The World in Bookshops
EDITED BY
Henry Hitchings
PUSHKIN PRESS
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction: A Place to Pause
HENRY HITCHINGS
Bookshop Time
ALI SMITH
Something that Doesn’t Exist
ANDREY KURKOV
The Pillars of Hercules
IAN SANSOM
A Tale of Two Bookshops
JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ
Leitner and I
SAŠA STANIŠIĆ
All that Offers a Happy Ending Is a Fairy Tale
YIYUN LI
If You Wound a Snake…
ALAA AL ASWANY
Desiderium: The Accidental Bookshop of Nairobi
YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR
Snow Day
MICHAEL DIRDA
Dussmann: A Conversation
DANIEL KEHLMANN
La Palmaverde
STEFANO BENNI
A Bookshop in the Age of Progress
PANKAJ MISHRA
Intimacy
DORTHE NORS
Bohemia Road
IAIN SINCLAIR
My Homeland Is Storyland
ELIF SHAFAK
WRITERS’ BIOGRAPHIES
TRANSLATORS’ BIOGRAPHIES
About the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction:
A Place to Pause
HENRY HITCHINGS
I’m nine years old, and I’ve been given a book token for my birthday. My mother takes me to spend it. The shop, all polished wood and green carpet, makes me think of a billiard table. I’ve recently read and enjoyed Frank Herbert’s Dune, a novel full of characters with names that strike even a nine-year-old as quaintly improbable (Duncan Idaho, Wellington Yueh), so I pick out the sequel, Dune Messiah, and then I grab the next two volumes in the series, Children of Dune and God Emperor Dune. “Who are you trying to impress?” asks another shopper, before adding, “The best one’s Beach Party on Dune.” “I haven’t heard of it,” I say sheepishly, and he laughs.
Recalling this now, I can picture exactly what the Dune books looked like, even though I gave up on the series halfway through the second volume. But it’s the book that didn’t exist that looms largest in my imagination; Beach Party on Dune really ought to have been written—hello again, Duncan Idaho—and sometimes I fantasize about finding a bookshop so profusely stocked that it’ll be there.
In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges published an essay in which he pictured a “total library” containing every possible book, and he returned to this theme in his story “La biblioteca de Babel”, visualizing a library that encompassed “all that is able to be expressed, in every language”. What I have in mind is a variant on this: a total bookshop, which includes, like Borges’s library, a faithful catalogue of all it contains, a panoply of false catalogues, proofs of the falsity of the false catalogues, proof of the falsity of the true catalogue…
I’m fifteen, and at the local bookshop, a single bright room with tall white shelves, there’s a large display stand dominated by Picador and Faber paperbacks, all of which look enticing. For a couple of weeks I eye up The Great Shark Hunt—a chunky collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism, dense with trippy verbiage. (Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t buy it, but wonder if perhaps it was beyond my schoolboy budget.) One day, while flicking through The Great Shark Hunt, I’m distracted by a friend who wants to go and procure some Nerds—sweets that are like fizzy drips of candle wax—and it’s only when I am a hundred yards from the shop that I realize I have liberated the book. I now face the challenge of returning it, undetected. It would be easier to keep it, of course, and part of me is willing to pretend that Hunter S. Thompson is the sort of writer whose books one ought to steal. But instead I go back and try to sneak The Great Shark Hunt into its rightful place on the display stand—except the stand chooses this moment to revolve extravagantly, and I almost knock it over, and then it almost knocks me over, and the shop’s proprietor, who resembles an angry hawk, swoops in to ask me what the hell I’m doing.
Throughout my teens, bookshops served as places of furtive self-education. I still like the idea that a bookshop can be an informal library, though not a lending library, and I know I learnt a lot about literature by snooping around well-stocked fiction sections. I can remember catching a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at a time when I knew nothing of Virginia Woolf; I concluded that she was someone I ought to be daunted by, and it was therefore a thrill, not long afterwards, to see a whole shelf of her novels (the Oxford World’s Classics editions, each with a yellow spine and a flash of red at the top) and to pluck down Orlando and start reading.
“He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it…” What madness was this? The very words “There could be no doubt of his sex” created room for doubt, and I was hooked. The next paragraph, nearly three pages long, contained a word I’d never seen before, asphodel, and the febrile pleasure of encounter caused me to collide with another customer, who clearly—and not unreasonably, though incorrectly—thought this was my idea of flirtation. So much to know. So much to find out. And always the sense of the bookshop itself as a cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, and a place of minor embarrassments.
I’m eighteen, and I am holding a copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This is in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, in the second-hand department, a place where earnestness goes to ramify and breed—and where all the stock seems overpriced but also either urgently necessary or naggingly desirable. Pound’s Cantos is a mixture of the two: I ought to be familiar with these poems, given that I’m about to study modernism, and this particular copy, with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sketch of Pound on the spine, is in mint condition. I turn it over several times, trying to work out how it’ll fit in with the bedlam of my student bookshelves. A voice intrudes: “You won’t understand that.” It emanates from the beard of a visiting scholar I’ve previously noticed haunting the English faculty library, and he removes the book from my hand and says to his young companion, “If I press this on you, will you read it?” I want to tell him that the volume is mine and that he’s a shit-breeched poltroon who shouldn’t be pressing anything on anyone. But he beats me to the punch: “Stick to the easy stuff, little man.”
At eighteen, the easy stuff was the last thing I wanted.
I was determined to stretch myself, to augment my reality.
Pound’s sprawling, refractory epic, with its fusion of personal and intellectual history, was precisely what I was after.
I recently reread the Cantos, inspired to do so by visiting San Michele, the island in the Venetian lagoon where Pound is buried—and where, in the driving June rain, I was wretchedly incapable of locating his grave. Now I look again at my copy of the book. I’ve written the date inside: 2nd November 1993. Hmmm. I was eighteen then, so maybe the visiting scholar’s young companion wasn’t persuaded after all.
I’m twenty-six, and I’m in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which is famous for having been founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (and less famous for having been co-founded by Peter D. Martin, who was the son of the anti-fascism crusader Carlo Tresca). I have read Ferlinghetti and think of him as an indescribably romantic figure—the name helps, and so does the fact that he published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and was prosecuted on account of its alleged obscenity. For half an hour I nose around the shop, which somehow puts me in mind of an abandoned tram; I manage to avoid being the rube who asks “Where’s Ferlinghetti today?”, and I buy a copy of McSweeney’s, a newish and much-admired literary magazine I have heard of yet never previously seen. It’s a hardback, costing abou
t double what I paid for my dinner. But it contains a 44-track CD, each piece of music on it corresponding to an item in the magazine; so, for instance, there’s a one-page short story by Lydia Davis, “Oral History with Hiccups”, and the track that goes with it, by They Might Be Giants, is called “Drinkin’” and is an instrumental number featuring a bass saxophone, presumably played by John Linnell, who came ninth in People magazine’s poll of The Most Beautiful People of 1998. The guy manning the cash register looks like he knows all of this. He spins the hardback on the counter, grins, and says, “So now you’re part of the problem.”
The problem? When I replay this episode in my mind, I think he was joking. I entertain the possibility that he regarded me as yet another chin-stroking try-hard, but conclude that he saw me for what I was: a little too eager to be tasting the cool new flavours, but worth encouraging. He wanted me to feel like I was tapping into something edgy, or at least fresh.
So, the “problem” is a good one. A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural events. A centre of dissent and radicalism. A place to disseminate notions too strange or explosive for mass circulation. A means of creating and nurturing coteries of readers. These ideas surface repeatedly in this volume: I think of Alaa Al Aswany’s image of a bookshop as a mustering point for participants in Egypt’s 2011 revolution and of Andrey Kurkov’s portrait of Bukinist, a nerve centre for the artistic life of Chernivtsi, Ukraine’s so-called Little Vienna.
A final note about City Lights: not long ago I read an interview with some of the shop’s current staff, and one, Tân Khánh Cao, reported that “For a while there was a woman who used to sneak in a staff door, and slide down the wooden chute into the room we receive books in. She made herself a bed out of bubble wrap at the bottom of the chute and was found asleep several times.” That’s not the kind of hospitality generally expected of bookshops, yet it seems apt in the case of City Lights, which has always prided itself on being a cradle of democracy.
I’m twenty-nine, and I am in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London. One of those time-warped bunkers that’s all dark wood and bile. I’ve gone in because there’s an eighteenth-century copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in the window. I wrote my doctoral thesis on Johnson, and I’d love to own his Dictionary. I ask which edition it is. The man guarding the till looks me up and down. “The sixth.” I know that the sixth edition was published in 1785, the year after Johnson’s death. I ask the price, and he tells me I can’t afford it, and I say I wouldn’t mind knowing in any case, and he explains that some old books are hard to come by and are as a result valuable, and I say I know, and then he says that my big overcoat makes me look like a shoplifter and I’d better shove off or he’ll call the police.
What would the police have done? At the time (2004) it wasn’t yet the norm to get arrested for wearing a heavy overcoat. Perhaps my offence was to blunder into one of those bookshops—less common now than they used to be—where the stock isn’t really for sale and the establishment’s raison d’être is to provide employment for people constitutionally unsuited to any form of work requiring social competence.
There is another side to this, I know. In his jaundiced essay “Bookshop Memories”, George Orwell recalls the customers who plagued him when he toiled at Booklovers’ Corner in Hampstead, which he did while writing his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It wasn’t “a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios”, and his presence was welcome not because he knew about literature, but because he was tall and could reach the shop’s highest shelves without a ladder. He had to attend to students trying to find cheap copies of textbooks and to “vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews”. “Many of the people who came to us,” he writes, “were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.”
No doubt there have been times when I’ve been one of those people. Sometimes annoyingly pedantic. Sometimes annoyingly inexact: “I’ve seen this book. I remember it’s got a white cover. I think it’s about the brain…”
I’m forty-one, and I am in The Bookseller Crow, in Crystal Palace—named after one of its owners, and also apparently in homage to the scavenging birds that terrorize visitors to the nearby park. It’s a defiantly independent bookshop; according to my copy of the London Bookshop Map, it’s one of 107 in the city, and “has the widest selection of UK and US titles south of the river”. I select Tom Drury’s novel The End of Vandalism. The man behind the counter, whom I later identify as co-owner Jonathan Main, mentions that he was instrumental in getting the book published in the UK, more than twenty years after it came out in the US.
I’ve been to bookshops that sell coffee and cakes, and I know of one that’s a Thai restaurant, and I’ve chanced upon several that seem to function as drop-in centres for the desperate. There’s a common assumption today that, in order to thrive, bookshops need to be good at things other than selling books. Yet what I look for in a bookshop is still a passion for books themselves. Not a front-foot, evangelizing passion, but the kind of ardour that expresses itself as a desire to have stock that other shops don’t have and to represent the world of books with sensitivity and conviction. The kind of ardour that may even lead the bookseller to intervene, just occasionally, in the production and reproduction of literature.
I’m thirty-seven and on a walking holiday in Norfolk. One afternoon in Burnham Market I stop for a sandwich and what I allege will be a quick browse at the Brazen Head Bookshop, which occupies several rooms in an old, porridgy-looking house. I’m not quick. I do, however, manage to choke back the urge to buy half a dozen volumes, and emerge with only one—the Victorian diary of Benjamin Armstrong. I have been seduced by an entry in which he records going to a disappointing party: “small rooms, piano out of tune, bad wine, and stupid people.” This is a pretty tart assessment, and seems all the more pointed for its author being a clergyman.
Inspecting my purchase as I leave, I find a train ticket inside: Cambridge to Norwich, first class. What’s this? An academic shuttling between seats of learning? Some latter-day Benjamin Armstrong jaunting between cathedral cities? An upwardly mobile footballer hoping for an advantageous transfer? Fanciful, I know. Yet such is a second-hand book’s power to enchant.
Virginia Woolf wrote that “Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” The vaster the flocks, the more variegated, and, as Michael Dirda comments in his essay here, “in overwhelming abundance lies the possibility of overlooked treasure”. But whatever its size, a colony of second-hand books always has an evocative smell. At the risk of sounding like a breathless oenophile, I’d claim that among its usual scents are almond and vanilla, a grassy sweetness, damp wood and even a hint of mushroom; teased by these aromas, I find myself in a forest, able to slip between worlds or between times, hopeful that behind some of the dark leaves there are golden ones.
Every second-hand shop is an opportunity for a treasure hunt, and is crammed with stories, since every item on its shelves comes with extra layers of history—the traces of past owners, their scribbled marginalia and Post-it notes. Their rail tickets. I once bought a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Selected Poems that contained, as a makeshift bookmark, the wrapper from a condom. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
In her essay “Bookshop Time”, Ali Smith writes of how “We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus”. Discarded books are “repositories of the lives they’ve been so close to”, and a second-hand bookshop is a museum of special moments in those lives. Many of these are acknowledged in the form of inscriptions—melancholy items, since they were fondly written and received by people who are probably now dead.
One of the strangest inscriptions in any second-hand book I’ve bought is in my
copy of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight; it’s essentially a declaration of love, framed in an oblique style that some might consider quintessentially English, and it is therefore more than a little sad that I acquired the book in a charity shop just a few weeks after the date that appears at the foot of the page.
I’m thirty-one, and I’m in Buenos Aires. My friend Ben, who is not a big reader, insists we visit El Ateneo (or, to give it its full name, El Ateneo Grand Splendid), a bookshop that occupies what was once a theatre and preserves its elaborate frescoes and carvings. At first it appears ordinary, but then I’m in a brightly lit auditorium, straining to look up at the balconies and painted ceiling. I decide I must buy something by Borges; I’ve read his stories in translation, and now, although my Spanish is nowhere near good enough for me to attempt them in the original, I feel obliged to kid myself that I’m equipped to do so and that maybe I can improve my command of the language by swimming in the Argentine master’s prose. Not that his prose is a place to immerse oneself, exactly, since it’s so abrupt and epigrammatic—frugal, even. But I’ve yet to become aware of this. As I examine a paperback of Borges’s Ficciones, another browsing shopper tells me I must read Adolfo Bioy Casares; when my fumbling reply makes it clear that I’m uncomfortable speaking Spanish, he switches to English and tells me that Casares is “more clever even than Borges”. An older man chips in to say that Casares was married to Silvina Ocampo, whose stories are “like dreams”, and then his companion wants to know if I have read Julio Cortázar. I haven’t, and she steers me to where Cortázar’s novels are kept. “The best is Rayuela,” she tells me, “but it is difficult.” I ask if she could recommend something more accessible, and she laughs. “Nothing of Cortázar is easy. Everything is alucinación.”
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