Inspiring Older Readers
The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted by Mark Forsyth
I must confess that I take it as axiomatic that I'm likely to disagree with anything Donald Rumsfeld has to say. The two times Secretary of Defence in the administrations of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush stands for almost everything that, politically, I can’t abide. Having said that, and with a record in office that should make one of Satan’s minor devils blush, I’ve never been able to quite understand why he’s often castigated most in public discourse for a rumination on political uncertainty that got him the Foot In Mouth Award in 2003 from the Plain English Society.
Here is the nub of what he said:
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”
I don’t know about anyone else but to me this is perfectly logical and makes entire sense – and I hate him for making me agree with him over something. And I’m not alone here because Mark Forsyth’s little essay, The Unknown Unknown, published by Icon Books back in 2014, takes Rumsfeld’s musings as it’s starting point and builds on it as evidence of the need for physical, high street bookshops in the age of the internet on-line shopping boom.
In essence what Forsyth is arguing for here is the creative power of serendipity:
“If you know you want something, the internet can get it for you. My point, and the whole point of this essay, is that it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are things you never knew you wanted until you got them…The internet takes your desires and spits them back out at you, consummated….The unknown unknown must be found otherwhere.”
But Forsyth goes further than just calling for the continued existence of the bookshop – what he wants to see flourish is something he calls ‘The Good Bookshop’ – one which is knowingly curated to provide him with an unexpected delight:
“It is a room (or two) where the unknown unknowns of the world are laid out on tables and stacked on shelves. It is a room (or two) where you can find what you never knew you wanted, where your desires can be perpetually expanded.”
And if you want the message of this essay summed-up in a paragraph, it’s probably this one:
“The ideal trip to the bookshop, the perfect, perfect, can-never-exist-in this-world visit to a bookshop works like this. I find the shop down a narrow street in a town I have never visited before. I go in, and there is only one book. Just one. It is laid out on a table in a plain cover. I cannot even see the title. I buy it, and it tells me the secret of the universe.”
Unnervingly enough, I have also had the dream of the perfect bookshop visit except in mine (and I’ve had it many times) the shop is filled with all the books I’d love to own – and lots of them are books I’ve never heard of. The prices are ridiculous and give-away and I spend time luxuriating in the shop that only I will find.
I’m kind of hoping that that’s where I will go when I die.
In the meantime, I continue to trawl second hand bookshops, independent bookshops, charity bookshops, junk shops, flea fairs and just about anywhere else that might harbour books because of the unknown unknowns - all those books I can't know I want because I don't know they even exist. I suspect Donald Rumfeld didn't anticipate his words being used as a perfectly logical and rational reason for why bookshops should continue to flourish - he was I suspect more interested in defence spending - but I dread the time coming when you will only be able to shop for books online. The only chink of light in that for me is that I'll probably not live long enough to see that terrible day.
Terry Potter
July 2018