Upside Down on the Label

The first copy of The Luxury of Listening heads for Australia.

By Rafi Mercer

An address label tells you very little. A name, a street, a postcode. Then, on the last line, the word that changes the weight of the parcel in your hand.

Australia.

It's the first copy to go there. Printed here like all the others, with a handwritten note folded inside, and sent to the far side of the planet, where the season is turning the other way. When I'm making the first coffee of the day in Yorkshire, it's already late afternoon there. The book will arrive in spring.

That feels right. The Luxury of Listening was never meant to move fast. It began with no cover, then grew one, then took on a colour, then a dot in the centre that I only later recognised as the middle of a record. Much of that change came from the Listening Club: one album a month, played all the way through, on the last Sunday, with members writing back afterwards about what they'd heard. The book kept shifting to hold what they sent.

The October Listening 100 works on the same instinct. It isn't a list of whatever arrived loudest. It's the records people stayed with. A book crossing hemispheres is about the slowest form of staying I can think of. It's a long way to go in a small envelope, carrying a note written in one room that will be read in another.

Somewhere, a parcel is moving south. When it lands, someone will open it, read the note, and then, I hope, put a record on.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. Subscribe for the weekly letter.

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