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Low-browse literature
You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life
(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)
When I was a kid, a bookshop was like an abstract painting of a toyshop. The attractive colours and imagery were there but with other dimensions and elements encoded or placed at one point of remove. The cover art on kids’ books hovered somewhere between the technicolour luridness of rental video cases and the staged tableaux of board-game boxes (where everyone is smiling but no one is looking at each other). More than the various pictured gangs of kids, what stood out for me was the silly, surreal or grotesque: a badger in plate armour, a three-headed witch on a motorbike. Yet the artwork was never meant to be representational — what you saw wasn’t what you got — so much as evocative.
This evocativeness continued through childhood, complicated with my growing awareness of authors as well as their books. Although the local bookshop had too strong a whiff of worthiness and school to ever feel like any Hall of Fame or pantheon, there was anyway a museum grandeur to the shelves. (It…
