Fifty Hades of Bibliocide

Can you imagine a town without a bookshop? Try it. Hideous, isn't it? Bleak, barren, a Ray Bradbury dystopian purgatory. Now type 'Workington, Cumbria' into Google, and imagine no more. Welcome and bienvenue to Fifty Hades of Bibliocide.

Once, we had a bookshop... The Derwent Bookshop... jingly bell as you shouldered open the magnificent ivory and golden doorway (metaphorically speaking - council funds were strictly limited) to a haloed cornucopia of narrative dynamite. I found it as soothing as I did exciting. But then, anathemous infamy: it closed down. Nobody was reading. Either because technology swept through like a horde of rats scampering through intellectually stifled terrain and feasting on the incertitude or suspicion of all matter papyrical were it not for wrapping one's Friday piscine supper, or nobody actually read in the first place and it was a doomed enterprise from the start. I'm praying it's not the latter. Rather, books have been killed with Kindleness...

Puns aside, it is depressing. The only place one might purchase a book in Workington now is WHSmith and charity shops. The problem with charity shops is that it is highly improbable they stock the precise title for which one was searching (unless you really were looking high and low for a battered and suspiciously stained copy of E.L.James); and WHSmith is a pre-vendor of books: somewhere to browse whilst stocking up on biros and fluorescent sticky notelets, then finding the nearest true bookshop, parting with your tender there.

Thus in shameful want of an adequate biblionic market, Workington folk must hoof their way to nearby Cockermouth (no jokes, please; we've heard them all) or Whitehaven.

Cockermouth must be given a short paragraph of its own to gently, reverently, place victory laurels upon its Wordsworthian brow after a monumentally successful re-opening of their bookshop after the 2009 floods. The inundation of biblical magnitude gutted the property and left residents unable to order copies of Her Fearful Symmetry and whatnot. Now, after three and a half years, The New Bookshop has shown that God will have to send more than a Flood to dampen their reading habits.

Now to arguably the the best bookshop in the world, ever: Michael Moon's bookshop in Whitehaven. Lunatic in name and nature, it gives one the opportunity to navigate somewhat creatively (i.e. become lost) but it is also a bibliophile's Elysium of old, leathery tomes enshrined in bookcases; where there remains no more space on the bookshelves, on the top they go, spiralling towards the ceiling in precarious, yet precious arrangements. Drapes semi-conceal corridors beckoning with coquettish 'come-hither' glimpses of the treasures behind the bridal veil. Room upon room appear, each with its own alcoved jumble of subjects exhaling aromas of decades-old, centuries-old, tales, perfuming the air with their heady promises of ageless wonders. Stairs, chambers, steps, darkened passages stuffed with books, positively bloated with opera... I was completely enamoured from the moment I first set foot in this Arcadia. I was also in a state of pecuniary deficiency. It's rather like turning up to a school sports day without your trainers or going on a substantial car journey without a David Bowie CD - woefully underequipped and plain silly.

Had the cathedral-esque demand for tranquillity in such distinguished companies as Donne, Shakespeare, and Churchill not instilled in me the veneration they merit, I would have indulged in squeals of unmitigated joy. As it was, I contented myself by mentally staging a coup de librairie in a despotic attempt to rule the Moon. Hell hath no fury like a frustrated bibliophile...