In his magisterial account of the politics behind the greatest war in history, Donald Cameron Watt reflects on the devastated European landscape of 1945. He comments that “….to destroy buildings, paintings and sculptures…the work of craftsmen, carpenters, painters…and writers of ten centuries, conceived in joy and brought forth with … delight…was an act which made those creations as though they had never been and impoverished all those who were to come.”
This, for us, is surely central to our love of books. The “realness” of books is what we sell; the spines on our shelves that tell people who we are; the smell of bindings, old and new; notes in marginalia that reflect conversations with ourselves as surely as with authors living and dead –all of this is the heady mix that ensures that books bind us together and keep us apart. All the technology in the world cannot enable one person to speak to many, in private and in silence. We are given dignity by the book in our hand. Whoever we are: poor or rich, black or white, complete in love or desperate for touch and solace, well or dying – the book gives us comfort, it provides a parallel world in which we are, for the time that we hold it and it holds us, the equal of the author, his confidant and foil.
In the same way that seeing old pictures of the reliquary of St Gertrude of Nivelles, or medieval Danzig, or the lost and dismantled amber room in the Catherine palace, does not replace knowing them, wandering their places and seeing their reality, so it is true that the electronic imaging of books, both new and old, in the most profound sense, subverts our culture and cripples our imagination.
“File save” is not a place.
In reality it is a binary repository for storing data. Books are not data. They live and breathe once we have touched them; and when we consign them to place, to physical space they touch our lives because they are conversations writ-large and ever present. They decorate our houses, they cross our paths, they call out to us time and time again.
Imagine, if you will, the slow movement of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto being played on a recorder: it will shrivel and die.
Imagine, if you will, reading any of the books of Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli author whose family was ripped apart by the Nazis in 1940 (when he was eight) and who then wandered the Galician countryside (alone, forsaken, bereft and invisible) until almost the end of the war. Imagine these works of memory, half-real, half-fiction, all art – and then tell me that the book in your hand, the one that occupies space in your sorrowing heart and beside your bed or on a shelf, tell me that book is no more significant a player in this theatre we all call life than a tablet or smart phone.
We are summoned by all books to a moveable feast. It was this reason, primus inter pares, that drew my shareholders, my directors and i, to the transaction that we celebrate tonight. All the while, during the long, arduous months of due diligence, we were told that the book represented an old technology, that sales of the physical were in decline (which they were), that the digital world offered immediacy, mobility, pricing benefits, convenience, storage, technical conversion and text-interaction: all true.
We were told that linear modes of absorbing information were outdated, that the book no longer appealed to a digital generation, that mobility and choice of platform supplanted place: we differed. We were confident that we could rise to the challenges and revive a business cruelly treated. We took charge of the economics of this business on 1 December 2013. From then until now exclusive’s trading reflects our certitude, as most of you here will know, you who are our suppliers (but first our partners). Sales have stabilised and are improving.
For me, personally, Exclusive Books has been a homecoming. However, I have only been able to treat it as familiar because my shareholders and our staff have been so extraordinarily supportive about the vision and the business.
Halting the slide, fixing systems, motivating staff, curating stock, allocating resources and optimising the balance sheet; all these and a myriad other inputs make up the weft of any business. And there are none better at understanding these interstices than our chief financial officer (who doubles as a cherished friend) and my co- shareholders.
But if you, South Africa’s publishers, are to prosper; if you are to grow your businesses, find new markets, improve efficiencies, invent, design and reimagine publishing – and if you are going to have the necessary confidence to make the investment in personnel and capital to do these things, then the gorilla in the cage, exclusive books, needs to fold you in its warm embrace and whisper tenderly in your ear.
But we are not an echo of the old refrain: seduction is for sissies, the he-man likes his rape. You must endorse our journey and travel the road because you are seduced by the vision – not held hostage by it. You should be smitten in love and believe in the idea that we can sew books so seamlessly into the fabric of South Africa’s thinking life, that our customers will buy books for their children and themselves as naturally as they might purchase a cinema ticket or a double brandy and coke.
And what is the vision? Let me start by drawing your attention to the books you found, wrapped I hope, at your place settings at the start of this meal. Each of the books is a stock item in our stores – and I am pleased that we did not have to ask any publisher to supplement the list – a list that has been dormant and mouldering in the further recesses of my mind, added to in increments as each year more books insidiously invade my memory. Each book before you has been read by me and has been matched to each of you. The list is not academic; nor does it stand out as the mark of someone with any particular intellectual aspiration. It is likely no different to what each one of you may have chosen – in its breadth of interests and its eclecticism.
But it is a reflection of how far Exclusive must travel still, that my initial list of fifty books could not be satisfied entirely from store inventory. Nor could my second list. Third time was lucky.
So beginneth the vision: that a middle-brow diverse list such as the one represented here (thrillers, fiction, classics, short stories, science, history, biography) can be met at least 70% by any of our stores. We have a long way to go. And the vision then unfolds itself because it requires people; it requires staff who can shepherd these lists and shape them to the communities they serve; human beings who can master systems that optimise delivery; and, above all, publishers and businesses who understand the arcane processes of the systems that, to borrow from Whitman, are the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. And hidden in this wish-list is the one defining element of customer service and quality of retail experience – training.
From the moment I arrived at Exclusive Books I have been told that we should reduce the space we give to mass-market paperback fiction and allocate it elsewhere. If we do, we will surely confront a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, further, I want again to increase the space. And if we cannot increase space then we must curate smarter or find larger sites.
Why?
Certainly it is not to compete with the ebook and its predations. These titles will never again contribute to our business as once they did. But what of that wonderful treasury that all of you hide away in your backlists? Why are those books not on our shelves? We share the blame equally: when did you last suggest, and when did we last propose, that we take Tom Sharpe’s two magnificent comedic novels about South Africa or Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin or Somerset Maugham’s short stories or the wild, rumbustious, almost uncontrolled, writing of Thomas Wolf (not Tom Wolfe). I can go on but you get my drift: this vision is a clarion call to range. It beckons change and asks you all to be change agents.
Our staff need to know, far better, your backlists and their DNA. In turn, we ask you to help us.
And how do we make ourselves relevant to a new South African middle-class; a growing, substantial and influential population who never grew up with books? We compete with other diversions, easier to absorb and more immediate. This new demographic is aspirant, ambitious and capable – and at exclusive we learn from them everyday. They are equally concerned by a public education system that threatens at any moment to fall apart. They are as heavily invested in their children’s future as we are. They understand the need to master and absorb information from an early age. We need to make the bookshop accessible; a place that welcomes not repels.
When JK Rowling gave the commencement speech at Harvard in June 2008 she titled it: the fringe benefits of poverty and the power of the imagination. In our own stores a changing demographic is unafraid to spend money on children. However, their focus is on information. We, on the contrary, need to do show our faith in the imagination – because it is the imagination that drives invention and innovation, not the ability to assemble or manipulate data. Earlier this year in all our stores we ran simultaneous public readings of stories (some of you here most graciously gave your time). We have to do this regularly so that we build adherents and remove the austerity and unfamiliarity that bookshops may present to some of our customers.
And what of our shops? If all we provide is staff to take your money then the customer can just as easily stay at home, click away and buy cheaper. We need to turn the store into theatre, to make it an invisible and visible place of interest, our spaces must extend the shopper. We have to compete for your rand – and the competition is daily tougher and more aggressive. We have heeded the call; and new and refurbished stores will reflect a new energy. We are also in the early stages of discussion with one of the national landlords to almost double the footprint of a flagship store to create a retail presence that will address customers in a new vernacular.
The presence of Phil Howard here tonight is not happenstance or spend for vanity or mad indulgence. His brilliance aside, and none of you will gainsay his stellar status after this wonderful meal, Phil’s craft is a proxy for what we want from our bookshops: a magnificent arrangement of different skills through the faultless management of a creative team to provide the customer with nourishment and comfort: a comfort that ultimately comes from the cultural matrix that sustains us all. In other words, at worst great bookshops have to understand your interests – and at best they should do so before you do.
We are focused on all the standard measures that you would expect from the grey hair assembled around our boardroom table. Some of these measures are more immediate than others. We move into a new head office at the end of June; we are evaluating a total overhaul of computer systems. We are building our brand and re-imagining our stores in a myriad of ways. We will develop online, we will create new channels of distribution, we want to take control of our coffee offering wherever we can, and much else beside.
You rightly expect nothing less from us. But tonight is not about providing you with minutiae about how the enterprise will be fixed. It is rather for us to tell you, and our magnificent staff, about the destination.
I hope that you feel in some measure that we have done so.
In the words of an old Johnny Cash song: I can see clearly now.
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