'Hooked on Books' is a second hand bookshop in Dover. When I was a teenager I used to go there a lot on my aimless wanderings through the town, to buy the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy books and Virginia Woolf novels. As well as the wall-to-wall shelves, subsidiary racks and tables in the centre, there are teetering piles of books on the floor and the counter waiting to be sorted, though the staff never seem too keen to order them. It's a dense concentration of books.
Today I went back to Dover for a few days, and on my way from the station to my childhood house, I thought I'd go to Hooked on Books and buy something. For a moment I had a fear that last time I was in Dover the shop hadn't been there, but I was relieved to find it still there, still facing the town hall across the pelican crossing.
I bought two books: 'The World of Chess', a technicolour hardback exploring the many beguiling byways of the noble game
and 'Epitaph for the Elm', a book written in the seventies about how Dutch Elm disease was killing all the elms.
The owner of the shop commented that he hadn't seen me for a while. I was quite surprised that he recognised me. We talked about Dover and how it has got worse since I left.
Every time I go back to Dover there are more shops and houses boarded up. London Road is like the main street of a ghost town. There's nothing here anymore. Everyone goes through the port and on up the Jubilee Way to London or Canterbury. It makes me happy to see Hooked on Books still going after 15 years. Along with the snooker hall in the Working Men's Club and Best Deals, stolid purveyor of second hand CDs, DVDs and musical instruments, it's one of the few champion cultural highlights of that ailing street.
