Things about Chiang Mai bookshops

Chiang Mai is a small city – around 200,000 people – and it was voted the fifth best city of its size in the world. I am a little dubious about city rankings but thought the figure worth recording. It seems that Chiang Mai does not fear running second as there is a pizza place in town which happily advertises the second best pizza in town. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one yet. Even though I haven’t undertaken comprehensive research on the matter, without hesitation, I award Chiang Mai first place as far as Availability of Second-Hand Books in English in a Non-English Speaking City (small-medium size).

Some things I have noticed:

* There are more second-hand copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra for sale in this town than there would be in O-Week at the Co-op at Sydney Uni if this were set as a first year philosophy text (and had been ordered on time).

* Many so-called off-the-beaten track travellers pass through Chiang Mai. This accounts for the Ethiopian and Kazakh phrase books. Excellent.

* Lots of Dickens for sale in Chiang Mai. In fact, I estimate that total Dickens outweighs Gaskell, Austen, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. OUTRAGEOUS!

* There are more copies of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than The Da Vinci Code for sale at Gecko Books. There are two ways of looking at this. The way I’d like to think it goes is that the travellers who come to Chiang Mai are a discerning bunch and bring with them Modernist Classics rather than Bilge to read. What I fear is the case is that second hand copies of The DVC just walk out the door whilst Joyce stays on the shelf.

* Philosophy and self help books are shelved together in some establishments.

* Marion Keyes made it into Modern Literature section of Gecko Books whilst Gore Vidal was shelved with General Fiction. On the other hand, Gore Vidal occupies a whole shelf in the Contemporary Literature section of the altogether excellent Backstreet Books.

* Inexplicably, the many, many copies of Anna Karenina and War and Peace on offer are not matched by Dostoyevksy’s Greatest Hits.

* Bertrand Russell occupies one fifth of the philosophy section in one establishment shop.

In spite of these oddities, Chiang Mai is a glorious pleasure-dome of book browsing. The books are super-cheap and a very odd variety of titles are available. If this were Glebe Point Road, the shelves would be picked through in a day, the Beats memorial displays would have been pillaged long ago, and the stores of highly collectible orange-cover Penguins and classic British crime ravaged.

What is particularly interesting to me, not to mention dangerous, is that all books in the same condition are roughly the same price. No distinction is made according to publisher, date of publication, or rarity. This dazzles my bibliographical sensibility. Wordsworth and Penguin classics are the same price and so are New Directions and Olympia Press and Bantam. A Black Sparrow Bukowski is equivalent to a Picador Tom Robbins. Long out of print and really hard to find Ursula LeGuin novels equal David Eddings or Brian Aldiss or someone lame like that. It’s crazy. The very simple lesson, that Books are Heavy, is one that I have almost internalised. When I moved house, this knowledge came closer to being wisdom, even though I didn’t move the boxes. Travelling with books in a bag that I, shock horror, have to carry, is really bringing the message home. Books are Heavy. For this reason, I’m not going to buy up big on stupidly priced second hand books in Chiang Mai and make my fortune by selling them off in London. No really, I am not going to buy a copy of Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices in perfect condition for two dollars and resell it for forty… I could, however, easily persuade myself to spend a week here, buy loads of underpriced books, post them on eBay and thus fund an even more decadent excursion through Indochina. Even though this is probably the best money making scheme i have ever concocted in my life, I'm going to let it pass me by. Instead of making my fortune by exploiting the benevolent pricing policies of the CM bookshops, I'm catching a bus to a town called Pai. By all accounts, my destination will provoke a state of terminal riverside relaxation and I may never leave.

Anyway, I’m still drowning in Gravity’s Rainbow and have The Magic Mountain on the side to reread and thereby elevate my being in time. Most of the bookshops here will buy books back without too hefty a markdown so I have shuffled through a number which have lightened my senses somewhat. Thus far, inter alia:

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses – to assuage my uneasiness at not having read it years ago, an egregiousness, I understand, for one interested in the American Novel in the Twentieth Century and the Western;

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick – in the hope that this one will convince me about Updike’s standing in Contemporary Letters;

P.D. James, The Children of Men – as counterpoint to the film, as follow-up to the Dagliesh mysteries. Now that I’ve read it, I want someone who has seen the film to read the book so that we can have a long earnest conversation comparing the two. Anyone?;

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven – in the hope that this might touch some of the heights of The Dispossessed;

P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves – What ho! ‘I began to realise that my ideal wife was something quite different, something a lot more clinging and drooping and prattling, and what not.’ Enough said;

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground – Hypothesis: The more Ripley, the better. Results: Confirmed.

I’m going to sally around the north of Thailand for the next week and will return to CM to exchange some ballast on the way to Laos. As I have mentally designated Laos a zone of minimum activity, I will need many books. Notwithstanding a mood change, my current intention is to plough through the last four volumes of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles (and thus notch a reading feat that no-one of my acquaintance under fifty has on their belt, and leaving only twenty-odd doorstops by the nineteenth century’s grumpiest novelist to go, not to mention the collected works of Balzac) and finally to acquaint myself with the works of Richard Ford. Riveting stuff, I know.