Glasgow Bookshops' Rejected Books: The Hidden List Beneath the Counter

Last month, while tidying up the shop's stockroom, I found a delivery ledger from the 1970s. It had been left behind by my predecessor, and next to certain titles, someone had written "NF" in pencil. Not For display. Books that couldn't be put on the shelves. As I followed those notes one by one, the quiet history of censorship on Glasgow's bookselling streets began to take shape. Books that were ordered but never placed on the shelves. Books that were only brought out from under the counter if a customer asked for them directly. Books that were never officially banned, yet were treated as though they didn't exist.

Here I've compiled part of the list I managed to trace. It isn't complete, only what I was able to verify myself.

Ghosts After the Obscene Publications Act

In the early 1960s, even after the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial had concluded in London, a considerable number of Glasgow bookshops refused to put the book on display. Legally, its sale was permitted, but among the bookshop owners along Sauchiehall Street, there was reportedly an unspoken consensus: "No need to invite trouble." An old regular at the shop where I work told me that back then, his father could only buy the book at one particular shop on Byres Road, and even there, you had to ask the clerk quietly.

Around the same time, Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book was equally unwelcome in Glasgow. Trocchi was Glasgow-born, but the heroin addiction and bohemian lifestyle his novel depicted didn't sit well with the city's sense of respectability. A secondhand book dealer told me that even into the 1970s, it was extremely difficult to find a first edition of this book anywhere in Glasgow, despite the fact that it was already recognised in New York and Paris as an important work of avant-garde literature.

Quietly Removed

By the 1980s, things shifted slightly. Rather than outright refusal, the preferred method was to hide behind the convenient phrase "out of stock." Here are some of the more striking cases I've collected.

When the first edition of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting came out, several large Glasgow bookshops refused the initial stock. There may have been some local rivalry, given that the novel was set in Edinburgh, but the bigger reason was that it depicted drug culture too explicitly. Eventually, word of mouth spread and the demand became impossible to ignore, so it was quietly slipped onto the shelves. There was a clear gap of several months at the start. I confirmed the records of non-stocking during that period directly from the ledger.

Alasdair Gray's works were treated comparatively well, but 1982, Janine was the exception. Some bookshops balked at it because of its extensive sexual content. I've heard that Gray himself considered this novel his most political work, yet what the bookshops took issue with wasn't the politics. It was the bodies.

When James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize, the situation was no less complicated. Some shops only placed it in a prominent position after the award. Before that, it had been tucked away in a corner of the "Scottish Literature" section, or left out entirely.

A Pattern That Still Repeats

The only thing that has disappeared is the outright refusal. These days, algorithms and distribution structures do the job instead. Major chains don't even register certain independent publications in their systems. Books that exist but can't be searched for. The form has changed, but the structure is the same.

What I've learned from working behind the counter is that the list of rejected books reveals a city's anxieties more honestly than anything else. What Glasgow wanted to hide wasn't obscenity. It was its own portrait. Trocchi's addiction, Welsh's poverty, Kelman's working-class language. The books beneath the shelf say more about this city than the books on top of it.

The ledger I found in the stockroom is now in my desk drawer. Every so often I take it out and study the "NF" marks. The pencil traces are growing fainter.