Beware the siren song of the 'free book'
This three-for-the-price-of-two business in bookshops is really getting out of hand now.
I went out in my lunch hour at the beginning of last week and popped into a bookshop to look for a travel guide for the far north of Scotland – to fuel my dreams of visiting high latitudes. No travel guide, no lunch and slightly more than one hour later I arrived breathlessly back at the office with three special-offer books, two magazines, a packet of premium liquid-ink pens, two packets of writing paper and a small red bear subsequently named Ridley. The three-for-two that had snared me here was Books Etc on High Holborn, and I had to run the gauntlet of another one in the nearby WH Smith while buying the paper, the pens, the magazines and the bear. Get anything as sensible as a travel guide in Smiths? Are you joking? Have you been in there recently?
Today, I got absolutely caned in the Charing Cross Waterstones (the three-for-two being endemic in UK bookshops regardless of proprietor). I had no intention of buying books. I was killing time before going to an art exhibition, for goodness' sake, so carrying bags full of heavy and unnecessary purchases was not really on my agenda. However, never one to do things by halves, I came away with my three books plus another book (a fat and heavy thriller) plus a copy of Granta's film edition intended for Mr Random.
The problem is that they always put these damned three-for-two stickers on books that you had intended to buy anyway, so it appears to represent a genuine opportunity to get a free book – the reason it works, I guess, is that it seriously ups the impulse-purchase rate. A slightly earlier post than this one features an article from the New York Times putting forward the argument that reading in itself has become an uncritically worthy and rather complacent pastime – virtuous in its own right regardless of the text involved.
In the same vein, I would suggest that bookshops will find us gullible bibliophiles an easy target as long as we can tell ourselves – “Impulse spending on books is has a moral worth that other impulse spending does not.” Yes, but that's not true, is it? And then there is the other thing I must now come to terms with – where to put the buggers once you get them home. Remember, there's two people of a bibliophilic temperament in this one small flat, and we are in serious debit bookshelf space-wise.
Astrofiammante's Latest Impulse Purchase List:
- The Full Cupboard of Life – Alexander McCall Smith
- A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
- Mountains of the mind – a history of a fascination – Robert MacFarlane
- Vernon God Little – DBC Pierre
- The Accusers – Lindsey Davis
- Wish You Were Here – the official biography of Douglas Adams – Nick Webb
- Enigma – Robert Harris