Bookshops

  Chatwin’s funeral was held in a West London church, though in 1989 his ashes were scattered by the side of a Byzantine chapel in Kardamyli, one of the seven cities Agamemnon offers Achilles in return for the renewal of his offensive against Troy in the southern Peloponnese, and near the home of one of his mentors, Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travel writer and, like him, member of the Restless Tradition. Thirty years earlier, a young man from the provinces by the name of Bruce Chatwin, without trade or income, had arrived in London to work as an apprentice at Sotheby’s, unaware of his future as a travel writer, a mythomaniac and, above all, a myth in himself. He was unaware, too, that he would give his name to a bookshop in Berlin. Two bookshops stand out among the many Chatwin might have discovered when he arrived in the city at the end of the 1950s: Foyles and Stanfords. One generalist and the other specializing in travel. One full of books and the other awash with maps.

  In the middle of Charing Cross Road, Foyles’ fifty kilometres of shelves make up the world’s greatest print labyrinth. In that period it became a tourist attraction because of its size and the absurd ideas put into practice by its owner, Christina Foyle, who turned the place into a monstrous anachronism in the second half of the twentieth century. Ideas like refusing to use calculators, cash registers, telephones or any other technological advances to process sales and orders, or arranging books by publishing house and not by author or genre, or forcing her customers to stand in three separate queues to pay for their purchases, or sacking her employees for no good reason. Her chaotic management of Foyles—which was founded in 1903—lasted from 1945 to 1999. Her eccentricities can be explained genetically: William Foyle, her father, committed his very own lunacies before handing the shop over to his daughter. Conversely, Christina must be credited for the finest initiative taken by the bookshop in all its history: its renowned literary lunches. From October 21, 1930 to this day half a million readers have dined with more than a thousand authors, including T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and John Lennon.

  Such Notoriety now belongs to the past (and to books like this): in 2014 Foyles was transformed into a large modern bookshop and moved to the adjacent building at 107 Charing Cross Road. The reshaping of the old Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design was the responsibility of the architects of Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, who met the challenge of designing the largest bookshop built in Britain in the twenty-first century. They created a large, empty central courtyard suffused with bright white light reinforced by huge lamps that punctuate the vast, diaphanous text, which is surrounded by stairs that go up and down like so many subordinate clauses. A cafeteria—which is always buzzing—is at the top, next to an exhibition room equipped for trans-media projects and the main presentation room. When you walk in you are greeted by a sign at ground level: “Welcome, book lover, you are among friends.” What would Christina see if she raised her head? She would see an entire wall commemorating her crowded lunches.

  “Explore, describe, inspire” is Stanfords’ slogan, as I am reminded by the bookmark I keep as a souvenir of one of my visits to that shop. Although the business was founded in that same Charing Cross Road where Foyles still survives, its famous Covent Garden headquarters in Long Acre opened its doors to the public in 1901. By then, Stanfords had already forged a strong link with the Royal Geographical Society by virtue of producing the best maps in an era when the expansion of British colonialism and an increase in tourism had led to a massive rise in the printing of maps. Although you can also find guidebooks, travel literature and related items on the store’s three levels, whose floors are covered by a huge map (London, the Himalayas, the World), cartography plays the lead role. Even the bellicose variety: from the 1950s to the 1980s the basement was home to the maritime and military topography department. I remember I visited Stanfords because someone told me, or I read somewhere, that Chatwin bought his maps there, though there is no record of him ever having done so. The shop’s list of distinguished customers comprises everyone from Dr Livingstone and Captain Robert Scott to Bill Bryson or Sir Ranulph Fiennes, one of the last living explorers, to say nothing of Florence Nightingale, Cecil Rhodes, Wilfred Thesiger or Sherlock Holmes, who ordered the map of the mysterious moor that enabled him to solve his case in The Hound of the Baskervilles from Stanfords.

  Foyles has five branches in London and one in Bristol. Stanfords has shops in Bristol and Manchester, as well as a small space in the Royal Geographical Society that only opens for events. Chatwin missed by a couple of years the opportunity to experience Daunt Books, a bookshop for travelling readers, whose first shop—an Edwardian building on Marylebone High Street naturally lit by huge plate-glass windows—opened in 1991. The store was a personal project of James Daunt, the son of diplomats, and thus used to moving house. After a stay in New York, Daunt decided he wanted to dedicate himself to his two passions in life: travel and books. Daunt Books is now a London chain with six branches. Au Vieux Campeur has sold maps, and travel books and guides as well as hiking, camping and climbing equipment from 1941 and now boasts a grand total of thirty-four establishments across France. Such is the way of Moleskine logic.

  At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, many amateur and professional artists took up the habit of travelling with sketchbooks that had thick enough paper to cope with watercolours or India ink and sturdy covers to protect drawings and paintings from the elements. They were manufactured in different parts of France and sold in Paris. We now know that Wilde, Van Gogh, Matisse, Hemingway and Picasso used them, but how many thousands of anonymous travellers did also? Where might their Moleskines be? Chatwin gives them that name in the Australian book we mentioned and it was what encouraged Nodo & Nodo, a small Milanese firm, to launch five thousand copies of these Moleskine notebooks onto the market in 1999. I remember experiencing, on seeing some of them or the limited editions following on from that first printing in a Feltrinelli bookshop in Florence, an immediate surge of fetishist pleasure, the kind that recognition brings. It is what any committed reader feels on walking into Lello in Oporto or City Lights in San Francisco. For years you were forced to travel to buy a Moleskine. It was not necessary to go to a Paris bookshop, though that did not mean you could find them in any bookshop in the world. In 2008 they were supplied to some 15,000 shops in over fifty countries. To cope with demand, production was moved to China, although the design remained Italian. Before 2009 I had to go to Lisbon if I wanted to visit Livraria Bertrand, the oldest bookshop in the world, which fleetingly opened a branch in Barcelona, the city where I live, and serial commercial expansion won yet another victory—its nth—over that old idea, now almost without a body to flesh it out: atmosphere.

  II

  Athens: A Possible Beginning

  One can walk around and read Athens as if it were a strange souk of bookshops. Of course, the strangeness is a consequence of the decadent atmosphere and palpable feeling of antiquity rather than of the language in which shop names and shelf labels are written, not to mention book titles and author names. For a Western reader, the East begins where unknown alphabets start to be used: Sarajevo, Belgrade and Athens. On the shelves of bookshops in Granada and Venice no trace remains of the alphabets of anyone who arrived in those cities from the East in the remote past: we read all that translated into our languages and have forgotten that theirs were also translations. The centrality of ancient Greek culture, philosophy and literature can only be understood if one considers its position astride the Mediterranean and Asia, between the Etruscans and Persians, opposite the Libyans, Egyptians or Phoenicians. Its situation as an archipelago of embassies. Or radial aqueduct. Or network of tunnels between different alphabets.

  After a long search on the Internet, inspired by the card of one of the establishments I have kept from 2006, I finally find a reference in English to what I am looking for: Books Arcade, Book Gallery or Book Passage, a succession of twenty spaces wit
h wrought-iron gates that are home to forty-five publishers, including Kedros and Publications of the National Bank. I made notes on the ways bookshops relate to libraries sitting on one of the many armchairs in those passageways, under a ceiling fan that sliced through the heat in slow motion. Because the Pesmazoglou Arcade—another of its names, and a reference to one of the streets giving access—is located opposite the National Library of Greece.

  The Tunnel opposite the Building. The Gallery with no inaugural date opposite the Monument recorded in minute historical detail: neo-classical in style, financed from the diaspora by the Vallianos brothers. The first stone of the National Library was laid in 1888 and it was inaugurated in 1903. It conserves and houses some 4,500 ancient Greek manuscripts, Christian codices and important documents from the Greek revolution (it was not for nothing that the idea behind it apparently came from Johann Jakob Mayer, a lover of Hellenic culture and comrade-in-arms of Lord Byron). But any library is more than a building: it is a bibliographical collection. The National Library was previously lodged in the orphanage in Aegina, the baths in the Roman Market, the church of St Eleftherios and the University of Otto; over the next few years it will transfer to a grandiose new building on the seafront, designed by architect Renzo Piano. The present Library of Alexandria is a far cry from the original: although its architecture is spectacular, although it converses with the nearby sea and 120 alphabets are inscribed on its reflective surface, although tourists will come from all over the world to gaze at it, its walls do not yet contain sufficient volumes for it to be considered the reincarnation of the building that lends it its mythical name.

  The shadow of the Library of Alexandria is so powerful it has eclipsed every other previous, contemporary and future library, and has erased from collective memory the bookshops that nourished it. Because it was not born in a void: it was the main customer of book traders in the eastern Mediterranean in the third century BC. The Library cannot exist without the bookshop that has in turn been linked from the outset to the publishing house. The book trade had already developed before the fifth century BC; by this date—when the written was beginning to prevail over the oral in Hellenic culture—the works of the main philosophers, historians and poets we today think of as the classics were known in a large part of the eastern Mediterranean. Athenaeus quotes a lost work by Alexis, from the fourth century BC, entitled Linos, where the hero says to young Hercules:

  “Take one of these beautiful books. Look at the titles in case one is of interest. Here you have Orpheus, Hesiod, Keralis, Homer and Epicharmus. There you’ll find plays and everything you might want. Your choice will reveal your interests and taste.”

  In the event, Hercules chooses a cookery book and does not meet his companion’s expectations. Because the book trade includes every kind of text and reading taste: speeches, poems, jottings, technical or law books, collections of jokes. And it also encompasses every level of quality: the first publishing houses comprised groups of copyists on whose ability to concentrate, to be disciplined and rigorous and on whose degree of exploitation depended the number of changes and mistakes in the copies that would eventually be put into circulation. To optimize time, someone dictated and the rest was transcribed, thus allowing Roman publishers to launch onto the market several hundred copies simultaneously. In his exile, Ovid consoled himself with the thought that he was “the most read writer in the world” since copies of his works reached the furthest boundary of the empire.

  In his Libros y libreros en la Antigüedad (a shortened version of H.L. Pinner’s The World of Books in Classical Antiquity that was only published after his death), Alfonso Reyes talks of “book traders” when he refers to the first publishers, distributors and booksellers, like Atticus, Cicero’s friend, who was involved in every facet of the business. Apparently the first Greek and Roman bookshops were either itinerant stalls or huts where books were sold or rented out (a kind of mobile library) or spaces adjacent to the publishers. “In Rome bookshops were well known, at least in the days of Cicero and Catullus,” writes Reyes. “They were located in the best commercial districts, and acted as meeting places for scholars and bibliophiles.” The Sosii brothers, publishers of Horace, Secundus, one of the publishers of Martial and Atrectus, among many other entrepreneurs, managed premises in the vicinity of the Forum. Lists were posted on the door advertising the latest books. And for a small amount one could consult the most valuable volumes, in a kind of fleeting loan. The same happened in big cities in the empire, like Rheims or Lyons, whose excellent bookshops surprised Pliny the Younger when he saw that they too sold his books.

  The sale and purchase of beautiful copies increased, as did the acquisition of volumes by weight so that wealthy Romans could cover a wall with a pretence to culture and boast about their libraries. Private collections, often in the hands of bibliophiles, were directly fed by bookshops and were a model for public collections, namely libraries, which sprang up in tyrannies, not democracies: the first two are attributed to Polycrates, the Tyrant of Samos, and Pisistratus, the Tyrant of Athens. Libraries are power: in 39 BC, Gaius Asinius Polio founded the Library of Rome with booty from his campaign in Dalmatia. Greek and Roman titles were exhibited there for the first time publicly and together. Four centuries later there were twenty-eight libraries in the capital of the later Roman Empire. Now they are ruins like the library in Pergamum or the Palatine Library.

  The Library of Alexandria was seemingly inspired by Aristotle’s private library and was probably the first in history to have a cataloguing system. The dialogue between private and public collections, between the Bookshop and the Library, is therefore as old as civilisation itself, but the balance of history always inclines towards the latter. The Bookshop is light; the Library is heavy. The levity of the present continuous is counterpoised by the weight of tradition. Nothing could be more alien to the idea of a bookshop than heritage. While the Librarian accumulates, hoards, at most lends goods out for a short while—which thereby cease to be such or have their value frozen—the Bookseller acquires in order to free himself from what he has acquired; he sells and buys, puts into circulation. His business is traffic and transit. The Library is always one step behind: looking towards the past. The Bookshop, on the other hand, is attached to the sinews of the present, suffers with it, but is also driven by an addiction to change. If history ensures the continuity of the Library, the future constantly threatens the existence of the Bookshop. The Library is solid, grandiose, is tied to the powers-that-be, to local authorities, to states and their armies: as well as despoiling the patrimony of Egypt, “Napoleon’s army carried off around 1,500 manuscripts from the Austrian Lowlands and another 1,500 mainly from Bologna and the Vatican,” writes Peter Burke in his A Social History of Knowledge, in order to feed the voracious libraries of France. Conversely, the Bookshop is liquid, provisional, lasts only as long as its ability to sustain an idea over time with minimal changes. The Library is stability. The Bookshop distributes; the Library preserves.

  The Bookshop is in perpetual crisis, subject to the conflict between novelty and stocks, and precisely for that reason finds itself at the centre of the debate over cultural canons. Great Roman authors were aware that their influence depended on the public’s access to their intellectual production. The figure of Homer is located in the two centuries prior to the consolidation of the bookselling business and his centrality to the Western canon is directly related to the fact that he is one of the Greek writers of whose work we have preserved the most fragments. That is, he is one of the most copied. He is also one of the most disseminated, sold, gifted, stolen and purchased by collectors, general readers, booksellers, bibliophiles and library administrators. Our concept of cultural tradition, our list of writers and key titles depends on papyrus and parchments, rolls and codices from Greek and Roman bookshops, on the textual capital they put into circulation, provisionally confined in public and private spaces, the majority of which was destroyed in countless wars a
nd fires and moves. The location of bookshops is fundamental to the structuring of these canons: there was a time when Athens and Rome were the centre of all possible worlds. We have built our entire subsequent culture on these lost, indemonstrable capitals.

  The traffic in books shrank after the fall of the Roman Empire. Medieval monasteries continued the task of spreading written culture, through copyists, at the same time as, thanks to Islam, paper ended its long journey from China, where it was invented, to the south of Europe. Parchment was so expensive that texts were often erased so others could be put in their place: there are few metaphors as powerful as that of the palimpsest to represent the way culture is transmitted. In the Middle Ages, a book could have some hundred handwritten copies, be read by several thousands and listened to by many more since orality was once again more important than individual reading. That does not mean that the bookselling trade came to a halt. The noble and ecclesiastical classes needed, after all, to read, as did the students who relied on printed texts in increasing numbers, the oldest European universities (Bologna, Oxford, Paris, Cambridge, Salamanca, Naples . . .) having been founded between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. As Alberto Manguel has written in A History of Reading:

  From roughly the end of the twelfth century, books became recognized as items of trade, and in Europe the commercial value of books was sufficiently established for money-lenders to accept them as collateral; notes recording such pledges are found in numerous medieval books, especially those belonging to students.

  The pawning of books was a constant from that moment on, until Xerox popularized photocopying in the middle of the last century. Photocopying shops coexist in the neighbourhood of the National Library of Greece and adjacent Academy of Athens, with universities, publishing houses, cultural centres and the most compact part of the souk of bookshops, because all these institutions feed on each other. I remember reading an edition of poetry by Cavafy that I’d been carrying in my rucksack in the spacious piano bar in the Ianos bookshop, a link in a chain of civilization, with its mahogany-coloured shelves and white-on-apple-green labels, simply because I could not understand a single one of the volumes around me. I also remember spending hours between the dark wooden shelves in the Politeia bookshop; browsing, among the thousands of books in Greek, through the few hundred that had been published in English. Divided between two floors and a basement, the premises have four doors of entry. It is one of those over-lit spaces: countless rectangles of light, from barely six spotlights, make the covers, titles and floor gleam. Politeia means “community of citizens.”