My Back Pages.

This weekend, I will be leaving my current residence in Tooting for good and moving east across South London, to New Cross.

Although I’ve always liked the South East, and look forward to finding it a lot more lively and generally conducive to my way of thinking than my current suburbanised locale, one of the things I will miss most about life on the bottom end of the Northern Line is being able to walk across the common of an uneventful weekend afternoon to visit ‘My Back Pages’, opposite Balham station, one of my favourite bookshops in the city.

Now, I’m not the biggest Dylan fan in the world (I’m not the smallest either, but… that’s a subject for another blog), but I've got to admit, a bookshop named after one of his songs bodes well. It certainly suggests that, a) it’s unlikely to be some crusty, collector-centric antiquarian hang-out, and b) it’s liable to be an establishment with a certain amount of character, run by someone with at least a passing interest in the pointy end of 20th century culture. And indeed, this proves to be the case.

‘My Back Pages’ is about 75% second hand, with a fiction section stretching across several vast walls, divided (hell, why not?) by nation/continent with sections devoted to British, American, Irish, Russian, French, African, Hispanic, Asian etc. literature, each of them managing to largely avoid the tide of pastel-coloured middlebrow crap that has consumed most of London’s charity bookshops, instead offering a wide variety of books which, even if they’re not universally wonderful, are liable to be more than fifteen years old, of varied and interesting character, and, y’know, generally worth a look.

There are correspondingly big sections for history, politics, art, poetry, philosophy, media and, you know, all the other rubbish you may care to read about so as to gain knowledge and insight during your tenure on earth. They don’t have biggest crime or SF/fantasy sections you could hope for, but you can’t have everything, and there’s plenty of good stuff in that general vein scattered through ‘fiction’ anyway.

The ‘new books’ section of the shop is pretty good too, presumably reflecting the proprietor’s own tastes to some degree by mixing a selection of current bestsellers etc. with a heavy back catalogue of ‘cult’/beat authors, including some intriguing small press items, and some choice New Directions / City Lights paperbacks that I can only assume get taken down and dusted off every year or so before returning to the shelf and waiting for some random hipster dope like me to turn up and shell out for ‘em.

On my last visit, I believe I picked up a VHS copy of ‘Walkabout’ and a water-damaged book by Richard Hell off the bargains stall out front for 50p each, then headed inside to find ‘Over the Frontier’ by Stevie Smith, ‘Whitechapel, Scarlett Tracings’ by Iain Sinclair, Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, ‘Nightmare Movies’ by Kim Newman (long OOP, and essential reading for horror fans), Richard Williams’ book about Phil Spector, the abridged version of Gibbon’s ‘Decline & Fall..’ and one or two weird-looking pulp sci-fis – total bill: £25, and the Newman book alone was £11.

The shop briefly closed down about eighteen months back, and when it reopened I remember speaking to the owner, who said they’d just about scraped together enough dough to stay in business, and were hoping to keep on making their rent on a month by month basis, or somesuch. That was before the recession hit.

I realise Londoners who don’t live nearby may be hard-pressed to find any other reason to make the trip to Balham (you could, um, I dunno, walk across the common to Streatham Hill, and get the train to Battersea or Victoria? – it’s quite nice), but ‘My Back Pages’ is exactly the kind of shop I wish this city (or hell, this world) still had more of, and paying it a visit and throwing them some business could be well worth your while.