MARK FORSYTH The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

The Unknown Unknown illuminates the serendipitous pleasures of book buying. Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, is not one of my heroes. Yet as Mark Forsyth has argued in this exquisite little essay, Rumsfeld’s 2002 phrase ‘unknown unknowns’ (linking Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups) can have more attractive meanings*. Applied to book buying it can be the stuff of romance. As Forsyth puts it: ‘A desire satisfied is a meagre and measly thing. But a new desire!’ The romance lies in acquiring something else. Just over a week ago I had been for a walk in the park, a regular 2.2- kilometre circuit except that I’d also made some detours. I’d stopped to ride an aerobic bicycle for one minute – didn’t want to do overdo things. I’d done arm lifts for one minute – already I was feeling stronger. I’d rowed – could feel the back and inside thighs working. Enough said. I was breaking new ground. I’d have a coffee at Café Paesano but I had just $7.00 in loose change. I would buy a Penguin Little Black Classic in Booked at North Adelaide a couple of doors away for $2.00, leaving $5.00 for the coffee. I’d try a writer I knew of but hadn’t read before. The mug of flat white decaf was $5.30. I proffered $5.00. Accepted. They’d moved the Little Black Classics. Last time the 50-plus titles in the series were prominent at the front of the store. Now the assistant led me to a back shelf. They were both lost and diminished in number. Around ten by authors I’d mainly heard of: Nietzsche, Swift, Suetonius, Petronius, Lawrence (DH), Flaubert, Chaucer, Chekhov, good old reliable (and prolific) Anon and Ruskin. Disappointed, but Ruskin’s Traffic held most appeal. I haven’t read Ruskin but I know of Ruskin. He lacked a sex life apparently, maybe was asexual, but was a know-all about matters of art and culture in Victorian Britain. I could, as the saying goes, ‘learn something’. The Little Black Classics are elegantly produced, generally run to about 50 pages and are perfect bound, just thick enough for the titles to be printed on the spine. Because I knew they existed as a series they were what Forsyth (via Rumsfeld) would term known unknowns. As I had previously read Flaubert’s A Simple Heart in the series, the Little Black Classics had become a known known. Category change can be a wonderful thing. I was ready to purchase Ruskin when I ran my eyes to the left. Nestled against the Little Black Classics were several copies of an even smaller book, A6, saddle-stapled, 32 pages. Rather than announce itself, this book, an essay commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week in Britain in 2014, was hiding. The Unknown Unknown became my unknown unknown. Discounted to $1.99. Keep the change. Five thousand words doesn’t take long to read – maybe 20 minutes – yet it occurs to me that this review is already a tenth of the length of its subject. Could the review expand beyond the length of the original? Probably, but I’ll exercise discipline. Forsyth says ‘serendipities are rare’ for bookshop browsers but are they necessarily so? My most regular book purchases are from the Oxfam second-hand shop in Hutt Street, Adelaide. While I often begin in Sport before moving to Australian History, Australian Politics and Fiction, I frequently turn up known unknowns. However, a fortnight ago I found Clem Seecharan’s From Ranji to Rohan: Cricket and Indian identity in colonial Guyana 1890s-1960s, a cumbersome academic title, it must be admitted. It was located within the topic I know best (Cricket) yet I’d never heard of the author and knew nothing about this aspect of the game’s history. This was an unknown unknown, a wonderful discovery, and as I have commented to friends, ‘a marvellous antidote to the wallop (T20) of the last month’. Forsyth makes many brilliant observations in his essay but I’ll comment on just two more. Discussing physical books, he writes that their advantage over electronic books is that the reader can flick through them:

You can glance at the beginning, the middle and the end. Just as you found a book by chance, you can find a page by chance, or a particular paragraph or line.

How exciting is this? Virtually all books, even familiar ones, will contain unknown unknowns. Forsyth also engages with the subject of the quality of books sold:

Half of the art of bookselling is about choosing what not to have in your shop. It is not enough to have good books, you must not have bad books.

We have all been to remainder shops where a lot of dross is being chucked out at bargain prices – books on Barbara Windsor’s boobs among others, as Clive James would have it. Occasionally one finds a good book but never a gem. What Forsyth is saying about bookselling can also apply to book buying. My personal library comprises 4000 books. Friends and associates wonder why. I am not a collector, much of it is a ‘working library’ so there are some ordinary books acquired for research purposes, but it is also part of my identity. I hate to think I possess bad books and if I do make an error of judgment I will generally shed such books as rapidly as possible. I could keep on enthusing about my new find. I returned to buy half a dozen copies of The Unknown Unknown the very next day. All but one, gone. Fellow book buyers (bastards) have had their own serendipitous experience with the same item. The word has got around. Deservedly so. *I am indebted to the NRB editors for pointing out the phrase comes originally from the DH Lawrence poem, ‘New Heaven and New Earth’: ‘… my hand stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown’. I wouldn’t have pegged Donald Rumsfeld as a Laurentian but perhaps we have more in common than I’d like to think. Mark Forsyth The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted Icon Books 2014 PB 32pp $5.95 Bernard Whimpress is an Adelaide-based historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is The Official MCC Story of the Ashes, 2015. You can buy this book from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.    

Tags: DH Lawrence, Donald | Rumsfeld, Mark | Forsyth