It may be Black Friday but as Biteback’s Press Officer, Ella Bowman, explains, it doesn’t all have to be about mindless consumption…
As many of you may already know, today is Black Friday on account of a handful of Americans wreaking havoc in shopping malls. What a thoroughly troubled country: forgetting yesterday’s offerings of turkey to their cohabitants, they mean business, and no one else is getting their mitts on that ice-cream maker, nor that onesie, nor that box of Medjool dates for only a snip of the retail pri… OUTTATHEWAYYY!!!
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) suggests that this show of commodity fetishism demonstrates a crisis of identity – ‘this silken scarf is the sort of finery the real me would wear’ mentality – and I don’t disagree. Perhaps then we need not fight greed and feel that we have gone without per se, but be happy with ourselves sans velvet offerings from St Michael, not wanting them in the first place. I suggest nothing original here: be happy with your lot. That’s the end of the lesson.*
So where do books come in? Someone labours artfully (in the case of all Biteback titles) to create an offering of information, the ownership of which will improve your breadth of knowledge, assuming you read it, of course (exeunt Gatsby with his uncut books)… In my case, I justify the buying of books as it was always encouraged by family; pocket money seemed to stretch further when in a bookshop rather than a Woolworth’s pick-n-mix aisle. Holding that glorious copy (oh the smell of a new book!) of Northern Lights under your arm and waddling out of the shop, into the car, where you read until you felt sick and heard the cautionary ‘don’t read in the car’ for the umpteenth time.
Wait… Before I start eulogising the existence of books in hardcopy, I’ll get to the point.
Books are wonderful things to own, to read, to reread, to share, to prop up furniture with (joking. Do not do that), and the book-greedy are even looked upon with sympathetic eyes. The reader of books is wealthy-minded, the owner of treasures may be poor. This being the case, which side are you on? Do you even need to pick sides? Of course you don’t! You can buy all of the trinkets and treasures you like whilst still affording books aplenty. It’s Black Friday and here is your link to the Biteback sale, in conjunction with Politicos.co.uk. If clamour and trample you must, so be it. Oh but we are a troubled country!
*Note to self: heed this lesson.