Why This Is Hell

Hastings.

Armed with print outs from Yell of bookshops and secondhand bookshops, I wandered down though the drizzle surrounding the station towards the sea. I noticed a charity shop near Woolies, but diverted first to Priory Meadow for a W.H. Smiths in hopes of a copy of the Daily Hatemail which might contain the DVD of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Mail yes, DVD no. It did enable me to find a tourist information office to help me locate Tamarisk Steps.

Queen's Road is host to an array of charity shops, and the Paperback Reader, which was claimed in my search to be new books, but was the pile em horizontal by genre shop. Nothing leapt out, and it was a grim haul from the charity shops - perhaps the dullest Oxfam bookshop I've seen. The YMCA has gone.

Back to Woolies and a couple of shops around there, then through the subway and along the front in search of Tamarisk Steps. A pause for a late lunch at the Blue Dolphin - a chippie recommended by a cab driver in C - and then to the steps. I imagine Chthonios Books to have a Lovecraftian connection, or even (local boy) Crowley, but it has eldritched itself into another dimension - there is no sign of even a door that might lead onto a bookshop. Perhaps it was really in what looked like a fishmarket. (Good guess?. Mail order only?) At the top of the steps I found Tackleway, where 9 should be Antony but again I suspect mail-order as it's a house.

I cut through various passages - coming across a new Robert Ludlum/Matt Damon trilogy of The Bourne Passage, The Bourne Busstop and The Bourne Florist - on my way to High Street. This is home, appropriately enough, to High Street Book Shop. Or has been at some point in the past. Sigh. There are a couple of junkshops, which are too scary to browse too closely.

I'm running out of patience by now, as I turn right on George Street and find Butler's World Famous Emporium. Ho hum. Pause for photo-op. There, ahead, is Boulevard Books and Albion Books, the latter I suspect a branch of a chain in Kent who have a maddening shop in Broadstairs with so much stock you can't find anything (see here). Boulevard is a little disappointing, then I spot Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke, which I've been looking for in one of those if I spot it I'll buy it but I'm not going to google or look for it kind of ways, and chat to the owner. Before I move on out, I spot a copy of Pullman's How to Be Cool which I clearly need for the Inevitable Next (But One) Big Project. A fiver. Yeap, grab that.

I do a quick scoot around Albion, but nothing demands to be bought, and I'd rather catch the next train back to Ashford than spend another hour in the mizzle. I haven't even seen the sea, given the weather.

So back along to an ice cream kiosk (gotta have a 99) and up to the station, timing it about right for the train. There are a couple of booksellers I haven't tried - but seeing the luck so far this are likely houses or shut. And I ought to do the castle and museums and stuff. Next time.

Edit: Looks like I paid a little over the odds for the Legman, but not astronomically. Going rate for Vol 2 is about what I paid for the first - and ought to be Rationale of Dirtier Jokes judging by chapter headings - and there's a book on him by the author of Offensive Films: Towards an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif. I note Legman also wrote Oragenitalism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation (1940). H'mmm.