Bookshops were untouched in August riots. “I stayed open all day during the riots and no one came in,” a bemused Philip Griffter the proprietor of Neapolitan Books told our reporter, “I was really expecting some passing trade. It was chaos at Foot Locker next door, I was hoping to shift this load of celebrity biographies, but no one wanted them.” He looks ruefully about him at the burnt out and gutted buildings which are now his neighbours.
This is increasingly a common experience for the small independent bookseller. Down the road Bernie Bootle runs a second hand bookshop. “There were crowds running out of Comet with plasma TVs, I pads, fridges, computers and what not, but amazingly not one person stopped even to look at the boxes of paperbacks at fifty pence each, or three for a pound, and there’s some good stuff in there. It just goes to show.”
Philip Griffter reminisced about the days when people actually stole books, “I used to catch people on a regular basis nicking Penguin Classics, can’t give them away now.” So what is causing this malaise? “I blame education and this materialistic consumer culture for leaving bookshops unscathed during the riots. Remember the Nazis burning great bonfires of books? That image stays indelibly marked in the collective memory, not like a load of fat kids stealing sports shoes and raiding Pizza Hut.”
Other places unaffected by the looting included the Anarchist Press, “We were thinking fantastic, we’re going to shift a few books, nothing, not one person made enquiries about Proudhon, Godwin or Kroptokin, incredible.” And at the Women’s Centre the story was the same, “We were ready with an emergency theatre workshop to challenge postures and confront issues of gender politics and oppression but the rioters went right on past and smashed the windows of the Argos store instead.”
