The non-book book

The TLS has this as its lead image on its website, referring to-of course-a very serious book about porn. Is the book industry just a version of porn anyway?

Alice Spawls has a really interesting blog on non-books. She writes,

"Gifts now seem to take up as much space as books, at least on the tables, where the prettiest paperbacks are distributed among Orla Kiely pots and enamel cups...

Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-bookproducts too, word-based diversions, colour-me distractions, bucket lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn't make a book, and putting them on shelves doesn't make a bookshop." 

At which point you felt like saying, thank God, the cavalry..

~

Over here in the land of the pure you come across so many books by charlatans like Osho or Deepak Chopra; then there's the cheap copies of Dan Brown and Coelho, thousands and thousands of these non-books, rotting next to old copies of GQ and Moshin Hamid (or, more accurately, his books-if that makes any difference). Everything's, ultimately, a spin-off (retro, repackaged, rebooted).

When did it start though? The 1960's and the stream of mumbo-jumbo emanating from the freer, looser, hip, hypnotic rambling-stream-of-consciousness-I-can't-be-bothered-with-structure or even with ending this sentence, like, properly, man? The mystical east and Zen life strategies, sold to you as the gen-u-ine article by some second-hand Texan salesman? A thousand years of wisdom condensed for you in the gleaming smile of a Californian trickster or in a pocket book of cartoons. Or does it go back further..the stuttering century, the ranters, the marginal man emerging from the underground, stumbling in the light streaming down onto him, those drop-outs and losers who would speak in tongues to the men in pointy hats as respectable people looked away aghast?

"In which anyone is up for anything and everyone's desires are compatible with everybody else's."

Is that a description of pornutopia or the free market? 

~

And Alice Spawls has another piece which refers to a place that I am very familiar with, having walked there and thereabouts at least a million times:

Hammershoi, whose wonderful paintings-this is not one of them- you were lucky enough to see (two days in a row, the second time borrowing the swami's ticket) at the Royal Academy. The only other artist for whom I've done that is Rothko (at the Tate), though I paid both times on that occasion.