Overwhelmed with advice, I left El Ateneo empty-handed. Ben wasn’t impressed. What was I—a pilgrim?
In truth, lovers of bookshops can be much like pilgrims; sometimes a shop has a hallowed reputation, and we travel in the hope of a salvific moment. To Paris’s Shakespeare and Company, the late George Whitman’s tribute to the bookshop of that name run by Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses. To the Bertrand in Lisbon, which opened in 1732 and moved to its present site in Rua Garrett after the original shop was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1755. To Selexyz Dominicanen, which inhabits a thirteenth-century church in Maastricht and used to serve as a peculiarly majestic bike-shed. To the now-defunct Rizzoli on New York’s West 57th Street, with its dramatic chandeliers and bas-reliefs, or Tokyo’s Morioka Shoten, which at any given time stocks multiple copies of just one book. To Hay-on-Wye at the border between England and Wales, a town of 1,500 souls that has two dozen bookshops and each year briefly swells to accommodate fifty times that number of people as it hosts its famous festival, once described by Bill Clinton as “the Woodstock of the mind”.
For most of us, though, the richest bookshop epiphanies have happened not in places to which we traipsed like pious seekers, but in ones we stumbled on.
I’m twenty-three, and I am in Rouen, birthplace of Gustave Flaubert. I first encountered Flaubert through Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot, which is narrated by a cranky retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who is obsessed with accumulating trivia about the writer in a bid “to anatomize the processes of human identity”. The day after drinking too many Belgian beers in one of Rouen’s rowdier bars, I’m fit to anatomize only the livid rhythms of my hangover, but I buy a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The shop is small and brown and wears the odour of yesterday’s cigarettes, and dust sits stubbornly on top of every volume; in short, I’m in the land of cliché, and the tight-lipped owner looks as if she could play one of the Thénardiers in Les Misérables—not barrel-like Madame, but rickety Monsieur. The price of my find is ludicrously modest. It’s the pale yellow Gallimard edition, and I treat it like treasure, carrying it off to a café where I order a restorative Badoit and begin to read. I’ve coveted this particular edition of Madame Bovary since I saw it in Grant & Cutler in London, maybe six or seven years ago. The book has a military stiffness that suggests it’s designed to be read many times. I feel mature and serious simply because I have it in my hands. My very own copy. And never mind that the people at neighbouring tables are rolling their eyes—Voici un touriste prétentieux!
In an essay on his life as a bibliophile, Julian Barnes recalls the period in his teens when he discovered “the excitement and meaning of possession”: “To own a certain book—one you had chosen yourself—was to define yourself.” More than that, it seems to me, to choose a book and take custody of it is a small enlargement of one’s self. Many of us cherish libraries, which are on the whole wonderfully democratic institutions and often the wellspring of ideas, but it is on our own bookshelves, packed with our purchases, that we find the archives of our desires, enthusiasms and madnesses.
I’m thirteen, and I accompany my English teacher to a local shop—a place that in my mind is the same shade of blue as a robin’s egg—to select some books suitable for handing out at end-of-term prize-giving. The idea is that I’ll help him choose titles my schoolmates may actually want, rather than the sort of austere tomes that are usually dispensed on this occasion. Scanning the display of new hardbacks, I’m thrilled to find that some previous browser has slipped into their midst a book called Merde, full of “the real French you were never taught at school”. No kidding. As I gobble up the unfamiliar racy phrases, I do a dreadful job of selecting books for the prizewinners, and I can’t shake my puzzlement—remember, I’m thirteen—at the presence in Merde’s section about sex of une nuit blanche, meaning “a sleepless night”.
Absurd as it may sound, that was a critical moment in my becoming interested in language—in slang, and in the intriguingly disparate slangs of different languages. A bookshop accident launched a lifelong passion.
It’s this phenomenon that Mark Forsyth addresses in his essay “The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted”. When we shop online it’s easy to find what we want, yet, when it comes to books, “it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them”. “A desire satisfied,” reflects Forsyth, “is a meagre and measly thing. But a new desire!”
Bookshops are forever producing new desires, and they are forever seeding desires in us that will lie dormant for a long time and then suddenly germinate. This is their magic: inspiration wafts through us, serendipity wakens unfamiliar cravings, dreams dilate, enlightenment irradiates the soul.
Saša Stanišić’s piece in this volume likens the relationship between vendor and reader to a drug user’s link with his dealer: “One of you has the goods, the other wants a supply of them.” Sometimes the book buyer is looking for “the hard stuff that can set off the most complex reactions”, and sometimes a fix leaves one with “an impression of convoluted feelings going in all sorts of different directions”.
All this mind-altering magic notwithstanding, we live in an age in which bookshops are vulnerable. Their livelihood is under threat from increased rents and rates, as well as from online retail and the allure of jazzier and more aggressively promoted forms of entertainment. An aside: although bookshops are businesses, they are largely exempt from the widespread antipathy to commercialism, partly because they promote literacy and community, but also because they connect us to a past in which retail was less cutthroat and more idiosyncratic.
The essays that follow celebrate the institution of the bookshop; they argue for its value and extol its charm. At the same time, each essay cherishes a particular bookshop or the bookshop culture of a particular place. Here’s Juan Gabriel Vásquez on his two favourite spots in Bogotá, both “places of transformation”; and here’s Elif Shafak in Kadikoy enveloped by the smells of coffee and linden; and here’s Pankaj Mishra in Delhi, carving out a private space for his imagination; and here’s Ian Sansom on Charing Cross Road, unloading new stock at Foyles while the entertainer Danny La Rue descends from his pink Rolls-Royce. Daniel Kehlmann transports us to Berlin’s Mitte with its cast of conspiratorial lunchers; Dorthe Nors to rural Jutland and fashionable Copenhagen; and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor to Nairobi, which is undergoing “a delirium of reconstructive surgery”. In some cases the essay is a memorial: Iain Sinclair writes about the defunct Bookmans Halt in St Leonards-on-Sea; Yiyun Li about Beijing’s long-gone Foreign Language Bookshop; Stefano Benni about the “dark, mysterious cave” that was La Palmaverde in Bologna.
This is not a gazetteer, a guide to the bookshops of the world. Instead it’s an anthology of personal experiences of the book, the most resonant object of the last millennium, and of the special place where readers go to acquire their books—a pharmacy or pharmacopoeia, a miracle of eclecticism, a secret garden, an ideological powder keg, a stage for protest against the banality and glibness of the rest of the world, and also a place of safety and sanity, the only kind of grotto that is also a lighthouse.
Bookshop Time
ALI SMITH
From time to time over the past few years I’ve done volunteer stints a few hours a week selling books at our local Amnesty International second-hand bookshop, Books for Amnesty. I live in a university town in the south of England and the book donations that come in, sometimes seven or eight in a plastic bag, sometimes a whole vanful, a house clearance, someone’s whole library, are endlessly interesting, tend towards the eclectic and are almost always unexpected repositories of the lives they’ve been so close to.
Open this copy of Ballerinas of Sadler’s Wells (A. & C. Black Ltd, 1954) with its still bright-orange-after-sixty-years cover and its black and white photo of Margot Fonteyn on the front, its original price of six shillings on
the back (now selling at £2). In blue ink on its first page, in neat child’s handwriting: Christmas 1954 To Caroline From Christopher. Tucked in beside this there’s a postcard of a swaggering tabby cat wearing a collar, and written on the back of it in an adult hand in faded blue, DARLING CAROLINE, PLEASE do send me a list of things you would like to have so that I can have some help to find YOU a birthday present. I shall be stopping at LIZZIE’S next week so please tell Nannie that my address will be Trumpeter’s House. Lots of love xx from Mamma xxxxx I thought Papa’s present from you lovely.
Or inside The Book of the Art of Cennino Cennini (Allen and Unwin, 1930) a ticket, single, dated 20th July 1936, Chatham and District Traction Company.
Or inside an American first edition of The Buck in the Snow by Edna St Vincent Millay (Harpers and Brothers, 1928) a business card for Miss Katzenberger’s Piano Lessons and an address in Queens, New York.
We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus: cigarette cards with pictures of trees or wildlife; receipts for the chemist; opera or concert or theatre tickets; rail or tram or bus tickets from all the decades; photographs of places and long-gone dogs and cats and holidays; once even a photo of someone’s Cortina. Now when I donate books to the shop I have a flick through to make sure that anything tucked into them isn’t something I might mind losing.
The volunteers, like the books, are of all ages and all lifewalks. They all have some things in common; they’re doing this for nothing, for Amnesty, most of them because they really love books, many of them because they love the shop, and all of them because they’re community-minded. It’s quiet in there, browsy, passers-by getting out of the rain, regulars who love the place and know that its stock can be curiously timely—it’s not unusual to hear someone exclaim out loud at finding just the book she needs or he’s been looking for all this time—and the occasional rogue, like the slightly drunk man who chatted to me for a bit at the cash desk then said, as he left: I was actually planning on shoplifting from here but since you’re Scottish I won’t. I called after him as he went out the door: If you’re going to shoplift don’t do it from a charity shop, for God’s sake. He gave me a wave and a smile through the window.
Here are some of the things he could’ve lifted that day. A Leonard Woolf novel called Sowing, signed inside Elizabeth from Leonard, Christmas 1962 (the Leonard who wrote it?). Another Leonard, a biography of Bernstein, definitely signed by the actual Leonard himself in a sloping hand. A copy of Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele, signed and dedicated by Munthe to Lady Astor. A ragged copy of A Girl Like I by Anita Loos, in which someone has scrawled in claw-hand on the first page, pArts Of tHis boOk are VERy sAD.
For every book I donate myself—and this is the problem with a shop like this—a new-bought old book or two, or three or four, tend to come home with me. So much for culling. But what can you do, when you pick up Hunter’s Guide to Grasses, Clovers and Weeds, 1978 (now £3); flick through it and find out that there are kinds of grass called Timothy and Lucerne, that Timothy came from the US in the 1720s, and Lucerne can’t be hurt by drought because its roots go so deep? Or 1964’s National Rose Society Selected List of Varieties (now £2.50); open it at any page and look what happens: Oberon, Ohlala, Old Pink Moss, Opera. Ophelia. Optimist, the. The entry after Optimist, the, simply says: “See Sweet Repose”.
My favourite find so far has been a copy of Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, not worth much in money terms, apparently, being a second edition. But open it and on its first page someone’s stuck a photograph, a young woman in a bathing suit sitting in long grass by the bank of a river, looking in a mirror to do her make-up. Above it, in black ink, in a sweeping hand, F.N.LW. from P.A. Sept. 1933. The first bit of the book has been well-read. The later pages are still uncut.
Then there’s the Frescoes from Florence exhibition catalogue 1969, an Arts Council publication covering the late 1960s European tour. This book, I’d noticed, comes in quite regularly. It always sells. When I saw the third or fourth copy come in I picked it up and leafed through it at the desk. “As is explained by Professor Procacci in his introduction, the removal of these frescoes often laid bare the underdrawing, or sinopia, beneath.” I opened it at a page where there was a description of a sinopia in which a woman was holding a small boy by the hand, “later eliminated by the artist, who painted over that portion”. The restorers uncovered him, invisible for centuries, and there all along.
All the years I was growing up, Melvens was the only bookshop in Inverness. It did a roaring trade in tourist books, books about the Jacobites and Mary Queen of Scots, books with “the Surgeon’s Photograph” of the Loch Ness Monster on the cover. My father’s electrical goods shop was about two minutes away, and when I was a small child I used to hang around Melvens trying not to be noticed, the afternoons between school and the end of the working day when I was waiting for a lift home in the car. It was pointless to pretend to be a bona fide customer when you’re only eight, have no money and anyway everyone working in the shop knows you’re Smith the electrician’s youngest girl, in here again.
Still, I managed to read a lot of books without getting thrown out. Ghosts and Hauntings: it was full of real photographs of real ghosts! The book about the Brahan Seer, the ancient man who could see the future through a little hole in a stone he kept in his pocket, who foresaw the Clearances and the Second World War and the coming of the oil industry. He foresaw the infidelity of the husband of his patroness, the rich woman up at the big house, but when he told her about it she was so angry she rolled him down a hill in a burning barrel of tar, but not before he’d foretold the tragic downfall of her whole family and all its descendants, and flung his stone into the sea with the prediction that only a strange and misshaped child of the far future would ever find it again. Highland Folk Tales: like the one about the man who killed his friend so he could steal his money, and buried the body under a big stone at the side of the road, then years later was eating his dinner with a set of cutlery whose handles were made of bone, and the bones he held in his hands began to speak, we are the bones of the friend you killed, they said, and he looked down and his hands were covered in blood.
But this isn’t a library—even the nicer woman who worked there had to chase you by saying it, it was her job, and books were dear, I mean expensive. Though that they were dear with the other meaning of dear was clear to me too because of the way my mother and father respected books. Money’s never wasted on a book, my mother’d say. One of the very few things that she’d kept with her from her childhood all the centuries back was a small blue book marked with the stamp of the school she attended till her father died and she had to leave to go out to work, Rip Van Winkle, about the man who falls asleep for a hundred years. That book, with her name on it from before she’d married our father, was tucked at the back in her wardrobe in behind the clean rows of shoes, and one sunny June afternoon when I was nine, recovering from a bad case of mumps and had been off school for three weeks, she sent me up town by myself to test how well I was, by giving me five shillings and telling me to buy whatever I wanted with it in Melvens.
The special aura of the new-owned book, the healthy shine and promise of it: as I came into adolescence, lucky for me Melvens opened a new downstairs room full of poetry and fiction, which is where I bought my first Lawrence, Mann, de Beauvoir, Hardy, Spark, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, the bright bright orange of Plath’s Johnny Panic, the L.P. Hartley trilogy about the people with the ridiculous names, and where I first understood that bookshops were also something to do with a differently layered understanding of who you might be, since the people who knew me a bit from life in general, or knew my mother and father or sisters and brothers, but then saw me browsing by myself downstairs in Melvens, regarded me differently afterwards—very like one of the girls in the year above me at school had started treating me differently when she worked out that I didn’t just know who Joni Mitchell was, but that I knew all the lyrics off the Blue and Court
and Spark albums—and though I knew immediately it was a sort of snobbery, well, it was one I rather liked.
My English teacher caught my eye one day on the way out of class. There’s a shop opened in town I think you’ll like, she said. She told me there was a new second-hand bookshop, in a small room up the staircase next to the Market Bar.
My mother looked aghast when I told her. The Market Bar! she said. I’m not going to a bar, I said. It’s a shop. It’s called Leakey’s.
The smell of paperback ink and paper was its own intoxication. The books seemed to tower higher than the room. I went, and so did most of the money I earned on a Saturday, £10 a day working in the restaurant at Littlewoods where the other Saturday girls made fun of me for spending my pay packet on so many books every week, and the full-time women were unexpectedly kindly about my being so bookish. What did you get this time? John Wyndham. H.G. Wells. Joseph Conrad. Epictetus. Turgenev. Graham Greene. Anything. Everything. A thick green Tennyson collection I saw on the shelf in there one day then had a dream about that night; I told my mother about the dream the next morning. Here, she said to me the next time I was going across town, holding out a note, her purse open in her hand. Buy that book you dreamed about.
I still have most of the books I bought at Leakey’s, which had moved from its staircase to a riverfront store many times the size of the narrow room, and happens right now to be one of Inverness’s true attractions, one of Scotland’s largest collections of second-hand books and maps, and a stunning and welcoming and balconied booklined paradise with a huge log-burning stove at the heart of it, the promise of something warm to eat always in the air, still at home nearly forty years on in a huge converted church tucked behind the river bank.
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