Moving my lips as I read

I was sitting in the garden. I had my feet up and a beer in one hand and an electronic book in the other so I was reading and drinking or drinking and reading. Maggie pounded past every now and then following that couch to five kilometres programme. One of the cats looked on.

I like books as things. I always think of bookshops as being precise; very neat. They often have a lovely smell too. Fan the pages as you sniff or just breathe deeply as you browse. Nowadays Spanish bookshops are much like British ones - easy access shelves and an impossible range of classifications which only make sense to the person who chose the labelling system. I mean is Philip K. Dick's Rick Deckard in a detective or a sci-fi novel? Not so long ago Spanish bookshops used to be much more difficult, much darker, very Dickensian, musty even. They had men with pince-nez behind wooden counters acting as gatekeepers to the shelves piled high with books at their backs. Old style Spanish bookshops had almost no recognisable organisation and if you were after something specific you couldn't browse - you had to ask. That scared me to death - speaking Spanish. Besides, when you asked you were committed. Do you have Blahdy blah by whatchamacallher? and you were on the road to an order and a two week wait to get the book that could cost a surprising amount of money. Some dozen or so years ago a recommendation for Antonio Gala's, Cosas nuestras set me back 45€ in paperback.

Nowadays I tend to read on a Kindle because, if I'm reading in Spanish, I can use the inbuilt dictionary to look up any key words I don't know. It was Kindle that confirmed me as a staunch Amazon customer. They have nearly everything and they deliver faster than you can drive to the shop. Spanish books are expensive, they have a controlled retail price with discounting only allowed to, I think, 5% of publishers recommended price so the price isn't that important because the market is artificially controlled. I sometimes use other online suppliers, especially for out of print books, but because I'm an Amazon customer it's dead easy to order a book within seconds of reading a review or hearing a recommendation. As the seconds become minutes, if the book exists in electronic form, it's yours. Real paper books come tomorrow or maybe the day after. I know about Amazon and taxes but I know that you too are happy to avoid taxes when you can and there is a chasm between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

I buy only novels from Amazon. I still buy books with pictures from bookshops or sometimes online. The last paper book I bought, because I expected it to have pictures, was about some of the plants featured in the paintings in the Prado museum. I made the mistake of ordering it from a shop in Pinoso. It was a lovely book and I enjoyed it a lot but it cost me 22€ for a paperback and, more annoyingly, it took 5 weeks, yes 5 weeks, to arrive.

With Spain being closed the bookshops are closed too. The independent stores are in danger of going under. I listen to a couple of radio programmes that have a cultural bent and both of them seem to be mounting a campaign in defence of bookshops. I don't quite understand why. Retail is a cut-throat business. Grocer's shops, cobblers, clothes shops, horse crop retailers, in fact all independent shops, were overwhelmed by big stores. Nowadays those physical shops are increasingly under pressure from online retailers. Why is there such a feral defence of bookshops when there wasn't for ironmongers or record shops? Is it a class thing?