On books in the landscape

Some time in the mid twenty-teens, when twitter was still twitter, and still a place to make connections and jokes, my partner Will stepped out of the bookshop where he had been working part-time for years, carried a book across the road, and positioned it on a gate.

For a couple of years he had been sharing photos of books from the Sam Read Bookseller twitter feed as it grew, but a combination of poor lighting inside the shop, and the increased interest he got on posts which included the lake district landscape had been driving him to try to take more pictures of books outside the shop. He’d started by just standing outside the door and holding a book up against the backdrop of the fells, which worked okay, but didn’t always show the books off to best effect.

Next he tried nipping across the road and balancing books on the drystone wall opposite.

Through trial and error he realised that balancing a book upright on the field gate gave the best light and framing. By the end of the autumn of 2017 it had already become a standard image for the shop social media – a book or stack of books on the gate opposite. People seemed to love this combination of book recommendations and the landscape of the lakes.

It was a quick and easy way for Will to share interesting books without having to think of anything clever to say about them during a busy day, as the landscape seemed to say enough by itself. The gate became the book gate, and visiting writers would have their photo taken by it too.

Outside shop hours we found ourselves taking photos of books in other favourites spots we found made good book backgrounds: a little crag looking down over Rydal Water, particular stones on particular walls, the lake shore. If the light in the shop is bad, our house is black hole, so it made sense if we wanted to share excitement about a book to take it out for a wander. It became a thing. I took photos of Will taking photos of books, lying or crouching to get the best angles, propping books up with jumpers or rocks because he never remembered to bring any props.

When my books which included swimming were published I wanted to photograph them by the lake that played such a large part in them. I’ve learnt a lot through that process. Through a lot of trial and error I eventually found which rocks allowed you to stand a book on them and get a good reflection too. As a disabled writer with energy limiting illnesses, living – as it so often feels – at the outer reaches of the literary universe, sometimes taking a photograph of one of my books within the landscape that’s in them has felt like the only thing I can do for them.

Photographing books in the landscape does come with its own particular perils. My EDS clumsiness means I’m highly likely to tip a book over a wall when trying to get it to stand upright on it, then use up all photography energy I had fetching it from wherever it landed. Then there’s the lake district weather to contend with. You can have the perfect shot lined up in still calm sunshine then as you step back to take it a sideways blast of hail knocks the book over into the mud.

I forget sometimes that paperbacks are much more liable to blow over than hardbacks, as in the case of the paperback of Some of Us Just Fall, which blew from its stony perch into the lake when I turned my back last May. Does this secure it as swim lit, I wondered, but no one answered.

What Will learnt pretty quickly from his time balancing books on the gate is that books look most dramatic in the landscape if the lens is somewhat on a level with them, or a bit below – the covers pop more, if you like. This isn’t too hard when you’re using a gate or a wall to pose them on, but requires a bit more contortion if you’re using a crag, or a rock in the lake. Have you really put enough effort in if you’ve not lain on a beach in the snow to get the right angle on a book, for example?

On friday Katie Hale took some classic behind-the-scenes pictures of me taking photos of the paperback of her brilliant second novel The Edge of Solitude and shared them online along with one of the photos. I’ve been meaning to share some behind-the-shot details for one of the lake poses for months, and even recorded some footage of me wading into the lake and positioning a book, though I forgot to post it at the time and can’t find it now. It take a bit of fiddling around the get balance, angle and light right but the key detail I didn’t get at first is being in the lake to take the photo. The fact I was taking them from in the lake is what seems to have surprised people most.

Because of the rain this last week, the level of the lake is higher than usual, and I was a little worried the water would actually lap at Katie’s book when I moved. It’s one thing to drop your own paperback into the lake; something quite different to drop someone else’s.

Normally there’s a choice of rocks all safely high and dry, instead of just one barely above the surface. Luckily, Katie had a can of pop with her which made a good prop, and even the fleet of ducklings that came to have a look at what I was doing did not knock the book down or wet its feet. One day I will remember that the top of that rock is not actually flat from that angle, though.

By the time Will and I took over the bookshop in October 2023 the book gate had started to suffer from the continual onslaught of lake district rain, and rotted from its centre, letting lambs wriggle through in the spring and no longer providing a stable surface on which to pose books. Last autumn, it was replaced. Good for the lambs, but less good for the books, as the new gate has a bevelled edge, which we’ve found* is not a safe base for books, though we’ve managed to get a view last shots on it before giving it up. In March I glimpsed out the window to see Will just catching Kerri Andrew’s brilliant new book Pathfinding as it toppled off the gate back into his hands, though he got the good shot first.

We’re experimenting with new places to pose books near the bookshop for best effect and remembering places Will used to use before the gate became his favourite, taking Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? to the river Rothay to gaze at its likeness (I was paddling in the river for this one but it would have been easier and a better angle if I’d got all the way in to be honest!).

As a writer, it’s hard to know if anything you’re doing to try and promote your books is making any difference at all. Publishing can be so casually destroying. You’re promised all this marketing panache when you sell your book to a substantial press, but then there’s a change in editor, or budget, or marketing staff, or head of imprint, or the whole press goes under. Or someone else with a bigger reach publishes a similar book at the same time, and yours becomes an also-ran. Or there’s a world event that makes the subject of your book suddenly awkward or inappropriate or contentious. If you know writers, you’ve heard it all. There are so many ways for things to go impersonally, un-deliberately wrong in ways you cannot account for or control. It happens all the time. If you yourself are a writer maybe it’s happening to you. It’s almost certainly happening right now to a writer whose instagram feed or tour schedule you may have been looking at with envy, thinking how different things would be if your work had the support theirs did. It’s happening to so many of us all the time but it’s maybe useful for everyone to remember it’s hard to see from the outside.

Does sharing an interesting photo of a book make a difference? Probably not much, in the scheme of things. Like any small thing you can do yourself though, it can make you feel less powerless in the process, more active in it. It can give you a sense of a tiny bit more control in the way your work is presented to the world.

As a bookseller, I know a photo can sell a book. It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes just sharing a photo of an interesting book online will make someone click on a link and buy it. As a bookseller, and as a writer, I have to believe that counts.

For me, the landscape I live in here in the lakes is so much a part of my writing it only makes sense to include it. It might not at all be the case for others. For me, it’s also, importantly, something I can do, and enjoy doing. It gives me pleasure, and I hope gives some to other people too.

Publishing can be so obscure, and it is so hard to track the impact our work is having. When I was really struggling with not knowing whether Some of Us Just Fall was reaching people out there in the wider world, it was readers’ photographs of the book in their landscapes, their homes, their hands that mattered to me. I love to see photos of my books in other bookshops and in other people’s lives, out there, doing their thing. It gives me hope that my little world is not that little after all, and that my work is travelling even when I can’t. So I try to do the same with books I love too. I bring those books into my world, as the books bring me into theirs. Its a small thing, but a small thing I can do, under the right circumstances of weather and body.


*yes it was me who dropped a book into the field. I am not to be trusted.