At that moment, that split-second of potential before answering I thought of pontificating in a faux Glasgow University accent, “Well, actually, it's a profound meditation on man's relationship with the world through the making of objects”. But I didn't. I just resigned myself and said “Aye, that's what it is”.
When I relate this story I play it for laughs. That at least is what I did at the recent Balfron Book Festival, when I told it to Callum Robinson. After all, it is funny. Or rather, it's, “quite” funny. Or, more accurately, I play it for laughs because it's not funny. Because as I hung up, happy that the book was waiting for me, I was genuinely disconcerted. Why did the exchange feel so unsatisfactory, so ... odd?
In this post, I want to try to work towards understanding that feeling. Because the bookseller’s question isn't one that would be asked of a master chef's memoirs. I can't imagine the same bookseller inquiring about Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: "is it a sort of cook book”? And that begs the obvious question, what was it about Ingrained that prompted the question?
There are a number of ways to go about this. We could consider the relationship between craft or making and the activity of DIY; we could consider the fact that the exchange took place during a phone call rather than face-to-face. It's highly likely that the phone call enabled the bookseller's question. A phone call is a more transactional and less personal form of communication than a face-to-face interaction. The absence of visual cues and social context allows for a more direct, sometimes blunt, way of inquiring. And if I had been present in the store, he might simply have held the book up and asked “is this the right one?”
But what I want to do is consider the first part of the bookseller's question: the “a sort of” part which functions in the question as a discourse marker; a word or phrase that helps to structure and organize what someone is saying. Discourse markers often signal a speaker's attitude or their relationship to the topic, rather than contributing to the literal meaning of the sentence.
The most obvious signal that “a sort of” sends is one of uncertainty; but it serves a few other functions as well, such as hedging, approximation and signalling the unfamiliar. Let's take each of these in turn.
By saying "is it a sort of DIY book?" the bookseller softens their meaning by creating a polite distance from their own question. He's not making a definitive classification, which avoids the risk of being completely wrong or directly offending me. This is a common way people navigate social interactions when they lack full knowledge.
And “a sort of DIY book” doesn't mean “a DIY book”. The discourse marker here suggests that "DIY book" is the closest category he can think of, but perhaps isn't a perfect fit. It's a way of saying "I don't know the exact term, but taking an educated guess I'm guessing it falls into this general category”.
On one hand then, the hedging and the taxonomical approximation highlight the bookseller's unfamiliarity with the subject matter. All that is to his credit and he's certainly earned marks for effort.
On the other hand however, the discourse marker highlights the implicit assumption that a book on woodworking must be a practical, instructional manual rather than a personal memoir or a philosophical exploration of man's tool-use in order to make objects and meaning.
This assumption left me wondering why it was hard to believe that a book about a manual craft could be more than just instructions. There is, in “is it a sort of”, an incredulity, an incredulity that someone could write about woodworking, and perhaps an even greater incredulity that that someone would want to read it. Who on earth would want to read “a sort of DIY” book without wanting to know how to make things? And with those ideas, I think we start to get a little closer to what was so disconcerting about the whole exchange.
Navigating the Cultural Divide
The bookseller’s question signals unfamiliarity: not just an understandable and excusable unfamiliarity with that particular book, but an unfamiliarity with the very idea of that particular book. The bookseller's language reveals more about his knowledge or worldview—by revealing a broader societal bias against working with your hands. It's subtle, unspoken — and it's more effective than a more direct statement ever could.
The bookseller's language, specifically the use of "a sort of," acts as a linguistic barrier. It's a way of saying, "This doesn't fit into my worldview, and because it's unfamiliar, I have to categorize it in the closest, most pragmatic way I know how”.
But the bookseller's question didn't just signal his unfamiliarity; it transferred it onto me. He was confronted with something outside his realm of reference—a book on woodworking that wasn't a DIY manual. But rather than admit his own lack of knowledge, his question reframed the situation so that the unfamiliarity became mine.
Though he didn't say it, the question signaled a subtle transfer of unfamiliarity. It was as if his lack of understanding of the book was recast as a statement about me and my reading choices, suggesting I was a different 'sort of' Waterstones reader/customer than he was used to.
It’s a subtle but powerful act of othering. His verbal uncertainty, represented by "a sort of," became a label of uncertainty applied to me. The burden of explaining my reading choice was placed onto me, not on him to understand the book. This is precisely why the interaction felt so disconcerting, despite the lack of any overt malice.
For the bookseller, a book about a manual craft could only be an instructional guide—a DIY book. This I think demonstrates, not just “a” cultural bias where the hands-on, tangible world is seen as separate from the intellectual, narrative world of memoirs and literature, but "the” actual cultural bias that exists in present day Scotland; one enhanced and intensified by the massive rise in school pupils going to university. And though recognition of this situation/problem is gaining traction there remains a number of questions that need to be asked and answered.
What happens to a society when hands-on trades are not given the same academic or cultural respect as other fields?
What happens to people, mostly white working-class men, when their society tells them that working with your hands is something you do if you fail at school?
What is the impact on the mental health of people, hand-workers, who are made to think that their work is of lesser value than “the life of the mind”?
Of course, no lanyarded member of the educational elite is openly going to disparage the trade's or manual work. They don't have to. The whole educational system is geared towards the only real measure of success being entry to university.
By asking "is it a sort of DIY book?", the bookseller was not just classifying a product; they were inadvertently revealing a deeper cultural assumption. They were signaling that the world of craft is "other" to the world of literature. And when my interest in a book by a woodworker made me a part of that "other" world, it felt like a moment of being seen as an outsider—someone whose reading habits didn't align with the expected norm for someone seeking a book in a place like Waterstones.
Confronting Myself As “The Other”
When I was in Primary 4, I won a book token. I went with my dad to Grant's bookshop on Union Street. I came away with The World of History, and I still have it. I've been buying books ever since. They are part of my identity. A way that I define myself. And, if I'm honest, others. If I see someone reading a book, I'll try to see what they're reading. Young or old; black or white; male or female, I've found readers to always be interested in what other readers are reading. My discomfort was then in part that I was mistaken.
The reason that I found the interaction with the bookseller so disconcerting was a sudden worry that I didn't belong. Waterstones might make money by selling Ingrained, but it might not value Ingrained. And by extension, not value readers of Ingrained, readers like me.
Conclusion
I wouldn't like you to think that I was offended. I wasn't. And there's every possibility that my call was answered by a novice bookseller who tried their best to explain the unfamiliar thing that they held in their hand.
And I accept those possibilities. Even so, and coming back to the point made at the start of this post, it's hard to imagine another type of book that might provoke that “is it a sort of” question. So it seems legitimate to ask what these subtle interactions reveal about how society values certain types of work and knowledge.
In this post, I've argued that the bookseller's discourse marker is symptomatic of the disdain with which hand-workers are held in certain sections of Scottish society. The bookseller doesn't, personally, have to share in that disdain. And that is to an extent, the point. The disdain is so embedded in the public consciousness that it can be manifested without really trying.
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