The Great Big Book Exchange (short story)

The Great Big Book Exchange
Main character(s):	Paul Magrs
Main setting:	28 November 2004-29 February 2005, Durham
Key crew
Publisher:	BBC Radio Four
Writer:	Paul Magrs
Producer:	Pauline Harris
Read by:	Paul Magrs
Release details
Part of:	Magnetic North
Release date:	2004 (original)
Format:	Short story
Twelve Stories
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You may be looking for the titular bookshop.

The Great Big Book Exchange was a short story written by Paul Magrs. It was commissioned in late 2004 by Claire Malcolm of New Writing North as a collaborative project with other authors and Creative Partnerships Sunderland & Durham for a special anthology, fold-out Durham book, which had the gimmick of opening like a "vivid chrysanthemum of paper". However, when the book was unveiled in Durham Town Hall, Magrs was absent.

On 14 October 2005, Magrs read an abridged version of the story on BBC Radio Four from 3:30pm to 3:45pm as part of Live From Durham. This edition was produced by Pauline Harris.

The prose edition of the story was later reprinted in New Writing North's anthology Magnetic North on 19 December 2005. It was later reprinted again on 1 November 2009 as a part of Magrs's anthology Twelve Stories.

BBC Radio Four summary

Enchanting story about a woman and her grandson's obsession with reading novels. The woman begins to exchange books via a book shop and begins to develop a unique relationship with the owner.

Plot

There is an old lady whose daughter moved out years ago. The old lady filled her life with stacks of paperbacks, so many that she can't remember them all. Her grandson has been recently orphaned as his parents died in a plane crash. The woman visits the Great Big Book Exchange every Saturday with her grandson, meeting the owner, the man with the plastic arms. Both Winnie and her grandson read whenever they can, and she is very pleased. However, granddad is not so pleased. He doesn't understand them. He believes that his grandson should not be reading, as he's a bloke, and he should be above it. Granddad is repulsed by the filthy things, and is disgusted that Winnie reads them in their bed. Returning the the Great Big Book Exchange, the owner sneaks messages into Winnie's books, unlining certain phrases and such. He dreams of what he could do if only he had his arms back, such as being able to dance with women, being able to heat up his Heinz ravioli with ease, and being able to read and write easier. Winnie and her grandson take many buses to many nearby towns, but their favourite shop by far is the Great Big Book Exchange.

On 28 November, Paul Magrs ponders what to add and remove from his story. He is on a train to Durham, sitting next to fellas from Leeds, some flirting slightly with several women on their way to do Christmas shopping. One man shows a woman pictures from his wallet and an old pound note which his wife had torn in half years ago, performing a joke whilst drunk.

On 1 December, Paul writes about how much more happier he is writing stories out of order, letting characters grow organically, disrupting concepts such as continuity. He does consider writing stories with more realism, recollecting visiting his Big Nanna in Jarrow three years prior, using a tape recorder to record conversations with her. He decides that it is too upsetting, and sucks the point out of imagining anything new.

On 2 January, Paul writes about how his stepfather's mother had moved in with Paul and his stepfather years ago, after her husband had died, how she had barricaded herself in her bedroom, reading books like Battlestar Galactica and Gone with the Wind. Paul recalls how they all had had to go to the Great Big Book Exchange in Darlington many times to find a copy of Gone with the Wind.

On 3 January, Paul writes about how he travelled across the North East looking for books, linking it to his story, writing about how he will get his characters to do just that. He also writes how he will write the granddad as a mean spirited character, until Winnie clobbers him with a frying pan, thinking that she killed him. Paul also has ideas about Winnie's past, how she grew up in South Shields with another girl, Ada Jones, who shared Winnie's interest in books.l, and that now, in their old age, they could reunite, but Ada will have soured with age.

On 4 January, Paul comes up with more ideas for Ada.

On the 19th, he writes how he had been awake the previous night, thinking about the Great Big Book Exchange. He'd also read On the Western Circuit. He develops the idea of the secret messages in the books, sewing in misunderstandings between the characters, adding in a new character, the "Saturday girl". He scraps it, thinking it's "too much plot". On 21st and 22nd, Paul writes more chunks of the story. On the 25th, Paul writes about the grandson's appreciation of Doctor Who - The Three Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, likening the bookseller to Omega and his universe of anti-matter. On the 28th, Paul writes more, with the grandson's mind "aswirl" after reading On the Road. On the 30th, Paul writes more.

On the 28th of February, Magrs writes about how he often finds himself returning to Books he's read before, often discovering more hidden within the pages. On the 29th, Paul writes how he feels that the books he wrote in the past almost feel like they were written by a different person, as if he wrote them in his dreams.

Characters

• Paul Magrs
• Man
• Woman

Referenced only

• Winnie
• Winnie's daughter
• Grandson's father
• Grandson
• Man with the plastic arms
• Granddad
• Man's wife
• Big Nanna
• Paul Magrs' stepfather
• Stepfather's mother
• Ada Jones
• Saturday girl

Worldbuilding

Books

• Winnie's grandson's parents died in a plane crash headed to Florida for a holiday they won in a quiz show.
• Grandson's parents said goodbye to him at Teesside airport.
• Pride and Prejudice, The Silence of the Lambs, Flowers in the Attic, Jaws, Rich Man, Poor Man, Sophie's Choice, The Exorcist, Jane Eyre, The World is Full of Married Men, Gone with the Wind, Peyton Place, Great Expectations, Brideshead, Dead Zone, Tin Drum, Dallas, Dune, A Clockwork Orange, Stig of the Dump, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, Lolita, A Confederacy of Dunces, On the Road, The Naked Lunch, Battlestar Galactica, The Guardians, The Mallens, The Midwich Cuckoos, The End of the Affair, Catch Twenty-Two, A Farewell to Arms, and Doctor Who and the Daemons are all books.
• Winnie's grandson would rather read books like Gatsby, Jude the Obscure, The Dark is Rising and Salem's Lot.

Food and drink

• Granddad sucked on woodbines and barley sugars.
• Winnie thinks that her grandson could learn to drive, so that they could go to Asda and buy a week's worth of shopping.

Individuals

• Granddad worked in the Navy and later in the Steelworks.

Music

• The man with the plastic arms plays songs by Ella Fitzgerald on his record player.

Transport

• Expresses and Road Rangers are bus companies. The X50, 213, 723 are bus numbers.

Shops

• Cancer, Heart Foundation, Animal Rescue, and Spastics are charity shops.

Locations

• Paul notes that the town the grandson moves to is like Ferryhill.

Notes

• The story was styled to read as extracts from the journal of Magrs' fictional counterpart. The story was also clearly intended to be a continuation of Magrs' semi-autobiographical, semi-fictitious stories such as Bafflement and Devotion; perhaps most evident of the story's status as fiction was the paragraph where Magrs mentioned visiting Great Big Book Exchange in his youth, a location that does not actually exist in Darlington. The Great Big Book Exchange reappeared prominently in Magrs' later novels Exchange and Enter Wildthyme.
• The various drafts provided in this story, while presented as works of in-universe fiction here, would later be fully adapted in Exchange, a novel that told the story of Simon, one of the protagonists who would later appear with Kelly and various other characters and locations in Enter Wildthyme and Wildthyme Beyond!. This is not to suggest that this is all in-universe fiction, as it is explicitly mentioned that Paul Magrs and his family had visited the Great Big Book Exchange in his youth, tying directly into the continuity of Exchange, as that novel reveals that the owner had run the shop for a very long time.
  • While this account may seem hard to reconcile with later stories, one could explain the conflicting accounts by assuming that Paul has inadvertently written a story almost exactly like that of the "real individuals", not unlike Philip Purser-Hallard's unintentionally accurate stories about the City of the Saved in PROSE: More Tales of the City linking material.
• There are several grammatical errors in printing in Twelve Stories, including a missing space between two sentences, and a missing bracket.
• The Great Big Book Exchange was later released on BBC Radio Four again on 13 May 2007.

Continuity

• The Great Big Book Exchange operates on it's own system of swapping books as opposed to selling books. (PROSE: Enter Wildthyme)
• Paul Magrs is also the author of novels about Brenda and Effie Jacobs, (PROSE: Brenda's B&B, The Story of Fester Cat) the Doctor, (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion, The Story of Fester Cat) and Iris Wildthyme and Panda. (PROSE: The Magrs Conundrum!)
• Paul's Big Nanna also appears in PROSE: Talented Witches and is referenced many times in Party Like it's 1979.
• The Great Big Book Exchange is located in Darlington. (PROSE: Enter Wildthyme)
• Terrance Dicks writes Doctor Who novels. (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion)