Shortly after the Covid lockdown on bookshops was lifted, I saw a wonderful video in which a small boy who couldn’t have been more than four or five hurtled through the door of his local bookshop towards the children’s section, before stopping abruptly to gaze up at the shelves.
“They’re still here,” he said with breathy awe. “The books are all still here.”
I may have needed to wipe something from my eye after watching this and I definitely shared it with all my bookish friends because he echoed the relief we all felt as bookshops and the world began to re-open. It had been a long time coming.
I will always remember the pandemic as the darkest of times with the occasional sliver of light. Everything became fragile and uncertain, and in my bid to find reassurance, I turned as I often do, to words. I found myself beginning to read more non-fiction. There was something about this writing that I craved. I needed information, truth, a more concrete version of events while I sought to make sense of what was happening around me. For a while, I couldn’t concentrate on fiction. It felt too nebulous. I needed to be on my guard, armed with facts. I couldn’t afford to escape, not even for a moment.
I’ve talked to a lot of other people who went through similar reading patterns whilst others reread books they loved, seeking the reassurance of the familiar. I’ve also heard that a lot of people returned to the classics; to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontës. This was particularly interesting to me as it mirrored the research I was undertaking for my new book, set in a bookshop during the Second World War. I discovered that classic titles such as Pride and Prejudice and War and Peace became bestsellers during the 1930s and 40s whilst book sales rose sharply between 1939 and 1945 exactly as they did during the pandemic.
There’s something hugely heartening to me about this. The world of 2020 was as different to the world of 1939 as the earth is to the moon and yet, human behavior invariably follows the same pattern when times are dark, as we seek comfort, escape, and truth in whichever form we can find. Books offer all three elements and in turn, it’s the sharing of these stories which unites communities and offers that glimpse of light when it’s needed most.
The pandemic was a brutal time for high street bookshops and libraries, but readers evolved as they realised how much they missed and valued these outlets. They supported their local shops by ordering via the internet or used the online library borrowing services (Libby became my best friend for listening to library-borrowed audio books on my daily hour-long rambles). Consequently, there has emerged a fiercely loyal bookshop and library-supporting faithful and a stronger than ever independent bookselling scene which isn’t so much a sliver of light in the darkness but a bright, beaming ray of sunshine.
Happily for me, my fiction-reading habits returned as the world began to blink its way out of the pandemic. I had a quiet weep on the day I went for my first Coronavirus jab, grateful to the medical staff who were giving me this potentially life-saving injection whilst desperately sad for those, including my dad, who had died as a result of the pandemic. My dad was a huge book lover who bought his own library’s worth of books during his lifetime, many of which are now treasures on my own bookshelves. He was a man who understood the power of books and learning, having received no formal education as a child. Consequently, he drank it all up in adulthood so that his shelves were filled with first editions of Thomas Hardy poetry mingled with books on architecture, literature, art, music, thrillers and later on, copies of my books. It felt like a small tribute to him as I walked from the vaccination clinic to a nearby bookshop and spent an eye-watering amount on a wonderfully-large pile of new books. As I plucked beautiful book after beautiful book from the shelves, I thought again of that little boy in the video. The books were indeed still here. This was a theme I carried into my writing of The Air Raid Book Club because I truly believe that if you have stories and people with which to share them, everything will be all right.
Other less heartening and distinctly darker patterns in the history of books and reading have re-emerged in more recent times. I don’t think I’m overstating it when I hear about the banning of books in schools and libraries in certain states in the US and am immediately reminded of the Nazi book bans and subsequent burnings of the 1930s. For children and young people to have their reading experience censored in such a way is downright dangerous. The world is vast, populated by billions of different people. That’s what makes life interesting. As humans we are meant to interact, to communicate, to co-exist, and for that we need an understanding of everyone’s stories. It’s what gives us purpose. Ignorance is definitely not bliss. I learnt this from my dad and I’ve taught this to my own children.
A fear of books, of words, of ideas and truths only emphasizes the power they have. In the days following the stabbing of the author Salman Rushdie last year, The Satanic Verses flew off the shelves of bookshops all over the world. And as book bans spread across the U.S., the groundswell of parents, librarians, and teachers defending the rights of young readers to books that offer comfort, escape, and truth (yes, those old chestnuts) is growing.
Books are powerful. Books are magic. They endure pandemics, book bans, and fear. They offer comfort, knowledge, and joy. We should defend and cherish them with all our might and make sure, for the sake of that little boy in awe of his local bookshop and the thousands of readers like him, that the books are all still here.
If you enjoy books about books and the power of stories, you may like to know that The Air Raid Book Club is out now in paperback from all wonderful bookselling establishments.
This essay first appeared in thenerddaily.com in July 2023
Annie Lyons 