The Unknown Unknown

Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted

Mark Forsyth

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781848317840
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848317932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mark Forsyth - author of the Sunday Times Number One bestseller The Etymologicon - reveals in this essay, specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, the most valuable thing about a really good bookshop. Along the way he considers the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld, naughty French photographs, why Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy would never have met online, and why only a bookshop can give you that precious thing - what you never knew you were looking for.

GEOGRAPHY

‘Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.” The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.

‘True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899

These days he could use Google Earth. The known unknowns, the blank spaces on Mr Conrad’s map, have all been filled in. Almost the last place to go was northern Canada. It was after the Second World War, and there were a lot of planes left over and a lot of qualified pilots and they buzzed over the tundra, taking notes, taking photographs, and taking away the fun of exploration for ever. That’s when we really got interested in other planets. They were all we had left.

The known unknowns are few and far between. There are a few left, of course: deep oceans, dark matter, why animals sleep. Although I like to think that Mr Conrad answered that one with those words ‘dream gloriously’.

The glamour’s off. Almost any question you ask can be answered. It’s only the questions that you didn’t know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.

They’re still there. They’re everywhere. Juliet is still waiting for you at the masked ball, if only you’ll go along. And she’ll wait for you for ever. And the book is still waiting for you, the perfect book, the one that will answer every question you didn’t know to ask. It’s on the shelf at the top, in the corner, just within reach of your grasping hand. The unknown unknown, waiting like an undiscovered continent, just at the back of the bookshop.

That’s what he was talking about, the great sage, the prophet, the messenger: Donald Henry Rumsfeld.

The message is that there are no ‘knowns’. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unkno...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the author
• The Unknown Unknown
• Strange Books
• The Good Bookshop
• Bibliomancy: The Future of Books
• The Ghost in the Bookshop
• The Romantic Bookshop
• The Theology
• Geography