Second Hand Books

It’s rare, isn’t it, that one has a dream with a joke in it (at least for me).

At B_____s bookshop in Oxford there’s a sizeable second hand section. Students and others can sell their used books there. It was sometimes a useful expedient in hard times. They gave reasonable rates (about 25% of the cover price) and paid cash. Now, among the staff in the second hand department, some seemed willing to buy more of your books and give a better price than others. One who I always tried to avoid was a glum & terminally ‘unhurried’ woman who seemed to have been there for untold years, so that the mustiness and yellowed surfaces of the second-hand book world had somehow seeped into her very soul and coloured it sepia. Anyway, she always seemed to reject more of one’s books that the others, returning them to you with a doleful expression and the inevitable, disappointing words ‘these, I’m afraid, we can’t use’.

So G., who I was talking to the other day, tells me she’s still there, although looking rather parched and cadaverous. And this must have prompted her appearance in my dream, in which she and the other second hand booksellers die in a motor-racing accident. They find themselves at the proverbial Gated Community called Heaven, whereupon what happens is that the gatekeeper allows the first two in and then looks at her shaking his head – ‘You, I’m afraid, we can’t use’, and shuts the gate.

Well, I thought it was amusing. Not so that it woke me up, mind.