Review: The Face Pressed Against the Window: A Memoir, by Tim Waterstone

Atlantic Books: £17.99

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

TIM Waterstone, the founder of the bookselling chain which still bears his name, is not a modest fellow. Nor is he afflicted with that most British of diseases, irony. But that he was instrumental in bringing about a revolution in bookselling cannot be disputed. Before he arrived on the scene in the early 1980s, the booktrade, and bookselling in particular, was beset by snobbery, complacency and the notion that customers were generally a nuisance.

Bookshops, meanwhile, were rather less welcoming than a dentist’s surgery, their staff either fierce or odd or insufferably superior. On crossing their threshold, you needed to keep your wits about you.

Waterstone’s mission was to drag bookselling out of the fusty 19th century into the glossy 20th. His first shop opened in London in 1982. By 1992, when he was 53, he had opened 85 more. The hosannas were universal and in his memoir he doesn’t attempt to mute them, quoting at length from sycophantic articles in newspapers and reprinting the sepia-tinted testimonies of former staff.

Before the advent of Waterstone’s, according the Independent: “In most cities outside London you couldn’t find philosophy or art or science, because if it didn’t sell by the dump-bin, it wasn’t stocked. Such classics as there were, invariably dusty Penguins, were consigned to a dark outpost beyond Cookery.”

Goodness knows where the writer of this tripe was talking about. Not Edinburgh, certainly, or Glasgow, or Aberdeen, or even Dumfries where Blacklock and Farries could be relied on to feed the habit of the intellectually curious.

What Waterstone’s did do, however, was shake up bookselling. Shops were staffed with bright, young and, by and large, quite well-read people and stayed open during evenings and at weekends. The stock, moreover, was insistently literary and eschewed much of the cannon-fodder to be found in outlets of WH Smith’s and, it must be said, in Waterstones – it’s renounced the apostrophe – branches today.

A major attraction were the readings given by authors of real heft. I well recall the November evening of apocalyptic weather in Edinburgh in 1988 when Salman Rushdie read rather tremulously from The Satanic Verses. Little did his audience know that only hours earlier the novel had been banned by the Pakistan government. That, in a sense, was the day literature died for ever since writers have had to consider who their work might upset rather than who they would like it to offend.

The Face Pressed Against the Window is not all about books and bookselling. It is billed as a memoir and in that category it is interesting if not entirely compelling. Waterstone, who was born in Glasgow, was brought up in Sussex. He was, he recalls, “the marginally emotionally battered child of a marginally battered lower-middle-class ex-colonial family”.

His were not touchy-feely parents. At war’s end, his mother accompanied his father to India to where his employer, a tea garden agency, had dispatched him. Consequently, Waterstone, aged six, was “dumped” in a dreadful prep school which “was actually a near brothel of sexual abuse”.

Waterstone himself was abused by the headmaster – one of whose habits was to insert a thermometer in boys’ bottoms as a pretext for taking their temperature – but reckons he got off lightly. At least one other boy, he relates, was so traumatised by what had happened to him that in adulthood he killed himself.

Bookish, he always dreamed of opening his own bookshop and got the opportunity when he was fired by WH Smith in 1981. He bought a dormant company off the shelf, renamed it Waterstone’s and threw every penny he could find into it.

Amidst the mutual backslapping and score settling, of which there is an uncommon amount, our hero wheels and deals and changes the face of the high street down which tumbleweed now blows.

Waterstones continues to expand – it has nearly 300 shops – though its founder is no longer involved in it. In 1993, he sold the company of which he was so proud to WH Smith, who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Its current owner is a hedge fund.