The long day of the short paragraph

Do not steal this book. You will be sued.

Every book lover is a bibliokleptomane. It’s been said of pastoralists in East Africa that they regard all cattle in the world as theirs; book-lovers, likewise, think that when it comes to the object of their affection the ordinary rules of property are waived. It’s a love that knows no laws; possession is what counts. And if it’s not the book itself that is purloined, then it’s words and phrases taken from it: borrowed, redeployed, frequently unacknowledged. Can you say there is no stolen property on your shelves? No overdue library book? No yet-unread paperback you were loaned years ago and never returned? Books are like livestock, like umbrellas, like pencils and pens, like socks in a launderette. They stray.

That’s if they don’t get nicked by Richard Rayner. The former assistant editor at Granta describes, in The Blue Suit, a career as a book thief that dwarves the peccadillos of the common-or-garden print fetishist. It took him from Heffer’s in Cambridge to the antiquarian bookstores of Los Angeles, via a bit of breaking-and-entering in Yorkshire and Islington, making The Blue Suit a book that contains, by implication, instructions for its own abduction.

And here I am in Waterstones bookshop in Kensington High Street, in London, poring over the shoplifting tips in The Blue Suit, wondering whether I’m prepared to pay a tenner to be told how I could walk off with it for nothing. Also whether, if I stole a copy and was apprehended, it could be a defence in court to show that I had been following instructions provided by the book itself (and if I might then, perhaps, write a sequel, the story of my trial – and acquittal – and call it The Blue Lawsuit). At this point I have a flash-back to another bookshop, and a different place and time.

Flashback to the 1970s

It’s the 1970s. I’m in Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California, looking at one of The Blue Suit’s precursors, a radical tract by the yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman called Steal This Book. It’s the year of the second Human Be-In (or is it the third?) – a summer or so after the Summer of Love. I’m a teenager, staying in Berkeley at the house of the eponymous Fred Cody, celebrated Bay area radical and friend of my glamorous Uncle Tony.

Along with many other booksellers in the United States Fred Cody refused to stock Steal This Book. That was until Abbie Hoffman came and explained to him, in person, in the hippest possible way, that he, Cody, the famous radical bookseller, was behaving like the neo-Nazi robber barons who controlled Amerikkka, so that when the revolution came his store might just – you know – burn, baby, burn. Cody, radical but conciliatory – in this instance – caved, and took half-a-dozen copies. These, he told me, were shoplifted within the hour by people who took the title at its word. I may have been the only person in the Bay Area who actually bought one. I still have it. Beneath the title, in a fit of teenage machismo, out of kilter with the spirit of the time, I wrote the following, If You Do, You Will be Killed.

There’s no specific advice for book thieves in Steal This Book, nor for aspirant writers. It includes now largely outdated tips for jamming cash machines and – in the phrase of the day – ‘liberating’ goods from shops and supermarkets. In a chapter called ‘People’s Chemistry’, there’s an easy-to-follow guide to making Molotov cocktails using wicks made of Tampax. The book is dedicated to a range of heroes of the US left, including the Viet Cong, the Weathermen and Malcolm X. Predictably enough, there was some difficulty getting it published. ‘Everyone agreed the book would be a commercial success,’ wrote Hoffman in his preface, ‘but even greed had its limits.’

Steal This Book was turned down by dozens of publishing houses before it finally appeared as a tatty, yellow-edged paperback with a bright red cover under a hastily invented imprint, Pirate Press. Richard Rayner has had no such problems. The Blue Suit appears, with an elegantly understated jacket in a tasteful shade of blue-grey, from Picador, an eminently respectable publishing house. The colophon page includes the following advisory:

The silence hums

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission . . . Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

So we’ve been warned: don’t touch a single paragraph of Richard Rayner’s prose. Do not steal this book. Don’t step on his blue suit. If you do, you could be taken to the cleaners. This concern with intellectual property rights is a mite disconcerting in a yarn about thieving (the subtitle is ‘A Memoir of Crime’). Especially seeing that quite a few of the precious paragraphs in The Blue Suit – those we are so emphatically warned not to reproduce – are only three or four words long. Here’s a random selection, each in its entirety:

She thumped me.
I hung up.
It was my mother.
Chrissie lit up a Marlboro.
The silence hummed.

The silence hummed. Apart from this last dodgy oxymoron, all the phrases above – each one of them an entire paragraph – could have been sampled from any book since the invention of the telephone. And you read them here: reproduced, copied, transmitted. See if they sue. (They may sue you too, on the grounds that reading them other than in the book itself is also an infringement of copyright.)

Where does this short-paragraph technique come from, anyway? Abbie Hoffmann’s own style verged on the prolix, so it isn’t from him. It can only be from Granta, where the author of The Blue Suit worked as an editor in the magazine’s hey-day. That three-word trick is fresh out of Granta’s prose kitchen: sudden, short paragraphs deployed as narrative punctuation in the manner of hard-boiled detective fiction. The origin of the technique, appropriately enough, is American crime writing: Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, with a touch of Hemingway. It’s a style heist. Why stop at nicking books when you can appropriate an entire genre?

Buy this coat

In London the salesman in Waterstones wrinkled his nose when he saw me reading The Blue Suit.

‘We’ve lost half-a-dozen copies of that,’ he told me. ‘People steal books a lot. Especially in the summer.’

I remembered walking out of Cody’s store in San Francisco a quarter of a century back. It was the summer after the Summer of Love; I was en route to the Human Be-In, with a receipt for $2.95 tucked into my just-purchased copy of Steal This Book, feeling more self-conscious than if I’d shoplifted it. It was hot in Berkeley. The summer was humming. I hummed along. The summer hummed right back. (This sentence is copyright, by the way; you may not borrow or adapt it. If you do, you will be killed.)

As I made my way down Telegraph Avenue towards the Bay – humming all the way – I was accosted by a street hustler with an imposing afro, wearing beads and sandals and a T-shirt that spelled out the word L-O-V-E. He was trying to interest passers-by in a second-hand Afghan coat.

‘Give me twenty dollars for it,’ he said.

Striving to be hip, speaking Granta-style – one short paragraph at a time – I said:

‘It’s ninety in the shade, man . . .’

He gave me a look.

Cool as you like, I said: ‘Hey, man, I don’t have any bread.’

‘So,’ he said slowly, staring at me, ‘you spent all your bread on that book?’ I nodded.

‘Man,’ he said, turning away with lordly froideur, ‘I hope your ass freezes off in the wintertime.’

A chill fell on the sidewalk. The summer of love was over. The day of the short paragraph had passed. The time of long sentences was upon us. ★