These aren't actually books ... Dangerous Books for Boys 'kits'


Cute signs that books are becoming nostalgic curiosities

How else can you explain the growing vogue for camp reproductions and pastiches of 'period' titles?

Toby Litt's first novel, Beatniks, features a number of characters attempting to live as if it were still the early 1960s, with the aid of period books and maps borrowed from their local library. It's a nice idea, but that last detail always struck me as a flaw. What local library still has 1950s road maps? Mine, I am fairly sure, would have flogged them off for about threepence each around the time of the oil shock; that would certainly have been the sensible thing for it to do.

Real retro-bohemians would surely spend much of their time rummaging in the bargain bins of secondhand bookshops. Now, however, there is an alternative. If, say, the beatniks made a trip to London, they could call in at Foyle's – attempting to ignore the ahistorically sensible payment system – and pick up a "pre-1960" Ward Lock Red Guide to the city, to be matched with a gold-boxed "historical edition" A-to-Z. (They would have to ignore the extract of the old map at the AZ company's website, but that's no reason for you to do so.)

Reprints are of course nothing new – on the shelf in front of me as I write there is a 40-year-old book along the same lines, a 1970 edition of an 1876 Handbook to the Environs of London. But these new ones are not so much reprints as reproductions. They come with elaborately old-fashioned bindings and, in the case of the historical A-to-Z, authentically fragile-feeling fold-out sections. They enter a market full of fresh, carefully styled creations summoned from an imagined past – The Dangerous Book for Boys and its many imitators; selections of 11-plus exam questions and period mnemonics; the series of Instructions to Servicemen leaflets gathered by the Bodleian Library; those fake 1970s children's annuals painstakingly edited to maximise the camp quotient.

Perhaps it all has something to do with the shortage of real secondhand bookshops. Few if any of the items I've mentioned would leave you much change from a tenner; for a less glamorous but genuinely old version, with a bit of wear, you could in many cases get change from a quid. These are items that sell on feel – hence all the attention to cute bindings – and impulse, so the online secondhand market isn't exactly a substitute.

Or perhaps, to be more ambitiously pretentious, this is what the death of the book looks like. As the hunger for text finds ever more of its satisfaction online or through e-readers, bookshops and traditional publishers are left to rely on the charm of the physical object; to make their books increasingly bookish. And most bookish charm, I'm afraid, is nostalgic. I have seen the future, and it consists of increasingly polished caricatures of the past.



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