We meet Gordon Comstock as he works his shift as a clerk at a bookstore. He reflects angrily on how he accepted a threepenny in change when buying cigarettes from a shop girl. Gordon finds just having a threepenny embarrassing: “Because how can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it’s the answer to a riddle” (4).

Gordon surveys the novels in the store’s lending library and bitterly thinks about his own book, a poetry collection titled Mice, which sold poorly. He feels only contempt for all the novels in the book collection. They remind him not only of his failed book, but also that he has been working on a new poetry book, London Pleasures, for years and still has not finished: “For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer,’ and he couldn’t even write!” (8-9). His only comfort is that many of the books in the store, even the classics, are neglected and decaying.

Gordon also turns his cynical and cruel eye to his customers, who include:

• A middle-class man Gordon suspects is looking for “smut” (7)
• A couple of working-class women praising “essentially English” writers (12)
• A young man Gordon thinks is wealthy and whom he identifies as gay or, to use his own slur, a “Nancy” (13)
• A visibly impoverished woman who tries and fails to sell Gordon a bag full of books in bad states
• Two “upper-middle-class ladies” who are regulars that look at books about dogs and cats but never buy anything (17)
• A shy young man who is also a regular
• A young woman looking for “hot-stuff modern love-stories” (18)