John Sutherland on the books for sale in cinemas, cafés and designer boutiques

In 1935, two young publishers, one American, one English, hit on the same brilliant idea. Why not sell next-to-new books, in soft covers, at near-giveaway prices, and call them “paperbacks”?

Allen Lane came up with Penguins, at 6d (2.5p) a go. Robert de Graff came up with Pocket Books, at a quarter. But great minds did not think quite alike. Penguins were paperbacks that sold like hardbacks, alongside their expensive shop-mates. De Graff, by contrast, sought new, non-book outlets: news-stands, drugstores, department stores. Whereas Penguin went chastely typographic in its covers, Pocket Books screamed for attention, with lurid pictorial come-ons. They needed to draw attention to themselves: customers were in the vicinity for reasons other than books.

It is still the case in America that books will be found in parts they don’t reach in the UK. In the past couple of weeks, I have bought Russian Prison Tattoos by Alix Lambert from Marc Jacobs, on Melrose Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (about as far away from the Putin Gulags as Mars).

I bought a volume of Nan Goldin’s photographs from the Arclight Cinema on Sunset and Vine. In Kinko’s, round the corner, I was less tempted by a rack of “Xerox yourself to millionairedom” business books (snuggled alongside them were the ubiquitous Da Vinci Code).

Historically, there is no advance in bookselling that has not been either pioneered or perfected

in the American marketplace – from “extras” in the 1840s (newsprint novels, distributed with papers), through the Book of the Month Club in the 1920s, to Jeff Bezos’s web store in the 1980s.

My local Starbucks in Pasadena (unlike my local Starbucks in Camden) has the inevitable bookstand. As is usual in this particular outlet, it currently features just the one title: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. As the capsule description in the New York Times chart puts it: “A former child soldier from Sierra Leone describes his drug-crazed killing spree and his return to humanity.”

It’s well chosen. Starbucks patrons are deeply conflicted about Africa and their beloved bean. Drinkers know that their double short latte is quite likely sweated out of exploited labour

in Kenya, Uganda or even, God help them, Sierra Leone. Beah takes away a nasty aftertaste.

A Long Way Gone subliminally connects with another title riding high in the charts: Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. It’s a rather dry treatise. But as Obama has confessed, he, too, came back from a youth which, if not exactly “drug crazed”, certainly involved inhaling and even snorting.

The queues are so long in Starbucks nowadays that one could plausibly get through a hardback before getting one’s order in. But from the trade point of view, Britain – currently gloomy about its disappearing “independent” bookshops – could draw some inspiration from de Graff and his legacy. Find new outlets. Caffè Nero might be a good place to start.

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