding and font were extraneous. I had the peculiar sensation on my Kindle of
mainlining directly into Galgut’s brain, without the intervening medium of the
book’s aesthetics.
    As I
began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder
that I could carry around a library in my pocket. It is a library,
arranged alphabetically or, if I like, in order of buying, and nothing shelved
in the wrong place. The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more
intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. Wherever I am,
there is always something to read.
    Then,
on a four-hour flight home from Moscow two months later, we ascended bumpily
through the December clouds, the fasten-seatbelt sign went off, I turned on my
Kindle, and it was irretrievably stuck. Nothing would open it. The only thing I
had to read was the British Airways in-flight magazine.
    Amazon
replaced it. How kind. But the argument against the electronic device had been
strengthened. An electronic device could let you down in the way that
its critics had warned. The advantages to the Kindle – its portability, the
quick ease of buying a book and reading it moments later, the mutable font size
– evaporate when you are holding in your hand a dormant or dead piece of flat
grey plastic.
    I had
not stopped buying physical books, but I noticed I was buying fewer of them. In
its heyday, Prospero’s, my local bookshop, was managed by a woman called Mary
who had worked at the original Penguin bookshop in Kensington. She had a
delightful side-kick called Stephen, a doleful young man who would glare at
books he thought customers should not buy. Once, returning from a few months
abroad, I began to pick up from the pile on the counter a copy of Schott’s
Miscellany , a publishing sensation in my absence, when he said with a loud
sigh, ‘Oh, don’t .’
    When
I read a long review by Margaret Drabble in the Guardian of the Collected
Stories of the murdered Soviet writer Isaac Babel, I put down the paper,
walked to the shop and asked if they had a copy of this £25 hardback.
    ‘Mary
ordered two,’ Stephen said. ‘She said, Linda Grant will buy one and someone
else will buy the other.’ And he took ‘my’ copy from behind the counter and
handed it to me.
    But
Mary retired and young Stephen left to train to be a teacher. The new staff
failed to build the relationships with their customers that the old regime had
sustained for so long. And then, of course, they never discounted. You had to
pay full price. Still, it seemed that our bookshop was part of our built
environment; it was us, it defined the kind of place where we lived, one in
which there were few high-street chains but lots of slightly quirky
independents, some of many decades’ standing. And our bookshop had a prominent
position directly opposite a closed-down Woolworths which was about to become