George Orwell’s Bookshop in 2016 — The Art.

George Orwell wrote about his days of working at a bookshop in a remote part of London in 1940’s. He described how people came to the stores, looked at the books, took them, flicked through them, told him to keep books for them, but never came back to buy them. Orwell said that a lot of people liked to entertain themselves with a thought of buying books, because it made them feel smart, though they never even bought or read any of them.

Here, I want to tell you about how people — that Orwell described in his essay -evolved and what they look like in 2016.

Recently, I attended an evening with a well-known British author. The event was held in the largest bookstore of London called Waterstones located at Piccadilly Circus station. I am not going to mention the name of the writer, who was presenting his book that evening. But what I can tell is the following.

There were people wearing extravagant suites of bright colors, something that people used to wear in 1960’s. They were not old. I would say they were in their late 30’s or early 40’s. But there were also people who on contrary, were wearing a worn-out T-Shirts and their hands had tattoos on them.

Two different type of people, who had so much in common.

When the writer sat down on his chair and started his speech, I started looking around to see how people reacted to his talk. I should say that the speaker was very eloquent. He is a person, who has travelled all around the world, visited every (!) country on this planet and wrote dozen of books on his travels. There are dozens of questions, that you can ask this person.

However, as I was looking around, I started noticing that some of the listeners were not paying attention to the speech, as if they were waiting for something else. It was a feeling that is hard to describe. It felt as if some people on their black chairs came not to listen something new from the writer they like, but to just check-in that they were here. What happened next explains my point more clearly.

Suddenly a person sitting in front of me turned the flash of his camera on and started filming his girlfriend. His girlfriend raised her hand and asked a question “What is the most favorite country you have ever visited?”. The author — who had answered this question thousand times — said that every country is unique and has something to offer. All this being recorded on a Samsung phone camera.

Then another girl, who looked 21 and was wearing sunglasses in the middle of December asked “I am a writer myself. Where do you get inspiration?” To be honest, I would never say to the author of 20 best selling books that I am a writer, especially, if I would have only half a page article written on a university newspaper. Her question was directed not to him, but to herself.

The last character of this fantastic audience was a girl, who asked “Have you been in Tanzania?” She was expecting that the author would say “No, unfortunately Tanzania is too small to go there” and then she would say “Oh, I am from Tanzania, it’s a wonderful place, go there!” BUT. The speaker said “Yes, I have been there 3–4 times” and the question came to a dead end. The girl who asked it didn’t say anything except of “I was just asking because I am from there”. That’s it.

The event offered free wine and the men in their extravagant suites sat down with other men and started talking about travels, though as I heard some of them haven’t left Britain in their life. They were holding their wine glasses as if they are in gentlemen’s club and the only thing missing was a Cuban cigar in their mouth.

All this reminded me of George Orwell’s description of people coming to his bookstore, looking at the books, talking about the books, not because they read them or were going to read them, but because it gives them a feeling of being higher than anyone else. Unfortunately this can be observed — in a different form — at bookshops in twenty first century.

Originally published at theart.quora.com.