Bookshops

  Finally, I walked into the Librairie Kauffmann. Not only because it is the French bookshop in Athens and hence stocks books that I can read, but also because it is one of those bookshops to get a stamp on your imaginary bookshop passport. The black-and-white image of the shop’s launch is striking: dated 1919, it shows a kiosk attended by a woman dressed in traditional fashion, her head partially covered, above her the words: “Librairie Kauffmann.” Hermann Kauffmann began his business with a street stall selling second-hand French books. Ten years later, he set up in premises on Zoodochos Pigis Street, which eventually grew into a kind of large apartment with views over the avenue, and incorporated new titles into his shelves thanks to an agreement with the publisher Hachette. Soon it became the place to visit for the most enlightened people in Athens, who came to stock up on French reading-matter whilst their children bought textbooks and course reading for their French-speaking schools and academies. A diploma granted to Kauffmann in 1937 by L’Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris hangs on the staircase wall next to photographs of Frida Kahlo and André Malraux. With Hachette’s help, he created the Hellenic Distribution Agency. After his death in 1965, his widow took over the firm and was behind important initiatives, like the “Confluences” collection of Greek literature translated into French, or the publication of the Dictionnaire français-grec moderne—something that should always exist in a bookshop specializing in a foreign language: a dictionary that is at least bilingual.

  The Kauffmann web page no longer works. There is no sign on the web that the bookshop is still open. After several futile searches, I salvage the orange card from that trip, with a tree embossed above Greek and Latin characters, like a murky archipelago at the bottom of the sea. And I dial the number. Two or three times. Nobody picks up the telephone. As I wander from one search engine to the next I finally find photographs I did not want to see. One shows the Pesmazoglou Arcade—or Book Gallery—burnt to the ground during the riots at the beginning of 2012 because it was home to private enterprises, including a branch of the National Bank’s publishing house. On the other hand, although the international press initially reported that the library had also been burned down, it was not attacked or ravaged by fire: public and ancient, with an inaugural date and plans to move. Its past and future guaranteed as much as anything can be, it remains standing.

  III

  The Oldest Bookshops in the World

  As well as being old, a bookshop must look the part. When you go into the Livraria Bertrand, at 73 rua Garrett in Lisbon, very close to the Café Brasileira and its Fernando Pessoa statue in the heart of the Chiado, the B on the red background of the logo proudly displays a date: 1732. Everything in the first room points to the venerable past that this date highlights: the display cabinet of extraordinary books; the extending steps or wooden ladders that give access to the highest shelves of some of the ancient bookcases; the rusty plaque that dubs the place where you stand “Sala Aquilino Ribeiro,” in homage to one of its most distinguished customers, who was a regular like Oliveira Martins, Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental or José Cardoso Pires; and above all the certificate from the Guinness World Records that attests to it being the oldest functioning bookshop in the world.

  A functioning, moreover, that has been uninterrupted and is well documented. Books have been sold intermittently since 1581 at 1 Trinity Street, Cambridge, to famous customers like William Thackeray and Charles Kingsley, but for long stretches the premises were exclusively the seat of Cambridge University Press, with no direct sales to the public. Conversely, caught in a quagmire of the absence of reliable documents, we find Matras in the city of Kraków—still called Gebether and Wolff by elderly locals—the mythical origins of which go back to the seventeenth century (when the book dealer Franz Jacob Mertzenich opened a bookshop in 1610 that did not close until 1872), and which was the site of a renowned literary salon at the turn of this century and now hosts important literary events within the framework of a UNESCO city of literature. That is why the Librairie Delamain in Paris, which opened its doors in the Comédie Française in 1700 or 1701—according to sources—and did not move to rue Saint-Honoré until 1906, may genuinely be the world’s oldest bookshop, though I imagine it cannot prove such a felicitous uninterrupted period of bookselling. Winchester’s P&G Wells bookshop does appear to be

  the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom and quite possibly the oldest in the world with single premises that are emphatically independent (it opened a branch at the end of the twentieth century at the University of Winchester). Receipts for the purchase of books from 1729 have been preserved and constant bookselling activity in the shop on College Street appears to date back to the 1750s. In 1768, Hodges Figgis began to deal in books. The oldest bookshop in Ireland and still active, it is also the largest with a stock of 60,000 books. It is equally the most Dublinesque of bookshops, because it appears in that most Dublinesque of books, which is not Joyce’s Dubliners but Ulysses, (“She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write.”). Hatchards, which opened its doors in 1797 and has never shut them since, is London’s oldest bookshop. Its aristocratic building at 187 Piccadilly, with the portrait in oils of its founder, John Hatchard, gives the establishment a suitably antique patina. It now belongs to the Waterstones chain, but it hasn’t lost any of its plush-carpet identity: unlike more commercial bookshops, it still sells novels on the first floor and reserves the ground floor for hardback history books, biographies and current affairs, which are still purchased by customers on their way to the Royal Academy or their Jermyn Street tailors. In recent years the shop has initiated a subscription service that, in our era of algorithms, employs three expert readers to study the tastes of subscribers and dispatch a selection of books to them on a regular basis. Mary Kennedy, who was my guide to the shop’s history and hidden corners, told me proudly, “They all have the right to return the titles they don’t like but we have only ever had one return.”

  The only really important nineteenth-century bookshop I have visited is perhaps the Librería de Ávila—opposite the church of San Ignacio and very close to the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. It was supposedly founded in 1785, the year when a shop was established on that same corner selling food, alcohol and books. If P&G Wells printed books for Winchester College, its contemporaneous bookshop in Buenos Aires was linked to the nearby educational institution even by name: Librería del Colegio. There are no extant documents relating to the Librería del Colegio at the same address until 1830, when it is frequently mentioned in the press, since it hosted conversations led by Sarmiento with Estrada, Hernández, Alberdi, Aristóbulo del Valle, Groussac, Avellaneda, Perito Moreno and other intellectuals who now have streets named after them. The present building on this corner was not built until 1926, where thirteen years later the Editorial Sudamericana was founded, existing side by side with the Librería del Colegio until 1989. It was shut for four years before Miguel Ángel Ávila bought the business and renamed it after himself. The names of these shops changed much less than those of the two streets where they shared a corner: San Carlos and Santísima Trinidad, Potosí and Colegio, Adolfo Alsina and Bolívar, at the last count.

  It says “Antiguos Libros Modernos” on the façade. On my first visit to Buenos Aires, in July 2002, I bought a few copies of the magazine Sur in its basement. Touching old books is one of the few tactile experiences that can connect you to a distant past. Although the concept of the antiquarian bookshop belongs to the eighteenth century as a result of the corresponding growth of disciplines like history and archaeology, in the previous two centuries it had been developed by bookbinders and sellers who worked as much with printed books as handwritten copies. The same can be said of the catalogues of printers and publishers that evolved, from simple lists of publications, into small but sophisticated books. I have never so much as touched one of the
se relics. Or even a book that was not printed.

  Svend Dahl in his A History of the Book states that manuscripts prevailed over printed books, in the first years of printing, by virtue of a veneer of prestige, as was the case with papyrus over parchment, or in the 1960s, with handmade books over ones that were machine-set. In the beginning, the printer was the publisher: “But itinerant sellers soon appeared who went from city to city offering books they had bought from printers.” They hawked the titles they were carrying on the streets and in the taverns where they stayed and set up a nomadic market. Some also had permanent stalls in big cities. From the sixteenth century, copies of the same book could be bought in the thousands. And their readers were in the hundreds of thousands: more than a hundred thousand different printed books began to flood Europe over the next hundred years. A double system of classifying and displaying books was developed using filing boxes and cards or bookcases, it being usual for the books to be unbound so customers could choose the kind of binding they wanted for their individual copy. Hence those whimsical collections of books that only have the covers their owners selected in common. Some can be found intact in the basement of the Librería de Ávila and in the second-hand bookshops on the Avenida de Mayo.

  What were the bookshops of the eighteenth century like, when Bertrand Livreiros, Hatchards and the Librería del Colegio opened their doors in Lisbon, London and Buenos Aires, respectively? As one can see from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century engravings studied by Henry Petroski in The Book on the Bookshelf, a detailed history of how we arrange our books and the evolution of the bookshelf, the bookseller sat behind a large desk to manage his business, which was often physically linked to the printers or publishers on which it depended, and was surrounded by a display from a large archive of sewn, though not bound, folders that were the actual bookshops. The boxes were often part of the counter, as one can see in a famous engraving of the Temple of the Muses, perhaps the most legendary and beautiful eighteenth-century bookshop, located in Finsbury Square and run by James Lackington, who, refusing to destroy unsold books, sold them off cheaply in accordance with what he understood as his professional mission. He wrote: “Books are the key to knowledge, reason and happiness, and everyone, no matter what their economic background, social class or sex, has the right to have access to books at cheap prices.”

  Goethe’s is one of the finest written testimonies to bookshops; on September 26, 1786, he jotted in his Italian Journey:

  At last I have acquired the works of Palladio, not the original edition with woodcuts, but a facsimile with copperplate engravings published by Smith, an excellent man who was formerly English consul in Venice. One must give the English credit for having so long appreciated what is good and for their munificence and remarkable skill in publicizing it.

  On the occasion of this purchase, I had entered a bookshop which, in Italy, is a peculiar place. The books are all in stitched covers and at any time of day you can find good company in the shop. Everyone who is in any way connected with literature—secular clergy, nobility, artists—drop in. You ask for a book, browse in it or take part in a conversation as the occasion arises. There were about half a dozen people there when I entered, and when I asked for the work of Palladio, they all focused their attention on me. While the proprietor was looking for the book, they spoke highly of it and gave me all kinds of information about the original edition and the reprint. They were well acquainted with the work and with the merits of the author. Taking me for an architect, they complimented me on my desire to study this master who had more useful and practical suggestions to offer than Vitruvius, since he had made a thorough study of classical antiquity and tried to adapt his knowledge to the needs of our times. I had a long conversation with these friendly men and learned much about the sights of interest in the town.

  The first sentences tell of the fulfilment of a wish: the aim of every visit to a bookshop. The final sentences, the acquisition of knowledge that is not to be found in the books themselves, but in the people in their vicinity. What most surprises the erudite German traveller is the fact that all the books are bound and accessible, so visitors can establish dialogues as much with the books as among themselves. Binding didn’t become standard in Europe until the requisite machines began to function around 1823. When bookshops began to look like libraries, because they offered finished products and not half-made books, what surprised Goethe was the handmade bindings. In A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Laurence Sterne enters a bookshop on the Conti quayside to buy “a collection of ­Shakespeare,” but the bookseller tells him he does not have one. The traveller indignantly picks up a copy on the table and asks, “And what about this?” And the bookseller explains that it is not his, that it belongs to a count, who has sent it to be bound: he is an “esprit fort,” he explains, “fond of English books” and hobnobbing with islanders.

  When Chateaubriand went to Avignon in 1802 after being tipped off about pirated copies of four volumes of his The Genius of Christianity, he recounts in his memoirs that “By going from bookshop to bookshop, I unearthed the counterfeiter, to whom I was unknown.” Every city had many and we have preserved no record of most. We tend to think of literature as an abstraction when the truth is that it is an infinite network of objects, bodies, materials and spaces. Eyes that read, hands that write and turn pages and hold tomes, cerebral synapses, feet that seek out bookshops and libraries, or vice versa, biochemical desire, money to purchase, paper and cardboard, stocked shelves, pulped timber and vanished forests, more eyes and hands that drive lorries, load boxes, order volumes, browse, peer and leaf, contracts, letters, numbers and photographs, warehouses, premises, square metres of cities, characters, screens, wonders in ink and pixels.

  The word poiein that in ancient Greek meant “making” is the linguistic root of “poetry.” In The Craftsman, the sociologist Richard Sennett has explored the intimate relationship between hand and eye: “Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” He focuses especially on carpenters, musicians, cooks, luthiers, people we generally understand to be craftsmen, but the truth is his reflections can be extended both to the endless craftsmen who have always collaborated in the making of books (paper-makers, typographers, printers, binders, illustrators) and the actual bodies of readers, their dilating pupils, ability to concentrate, bodily posture, digital memory (in their fingertips). Writing itself, inasmuch as it is calligraphy—that is, manufacture—is even subject to a discipline of perfection in civilizations like the Arab and Chinese. And the move from writing by hand to keying in is still very recent in the history of culture. Although he does not intervene directly in the creation of the object, the bookseller can be understood as the craftsman reader, that person who, after the 10,000 hours that, according to various studies are necessary to become expert in a practical skill, is able to combine work with excellence, manufacture with poetry.

  Romano Montroni, who for decades worked in Feltrinelli’s in the Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, Bologna, writes in “The Bookseller’s Decalogue” that “the customer is the most important person in the enterprise,” and places dusting at the centre of activity in a bookshop: “One must dust every day and everyone must do it!” he exclaims in Vender el alma: El oficio de librero. “Dust is a vitally important issue for a bookseller. He dusts up and down and clockwise in the first half-hour every morning. While doing so, the bookseller memorizes where the books are and gets to know them physically.”

  Some of the world’s bookshops carefully nurture their tactile dimension, so that paper and wood bear witness to a tradition of craftsman readers. In England, for example, the three branches of Topping and Company were furnished with shelving made by local carpenters, and the small signs labelling the sections and the cards recommending titles are handwritten. The Bath branch’s
well-stocked poetry section shows how important it is for a bookshop to cherish and develop the interests of the local community. “People here have a great fondness for poetry,” Saber Khan, one of its staff, told me, “and we stock the largest selection of poetry in the country.” Readers, like carpenters, are different in each locality: the branches of Topping and Company “have their own identity, like brothers and sisters, but in every one coffee is free, because you can’t deny anyone their cup of coffee.” I saw readers who sat for hours on wooden chairs at wooden tables. There was a bed and bowl for the dog who roamed around the shop, his home and ours. Its slogan, “A proper old-fashioned bookshop,” could be read as “a genuine period bookshop,” or “a bookshop comme il faut, fallen out of fashion.”

  As José Pinho, the Alma Mater of Lisbon’s Ler Devagar, told me, a bookshop can regenerate the social and economic fabric of an area, because it is the present pure and simple, and a speedy engine of change. That is why we should not be surprised if many bookshops are part of greater social projects for change. I think of those in Latin American cities inspired by Eloísa Cartonera’s original shop in Argentina, with its books bound by the unemployed workers who collect paper and cardboard from the streets. I think of La Jícara, a restaurant serving the tastiest of local food wedged between a double bookshop, for both children and adults, which only sells books from independent presses in Oaxaca, Mexico. I think of Housing Works Bookstore Café, which is run exclusively by volunteers and gives all its profits from the sale of books, the renting of space and the cafeteria to help those most in need in New York. They are bookshops that hold out a hand to create human chains. There could be no better metaphor for the book tradition, because we read as much with our hands as with our eyes. I have often heard the same story on my travels. When the time came to change premises, it was the customers, now friends, who offered to help with the move. That human chain uniting the old premises of Auzolán in Pamplona with the new. Or RiverRun’s in Portsmouth. Or Robinson Crusoe’s in Istanbul. Or Nollegiu’s in the Poblenou district of Barcelona.