Double coincidence. It turns out that Christina and I had gone to the same convent school—she was a few years older. She was the swimming captain, one of the lofty “big girls”. Christina and Yasmin became friends after Yasmin got weary of chasing her away from the bookshop, where Christina would show up often to figure out puzzles, play with model aeroplanes and miniature animals, read storybooks and decline to leave. They share a loud laugh over that memory before we return to the topic of Westlands Sundries.
Yasmin took over the bookshop in 1977. “This was my fate and destiny,” she says. “I did not know anything else. I always knew that the shape of my life would be built around the bookshop.”
I attempt to broach the topic of their leaving the fifty-year flagship store in Westlands. A grimace temporarily mars Yasmin’s serene features. This is a sore point. I abandon the topic. One day I will return to it. Not today. In our general conversation, one senses the trauma of this probably unexpected amputation from the site of a girl’s moulding as daughter, businesswoman, wife, mother, citizen and bibliophile.
We return to the theme of books as we settle around a table in a café that proclaims “Happiness is a cup of coffee and a good book.” Yasmin says she holds her meetings here because it is designed for book lovers.
There are books stacked up on a shelf behind her.
“There is such pleasure in the smell of a book.” She hesitates as if afraid of exaggerating. Quietly, she explains, “It is such a personal thing.” She leans forward, “A book is not just a product; a book is an experience. To understand them you must have a feel for books.” Her eyes sparkle.
Yasmin is a gentle raconteuse with a self-deprecating sense of humour, a large-hearted woman immersed in life and its ceaseless questions. She is a soul who has taken intense journeys in and through her bookshop: business journeys, human journeys, journeys into and through discovery and loss, mostly of cherished ones like her husband Noorudin Manji, who died in 2011 and had overseen the logistics of book retailing. She had understood then that she could not give in. She had to learn to do what he had been doing. There was a city and community that needed her to keep the bookshop open. “There was never a plan B for me,” Yasmin reiterates.
This is why there is still a Westlands Sundries in a Nairobi where bookshops are a casualty of the illusion of progress. Her father, having discovered his purpose in the world of literature, was never distracted by other glittering business prospects. Yasmin inherited this single-minded focus. Our conversation wanders. It returns to the shop. She says, “Father’s bulwark was my mother Gulshan. She was the constant. When father went on his sourcing trips and to book fairs, she stood guard. She never sought the light for herself. But she stayed at her post until she died two years ago.”
Sayed’s passion was a flame that drew in his whole family. It translated into a space where the people that ended up working there are those like Elizabeth and Jackson who are open to the mystery of the world of books, insightful people who know where to find book titles, who neither fuss nor glare if someone unwraps the plastic covering of books so as to turn the pages, who have settled into the service of literature with no intention of changing tack, no matter how seductive the other offers they receive.
I ask, “How much did you change the shop after your father’s years?”
Christina cuts in. “Yasmin’s passions, her diversity of interests, all of these translated into greater varieties and categories on the bookshelves; you can see these for yourself. She has names for the infinity of new-book smells. Best of all, when you lingered in the bookshop, you got fed!”
Laughter.
As if on cue, Yasmin’s two sons Zain and Zahid appear. Zain is intense, with dark marks under his eyes. By his own admission, he is a night owl; the morning causes him to growl. The taller son Zahid is watchful and quiet. He listens. He has a wicked sense of humour. The brothers tease one another and their mother constantly. Theirs is a relationship threaded with play. Yasmin is relinquishing control of the bookshop to them, a third generation taking over. They are curious about this interview. The brothers speak of growing up deluged by books in all available spaces, in every room. They joke that when they moved house it was because the books needed a bigger place to occupy.
Zain, who is the elder, remembers with a sense of irony “I never had to buy books. Made it difficult going into a bookshop abroad. What a struggle: the choice between reading the book now, or waiting to return home to Kenya where I could get it free.” Zain’s vision for Westlands Sundries is much in keeping with the trends of the present age: the graphic novels section is his innovation. The category has its followers. It is the space where the city’s closet graphic novelists show up to find each other. The shop sells and promotes the posters and comics of some of Kenya’s best, the only bookshop that does so in Nairobi. Today Zahid, diplomat in the making, oversees some of the bookshop’s back-room stuff: stock control, bookkeeping, systems, licences. Zain, non-practising biochemist, is preparing for a Saturday free comic book day at the bookshop. Speciality events, niche marketing, author readings, gatherings of readers, multimedia—indicators of added dimensions to this bookshop’s life? Yasmin listens to her sons with equanimity, glimpsing the future, as we do, in this discussion. She is serene about the inevitability of change, understanding that a resilient system absorbs shocks and reshapes itself to accommodate and grow from the opportunities presented by a new epoch. There are lessons here for my nostalgic self.
As we bring the interview to a close, Elizabeth turns up with a well-dressed man with round spectacles and an effusive manner. Yasmin rises to greet him with warmth. She then introduces us. His name is Eduardo Moreno—a UN worker, but also a photographer whose works have been widely published.
“We are talking about books,” Yasmin says.
Eduardo notes that the bulk of his life has been spent reading books. We speak about the themes he explores in his photography. “Why did you choose Westlands Sundries to showcase your work, Wooden Dreams, in East Africa?” I ask.
He answers that it was not because they were the largest, slickest or most strategic, but it was because he felt that it was the place where books were most at home in Nairobi. “It is full of light so even I, with my eyes, can read the small print in books. It has life and space and energy. It is for people who are in love with books. They let me unwrap the plastic that covers books without rolling their eyes.”
“Dust covers,” Yasmin chips in. “We cover the books to protect them from dust discolouration.”
Eduardo quips, “In other bookshops the plastic is a defence against readers. They forget that an important part of book buying comes from having a tactile connection with the pages.” We laugh the laugh of those who “get” a secret code. As if in confidence, he adds, “Here you can stop. You can talk. You can walk through book worlds. You meet life. You make friends.”
We leave the coffee shop in a chattering convoy.
For a moment, I forget that this is an interview. The spirit of the place has rid me of some unstated fear. With a fresh insight into its history, I feel secure in my memory of Westlands Sundries. What endures? I sometimes wonder. In this encounter, what endures are stories we are compelled to tell because of the people we have met and known in life and literature; what endures is the legacy of a man in love with books, who infused his wife and daughter, a city, a nation and the world with his passion. What endures are unexpected meetings that unfold in spaces warmed and touched by books.
Before I exit the bookshop, one more thing.
I explain.
“My mother, elegantly aged, and retired, keeps a garden she loves. In this season of Nairobi storms, her plants are suffering. Might you have a book on the management of waterlogged land?”
Jackson retrieves three possibilities. I choose one. At the till, Elizabeth slips it into a plain bag. No “Westlands Sundries” branding. However, I no longer need to be reminded that here I can reclaim a space where the sense of
a constant “home” in a mercurial city abides.
Snow Day
MICHAEL DIRDA
On the morning of Friday, 22nd January 2016, Washington DC was preparing for snow. In fact, the city was hunkering down for a major blizzard. School had already been cancelled and the subway, astonishingly, would be closed all weekend. By that afternoon nothing would be moving across the white landscape except ploughs, salt trucks and people on cross-country skis.
Just the day before, my wife had fortuitously left for San Francisco and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. In other words, I was home alone, without any—what’s the word I want?—supervision. After breakfast, a quick phone call confirmed that the Second Story Books warehouse, located in Rockville, Maryland, would stay open until the snow actually began to fall. According to the Washington Post’s weather gang, that wouldn’t be until sometime after 1 p.m. Consequently, a resolute and determined bookman—especially one whose beloved spouse was on the other side of the country—might be able to paw through a half million books for perhaps three hours. Possibly even longer, if he was willing to risk driving home at the onset of the reputedly apocalyptic storm.
Thus at a little after 10 a.m. I was blithely making my way along Parklawn Drive through an area dominated by wholesale flooring outlets, self-storage companies and electrical and plumbing supply stores. While Second Story does maintain an open shop in Washington’s bustling Dupont Circle, its offices and warehouse are out here in the suburban backwaters. Once upon a time, its owner, Allan Stypeck, operated additional Maryland outlets in Bethesda and Baltimore. But those days are long past. The used-book business has contracted significantly since the 1980s when the greater Washington metro area boasted forty or fifty shops.
They bore names like Book Alcove, Book Nook and Book Market, and many dealt principally in garage sale leftovers and current bestsellers, rather than antiquarian material. Still, the book-addled will glance around even the most lowly paperback exchange. After all, as the collector’s mantra has it, anything can be anywhere. I remember unearthing Cyril Connolly’s relatively scarce pamphlet The Missing Diplomats—published in England by the Queen Anne Press—in a junky magazine emporium near Union Station. It cost me a quarter, but finding this early account of the Burgess–Maclean spy case made my day since I was then a Connolly completist. On another Saturday, behind the counter of a Silver Spring shop not far from where I live now, I noticed a first in a fine jacket of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The dealer had priced it at $50, and soon after I bought the book—even then worth a thousand dollars—he realized his mistake.
Such discoveries keep collectors and scouts—as book runners are called in the US—coming back again and again. Once I picked up an inscribed copy of H.G. Wells’s collected stories from a sidewalk cart marked “Any book, $4; six for $20”. I stupidly crowed about this find in print and the shop’s owner was properly miffed, but he drew lots of new customers as a result. Of course, such bargains are far harder to come by in the digital age, since sellers tend to hunch over their computers all day checking online prices at Abe or Amazon. Today, it’s unlikely one could notice on an open shelf—as I once did in Winchester, Virginia, the birthplace of the immortal Patsy Cline—a first edition of Richard Garnett’s Twilight of the Gods, inscribed by the author to his close friend, the painter Ford Madox Brown, and priced at a whopping $5.
Another example: when I first arrived in Washington in the late 1970s, I worked part time at an extremely downmarket bookshop on Sunday afternoons. Its owner would accept virtually any printed matter—even Reader’s Digest Condensed Books—and in exchange offer some derisory amount in credit, never cash. But one Sunday Pat and Allen Ahearn—the owners of Quill & Brush, which specializes in fine modern firsts—charitably dropped off a couple of boxes of fiction they couldn’t sell. Being tasked with shelving this better-than-usual stock, I noticed a novel written by a woman from my home town of Lorain, Ohio. Years later, I got Toni Morrison to sign that copy of The Bluest Eye. I just looked it up online to check its current value: at least $3,500.
While I have always admired tidy antiquarian bookshops, such places are usually too well curated for my taste. Sleepers are scarce. Bear in mind that I grew up the son of a working-class, shopaholic mother who loved bargains. If it wasn’t marked down, usually by at least seventy-five per cent, she didn’t give the item a second glance. With such a heritage, I naturally gravitate toward book barns and warehouses and thrift shops where the quantity of books takes precedence over any apparent quality. Yet in overwhelming abundance lies the possibility of overlooked treasure. For instance, from Second Story’s warehouse I once scooped up a first of John Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet—a thrilling Stevensonian adventure story—for a couple of bucks. Nowadays, the warehouse runs an almost continuous forty per cent off sale of its regular stock, while its huge bargain annexe charges $4 for a hardcover, sometimes less. On the morning of the gathering storm, the annexe hardcovers were going for $2 each.
I’ve never counted how many books I own, but my attic is stuffed with genre fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—needed for a big project—and the basement is solidly packed with recent novels and non-fiction, some of it on industrial shelving but the bulk in boxes piled higgledy-piggledy. It’s really quite appalling. There’s also a rented storage unit, which has sucked a fortune out of me, probably more than its contents are worth. If forced to guess, however, I’d estimate that I own between 15,000 and 20,000 books, conceivably more. From many quite reasonable points of view I have “too many books”, but to my mind I just need more bookshelves. Or a bigger house.
Yet am I, in fact, a collector? Somewhere I read that if you couldn’t lay your hands on any book you owned in five minutes, you were just an accumulator, a hoarder. I couldn’t lay my hands on some of my books if I had five days to search for them. The great bibliographical scholar G. Thomas Tanselle contends that any true collection requires an overarching theme, a plan, defined limits. My only plan is to keep books I might need in my work or that I hope to read some day for my own sweet pleasure. That means Tarzan and the insidious Dr Fu Manchu as well as Dickens and Proust. The novelist and bookseller Larry McMurtry once observed that only those with basements or storage units like mine can enjoy the highly rarefied delight of scouting their own books: you never know what might be waiting at the bottom of the next box. Of course, McMurtry used to buy entire bookshops to stock the used and rare shelves of Archer City, Texas, his American version of Hay-on-Wye.
In my defence, I do suffer from an associative malady that permits me to justify acquiring almost any book. Take, at random, Leonard Merrick’s The House of Lynch. Merrick is now an almost entirely forgotten writer, but he was once so popular that each volume in a standard set of his works was introduced by a celebrated contemporary, in the above case G. K. Chesterton. As it happens, I’ve collected Chesterton ever since I first read The Man Who Was Thursday, so it would make perfect sense to plunk down a dollar or two for Merrick’s novel. In this case, though, I did manage to back away from the book. More clutter, I sternly said to myself. Of course, I now realize I should go back to that thrift store and see if The House of Lynch might still be there. After all, who but another Chesterton collector would want it?
The cement floor of the Second Story warehouse stands roughly three feet off the ground and there are loading bays for trucks on either side of the entrance. On that Friday morning, as Snowzilla was preparing to stomp Washington, I parked in an almost empty lot. Once inside, I said hello to Eddie, Second Story’s most senior employee, who immediately started talking about the short-sightedness of any high school curriculum that didn’t include Kidnapped. I grunted my assent, but couldn’t really waste time on our usual chit-chat, given the approaching storm and many, many shelves to look through.
Still, I would argue that under most circumstances the conversation of used book dealers or obsessive collectors is the best conversation in the world. I remem
ber once visiting Port Richmond Books, comparable in size to the Second Story warehouse, in a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. The owner’s inner sanctum included a long library table, and around it that afternoon lounged a half-dozen locals, trading neighbourhood gossip and old war stories about Vietnam as they nibbled on cheese, pickles, good bread and Polish kielbasa. Nearby was a humming refrigerator filled with beer and soda, as well as a keg of Guinness. Greg Gillespie, the owner, handed me a glass and told me to help myself to the eats. Yes, I could take along my Guinness as I prowled through his miles of fiction. I was there for hours and bought a bunch of books and left half drunk. Best afternoon ever.
At the Second Story warehouse the “regular” stock is arranged in the usual sorts of categories—mysteries, biography, literary criticism—but there are unmarked subsections as well. On the tops of some random shelves loom sets of Thackeray, Carlyle and other eminent Victorians, while certain bookcases display specialty publications, such as the garish, faux rarities of the Easton Press, the austere volumes of the Library of America, and boxed titles from Heritage and the Folio Society. Occasionally, one sees little slips of paper protruding from between a book’s pages; these slightly pricier titles are listed online. Second Story also sells graphics, movie posters, Asian art, vinyl records, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs. Near the checkout is a table covered with cartons holding dilapidated issues of Amazing, Weird Tales, Unknown, Thrilling Wonder Stories and other pulp magazines.
No matter how often I’ve gone to the warehouse I can never quite scout it all in one visit. Usually this is because of time pressure, often compounded with guilt that I should be writing or working in the garden or cooking dinner or simply doing something other than looking at old books. Over the years I’ve also learned the prudence of sneaking any newly acquired treasures into the house as covertly as possible. There’s nothing like a baleful glare from one’s beloved spouse to ruin a good day’s booking, to use a word common among American collectors. Nowadays, though, I’m in top form only during my first four or five hours in a shop; after that my head starts to grow woozy and my eyes have trouble focusing. Yet I am nothing if not dogged. After all, during those few blissful hours my cares and worries are forgotten. As a boy, I could lose myself utterly in a book; now I seem to lose myself only in used bookstores. Alas, neither sweet surrender nor wide-eyed wonder, except fleetingly, is advisable for a professional reviewer. Moreover, I’m one who, even on holiday, can’t start an Agatha Christie paperback without a pencil in his hand. My mind tends to interrogate any text, on the alert for clues, telling details, key passages, the secret engines of the story. As a result, while reading remains a pleasure, it’s become a guarded pleasure, tinged with suspicion. Quite reliably, however, my heart still leaps with childlike joy at the sight of row after row of old books on shelves.
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