Book Signing...

I have organised a book signing two months after my novel’s release primarily for my own amusement. On a whim I called my home town Dartford’s only local bookshop and the owner, Graham, said Yes immediately. I could almost hear him shrugging over the phone.

“I’m not expecting a great deal of people,” I warned him.

“I shouldn’t hire extra security then?” he said. I like him.

When I arrive Graham is sitting behind the till reading a huge hard backed account of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

“What do you do for fun?” I say by way of introduction.

He lowers the tome. He is about fifty and wearing glasses and a cardigan, perhaps as a comment on the stereotypes of bookshop owners. Or perhaps because stereotypes exist for a reason. “Mr. Hardy, I presume,” he says.

“Indeed.” We shake hands. I glance around his tiny, empty shop. “How’s business?”

He just laughs.

I smile and look round again. He has set up a table at the far end of the room. Next to it is a blackboard on which he has actually written, exactly to my specification, Christopher Hardy - King of Sci-Fi’s Christmas Signing Spectacular in shaky handwriting.

“Just set yourself up over there and I’ll wait for the masses to begin filling my till,” he says.

“Right.” I put my bag under the table and take my jacket off, revealing my ‘King of Sci-Fi’ shirt. I sit down and finger the felt-tip pen on the otherwise bare surface. “Where are the books?”

He looks up from the counter. “Which books are you referring to?”

“My books. Clear History.”

“I don’t have any,” he says. “I assumed you were bringing them. We usually just buy the copies the author sells, and a few more for stock.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh indeed,” he says.

I lean back in my chair and laugh, suddenly giddy with the sheer absurdity of the event.

“There appears to have been a lack of communication,” he says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, still laughing. “Really. No one will come.”

He smiles and shakes his head. He nods towards a door marked ‘Staff Only.’ “Make us a cup of tea then, will you?”

“Sure,” I say, wiping a tear from my cheek.

The door opens onto a small kitchen area and a toilet. I make the tea, dancing to a song in my head.

When I come out there are two young girls in the shop. Graham takes his tea. “Your first fans,” he says.

I laugh again. “Yeah, right.”

The girls hear me and turn round. They giggle and take the few steps required to cross the shop.

“Hi,” one of them says.

“I looove your book,” the other one says.

“Shut up,” I say, stunned.

Their smiles fade.

“I mean…that’s great,” I say. They are even prettier than the girls who asked James Hardy for his signature and this pleases me. “Wait, I should be sitting at the table.”

They follow me over and I sit down. We look at each other, smiling. No one is sure what to do.

Eventually one of them says, “Will you sign a book for us, then?”

“I’d love to, but I don’t have any.”

They look at each other. “We came from London.”

“Hold on.”

I ask Graham to call the local W H Smiths. He does so with a bewildered expression.

“Smith’s has copies,” I tell the girls. “It’s just down the road.”

They leave the shop in a state of confusion and almost immediately a huge guy in a leather jacket holding a motorcycle helmet comes in and approaches me.

“Good to meet you,” he says. “Big fan.”

“Thank you,” I say, a little scared. “Look, I’m afraid we’ve…sold out of copies already, but…”

“That’s okay,” he says. “I’ve already got one. I want you to sign something else.”

He pulls his jacket off and then his shirt. His torso and arms are covered in tattoos.

“Christ,” I say.

“I love my tattoos,” he says.

“Looks like it. That’s…great.”

“I’ve got a space here,” he says, pointing to a fleshy area over his left nipple. “Sign it and then I’m straight down the parlour to get it inked.”

“Wow,” I say. I stand up and move warily around the table. “What’s that one?” I say, squinting at a large amateurish scrawl on his shoulder.

“‘The Ebonic Plague,’” he says cheerfully. “That was the name of my Nazi punk band in my misspent youth.”

“Wow,” I say again. “That sounds…fun.”

“It was okay,” he says modestly. “We put out one single; ‘Rosa Parks Should Have Stood The Fuck Up.’ It didn’t do that well.”

“That’s a shame,” I say, gingerly stretching out his moist skin with trembling hands and marking it with my childish signature.

I step back, awaiting judgement. He looks at it for a long time and my heartbeat doubles. Eventually he looks up. “That’s brilliant,” he says with genuine emotion.

I smile with relief. “Excellent.”

“Quick photo,” he says. He holds his mobile phone out and crushes me against his flesh. I smile the best I can. He checks it, and again appears delighted.

When he has left, I sit at the table and recover my composure. “Is he a regular?” I ask Graham.

The two girls return with copies and I sign them and they take photos and I am slightly less uncomfortable with the whole process than I feared I might be.

Graham is less happy. “Those are sales I’m losing out on,” he says.

“Don’t worry, no one else will come,” I assure him, but only ten minutes later a middle-aged woman comes in and flirts for awhile and goes off to Smiths to buy the remaining three copies for Christmas presents.

“This is silly,” Graham says.

“I know.”

I call Pauline at Harper Collins. “How quickly can you get copies of my book to Dartford?”

A courier is dispatched from the warehouse. Two groups of young men come in and I ask them to return in two hours but they don’t have time, and they run off to another nearby chain for copies, and when I sign them thirty minutes later, Graham is furious.

More people arrive and I do photographs but they leave empty-handed.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Graham.

The courier finally arrives and the tension is relieved a little and he stacks forty copies of my book on the table and Graham signs for them and he leaves.

I sit behind the table for the rest of the afternoon. No one else comes in. The silence, at times, is almost unbearable.

I leave Graham in his shop at seven pm, staring forlornly at the stack of books. I can’t think of much to say.








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