Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell (Penguin Modern Classics, 1971)

ISBN: 0140002979 • Condition: Good • Sold by Crappy Old Books

Come for the hunger, stay for the hygiene. In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell takes an entry-level position in poverty and writes the best employee handbook it’s ever had. Paris supplies the kitchens—boiling, shouting, and a sous-chef who thinks cleanliness is a bourgeois superstition—while London contributes the tramp’s itinerary: spike to spike, tea to tea, sermon to sermon, each with rules longer than a hotel bill you can’t pay.

Orwell’s trick is simple and devastating: he notices everything. Grease climbs the walls like ivy. Shoes achieve new philosophies. Charity discovers innovative ways to be inconvenient. In Paris, he becomes a plongeur, which is French for “human dishwasher with creative burns,” and learns that civilisation rests on a sink full of water that hasn’t been changed since the Third Republic. In London, he masters the art of walking exactly far enough to find a bed, then being told to walk exactly as far again tomorrow for moral reasons. The book is funny (yes, actually), grim (also yes), and so lucid you can see the crumbs of yesterday’s bread in every sentence.

Expect:

• Menus without food, beds with rules, and work with no end.

• A cast of intrepid down-and-outers who can make a cigarette last longer than a friendship.

• Observations sharp enough to slice bread you haven’t got.

• A field guide to invisible labour, written in prose that never raises its voice.

This 1971 Penguin Modern Classics edition has the cool grey livery of good intentions and the small-type courage to tell you exactly what the soup looked like. “Condition: Good” at Crappy Old Books means a well-travelled paperback with a respectable spine-crease, lightly tanned pages (sunlit, not smoke-cured), and enough structural integrity to survive both a café table and a bus seat. It will not give you trench foot. It may, however, give you opinions about restaurant kitchens you can never un-have.

Buy it for the Paris grease and the London drizzle, keep it for the x-ray of class disguised as a travelogue, and lend it to anyone who thinks hardship builds character—so they can meet some characters hardship built. Crappy Old Books: purveyors of honest paperbacks that know the price of tea and the cost of dignity.

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