How the spirit of revolution lives on in radical bookshops
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Version 0 of 1. Portswood Road, a quiet suburban high street in the suburbs of Southampton, is not immediately conspicuous as a hive of revolutionary agitation. Nor is it necessarily the place where you expect a shop to be named after the Great October Socialist revolution that occurred in St Petersburg in 1917. You would certainly not expect such a place to have survived for 37 years. October Books, the city's strikingly long-lived leftist bookshop, is unusual in many respects. After nearly facing closure last month, it appealed to its customers and the city at large – with the support of Simon Letts, leader of Southampton's Labour council – and managed to obtain the £6,000 it needed to renew its lease. It is telling that a relatively small sum stood between it and closure, but it still shows a remarkable public affection. October Books will, for now at least, endure as one of the survivors of a peculiar and important institution: the radical bookshop. These places are about more than ethical consumerism. Places like October Books have always been important on the left, as it has always lacked much in the way of urban infrastructure, of permanent places to meet, organise and institutionalise thinking about alternatives – a lack which some tend to elevate into a virtue. They're not just places you buy books. Although here I should declare an interest. I was lucky enough to do my school work experience at October Books in 1997 at its earlier incarnation in Southampton's inner city, where it was founded in 1977 as a worker-owned co-op. Aside from the possibly questionable ethics in hiring unpaid labour, it was definitely educational. It could be a melancholic experience, reflecting the state of the left in general – clipping off the mastheads at the end of the week of all the unsold copies of Weekly Worker, International Communist Current and Lalkar, making odd smelling vegan drinks for the older members of the co-op, ringing up a number left by someone who'd ordered Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to tell them their book had arrived and finding that it had been ordered by a person now deceased. More often, though, it was intriguing – you got to see firsthand the workings of a collective that had existed (at that point) for 20 years, and how successful it actually was, without any sign of the customary vicious infighting. You could see how important it obviously was for a lot of people in the area, as the place was seldom empty. Moving to Portswood, presumably to be closer to the city's students, meant some changes. In order to survive, the bookshop has, shall we say, moved away a little from the norms of October – displays of Joanna Trollope would surely have been deeply controversial in 1977 – but it is still the only place to go in Southampton if you require a copy of Cineaste, Class Struggle, Freedom or Radical Philosophy. It also serves as a connecting point of the city's networks of anarchists and environmentalists as much as socialists, and has remained doggedly non-party, beholden to no sect – a rare thing on the far left, which explains much about its longevity. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why October Books has lasted so long. The umbrella Federation of Radical Booksellers collapsed some years ago, though a smaller Alliance of Radical Booksellers was set up recently to reconstitute it. London still has several which have held out against the endlessly rising rents – the SWP's Bookmarks, Gay's the Word in Bloomsbury, the pacifist Housmans, and the anarchist Freedom Books. The latter two have been around for even longer than October Books, since the 1940s and 1880s, respectively. Last February, Freedom survived not the first of attempts to hound it out, after it was firebombed, most likely by far-right activists. Outside the capital, Glasgow has Calton Books, Five Leaves in Nottingham, or News from Nowhere in Liverpool function well and there are a few others. Occasionally, new ones even open, such as Hydra Books in Bristol. The sheer longevity of the survivors might suggest that these are antiquarian places, museums of a dead politics. Yet as the public aid of October Books proves, they can still be living institutions, moles carrying on their work in even the seemingly sleepiest of cities. |