Compendium Bookshop, 1968-2000
London's Compendium Bookshop, a landmark in a certain sort of vanguard
bookselling, finally closed its doors in early October. Born in that fabled
annus mirabilis, Compendium opened a window into the stuffy
predictability of English bookshops, importing literature from the States and
Europe, and providing a connection to the most advanced currents then emerging
in European political and philosophical thought. With a wilful eclecticism,
Compendium stocked books, magazines, journals and ephemera whose only common
feature was their novelty and their intrinsic interest. Fiercely resistant to
the commodification of thought, Compendium was a resource for those engaged in
the critique of nascent spectacular society and in the imaginative construction
of alternatives. Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem were always the presiding
spirits, even if, over time, newer and stranger gods arrived in the pantheon.
(And often to a quiet derision: one memorable signing managed to produce no
audience for Baudrillard in the flesh: perhaps the simulacrum was preferable.)
After Marx and Sartre and the phenomenologists, the postmodernists, the
post-Marxists: after the posts, the revivalists and the hybridizers. Right at
the end, Deleuze and Guattari had come to the throne, displacing the now
seemingly exhausted Derridean dynasty.
But Compendium only survived as a peculiar anomaly. Perched relatively
cheaply in Camden's bohème, it partly created its own constituency, the new
layer of soon-to-be-influential culturati who gave it their loyalty because the
rest of the industry had yet to catch up. British publishing and bookselling
were laggard in being transformed by the forces of cultural globalization, still
wedded to a rather narrow, mid-century conception of culture and letters. In the
1990s all that changed. First there was the chaining of the retail end, with an
explosion in the number of bookshops (especially superstores), and discounting
policies which followed on the abolition of the Net Book Agreement. Second,
there was the rise of Internet retailing, with discounting the main tactic in
the vicious pursuit of market share untrammelled by concerns of operating
profit. Compendium found its niche suddenly assaulted by numerous brawnier
predators, outbid in range and depth of stock as well as price.
Just as the intellectual currents that Compendium had championed became
common currency, so their provision suddenly became ubiquitous. Suffering the
dreadful fate of all vanguards, Compendium started to look passé. But
there was an additional element beyond brute economics and the pains of fashion,
beyond even the degeneration of Camden into squalid Eurotrash tourism (a
transient moment of its ineluctable conversion into high-price, high-rent
mallification): the relentless transformation of what had been philosophical
publishing into academic publishing, and that latter into an arm of the Research
Assessment Exercise. The seemingly infinite production of readers and
anthologies, recycling the same canonical texts and competing to service the
same narrow band of undergraduate readers, coupled with the premature and only
career-necessary publication of single-authored essay collections, generated a
publishing culture of breathtaking banality. This was truly the mass production
of thought and it had now taken hold of the very intelligentsia who had probably
bought that Black and Red edition of Debord's classic in Compendium's basement.
Compendium, then, in the end was a victim of the very forces it had always
opposed: the commodification of culture and the growth of big capital.
Philip Derbyshire
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