The case for classic recycling

Imagine a world in which there was never again a new novel and no more plays that capture the age in which they were written. Stare helplessly as the sources of lilting poetry from the round earth's imagin'd corners dry up, and the swords of cynical essayists are put up.

Do not go so far as to picture the ever-increasing global population descending into a sort of warped barbarity sprung from cultural thirst. Desperate individuals would not be trading pounds of flesh to get their bloody fingers on one of the last remaining Complete Works. A hundred years down the line, one would not find one's neighbour executing a brutal murder in a quintessential town or village and subsequently setting out clues by which the perpetrator may be discovered, just to give others something akin to the thrill of deciphering the latest murder mystery before the detective himself. There would still be copies of Shakespeare and an incessant supply of Ian Rankin thrillers.

In this parallel world, publishers would continue to publish, booksellers to sell, and the masses to buy and read. It is only the voices that rise up from the ivory white pages in inky authority that would cease to exist. Mr McCall Smith would never pen another 44 Scotland Street story, Mr Dawkins would choke on the chaff that he has yet to share with us, and there would be no post-Iraq/Afghanistan-war elegies to match the nostalgia and deep sadness of the likes of Brideshead Revisited. (This last, I realise, assumes that there will at some point be a time post-Iraq/Afghanistan-war, but never mind). Nothing new would ever be written, in any form.

Now here's the reason for the creation of this hypothetical dystopia. A while ago I came across an article envisaging a world in which there was no new music. Tracks already in existence could be endlessly rerecorded and rereleased; I can hear now a dubstep version of Day Tripper, a violin concerto that sounds distinctly like Insomnia, and a sat-nav-esque selection of voices for each and every pop song (English man/English woman/Irish man/Irish...you get the idea). I saw at once that this would by no means be a tragedy. If all the many dances of the world were brought together in one riotous tangle of limbs, swaying and leaping and jumping, it would be as if four dimensional fireworks were covering the sky, each giving a blazing glory to different aspects of the others. Display over, this glory would then be forever visible, a halo glowing for all time. Likewise, if all the lyrics of the world were married with all the melodies and beats, each would reveal some previously unnoticed diamond on the sole of the other's shoe. A new sort of musical intertextuality would appear. Imagine!

Glancing through from the office into the bookshop where I work, I realised this wouldn't quite work for the world's literature. Poems could perhaps be expanded into novels, and novels condensed into poems or plays. Yet literature has only the medium of language, whereas music boasts words, sound and rhythm. Fleetingly I doubted the worth of all the books around me; there just didn't seem to be enough scope for development. I felt like that narrator - whatshisname? readitatschool? - like him, I would be borne back ceaselessly into the past...

...Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby. Relief washed over me like a bucket of cold water on a hot day as my thoughts danced through the movements. The Great Gatsby... the photo on my Penguin edition that I love... the man and the woman sitting on a diving board and looking out over the water. I dived into the shop and cooled off after my panic. Of course there would be scope, for I also love the leather-bound special edition copy of Gatsby, there on the shelf. From across the room I heard a copy of Moby Dick, a book I've never been inclined to read, suddenly calling out to me like the sirens to Odysseus, with its rough-cut, rip-look pages.

Visualising my bookshelf at home I saw the elegant edition of Orwell's Critical Essays I'd bought, chiefly because of its cover. It matched his Narrative Essays, so I'd had to have both. I've dipped in and out of them, but I won't pretend I bought them because I just had to read them from cover to cover. My mind's eye is currently oggling the Vintage edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, each page a delicate yet resilient and understated frame exhibiting fourteen lines of the most powerful poetry in existence. And all that space to be scribbled on!

You might call me 'a sucker for marketing' - though I'd rather you phrased it as 'an admirer of beautiful objects' - but that still isn't quite right. A publisher could put the most glorious jacket ever conceived on Martin Amis' London Fields and I wouldn't buy it; I just don't like the book. In an ideal (and probably realistic) world, the above scenario would never arise. But if it did it would by no means be a dystopia. The covers that encase the words we love would multiply, each one a visual representation of an interpretation of the text within giving it a new and lasting light. The written word and the image would grow closer together, intertwine even; a system of classic recycling would take root in society.

I shall never again be ashamed to judge a book, in part at least, by its cover. Obviously I'd rather the twenty-first century had its own Evelyn Waugh, but if that wasn't possible, I could quite happily settle for Brideshead Rejacketed.