Bookshops

  From at least the time of ancient Rome, bookshops have been spaces for establishing contact, in which textuality becomes more physical than in the lecture theatre or library, because they are so dynamic. In bookshops it is the readers who are most on the move, who bring the copies on display to the counter, interact with the booksellers, take out coins, notes or credit cards and exchange them for books, and who, as they move around, observe what other people are looking for and buying. Books, booksellers and bookshops stay relatively still in comparison with customers who are constantly coming and going, and whose role inside is precisely to circulate. They are travellers in a miniature city whose aim is to provoke the letters—still inside the book—into motion as long as the reading (and its recollection) lasts, because, as Mallarmé wrote: “The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must derive its mobility from the letter.” Nonetheless, the bookshop itself, with or without buyers or browsers, has its own cardiac rhythms. Not only the rhythms involved in unwrapping, arranging, returning and re-ordering. Not only those involved in changes of staff. Bookshelves also enjoy a relationship of conflict with the premises that lodge and partially define them, but do not constitute them. And with their own names, which often alter with successive owners. Inside and out, bookshops are portable and

  changeable. The reason the Guinness World Record for the Oldest Bookshop in the World is held by the Livraria Bertrand is because it is the only one that can demonstrate its longevity. Bookshops usually change names when they change hands. At the very least. The oldest in Italy is a case in point: the Libreria Bozzi was founded in 1810 and is still open on a down-at-heel corner in Genoa, but its first owner, a survivor of the French Revolution, was Antonio Beuf; it was not purchased until 1927, by Alberto Colombo, father of the first wife of Mario Bozzi, who gave the establishment, now managed by Tonino Bozzi, its current name. Another good example is the Lello bookshop in Oporto. The establishment was opened under the name Livraria Internacional de Ernesto Chardron, on rua Dos Clérigos; in 1881, José Pinto set it up on rua do Almada; thirteen years later it was sold on by Mathieux Lugan to José Lello and his brother António, who renamed it Sociedade José Pinto Sousa Lello & Irmão. And if those were not changes enough, after the building of the present edifice—a neo-Gothic and art-deco hybrid—in 1906, the bookshop was given its definitive name in 1919: Livraria Lello & Irmão. An article by Enrique Vila-Matas still hangs in a corner of the shop, where he describes it as the most beautiful bookshop in the world. The card I retain from my 2002 visit is made from elegant, slightly crinkly paper, with the logo and address printed in purple ink. Under the logo it says: “Livraria Lello.” “Prólogo Livreiros, S.A.” is the name of the company that runs it.

  Another internationally renowned, contemporary bookshop, the Luxemburg, in Turin, tells a similar story: although it was founded in 1872—if we accept that changes of owner, premises and even name do not destroy a bookshop’s identity—like Ávila, it had a different name for most of its existence. Owned by Francesco Casanova, an important Piedmontese publisher, the Libreria Casanova was a pre-eminent cultural centre in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. The Neapolitan chronicler Matilde Serao, the decadent Antonio Fogarrazo and the creator of verismo, Giovanni Verga, were some of its habitués. Casanova forged a close friendship with Edmondo De Amicis, whose Gli azzurri e i rossi he published in 1897. If the premises succeeded in catching the spirit of the times under his management, when the project was taken over in 1963 by activist and writer Angelo Pezzana, who renamed the bookshop Hellas, the new owner also knew how to connect with the times. Given that he was the founder of Fuori!, Italy’s first gay rights group, it is hardly surprising that on February 12, 1972 the bookshop launched the countercultural, psychedelic magazine Tampax that later engendered another, Zombie International. Together with Fernanda Pivano, the great promoter of American literature in Italy, Allen Ginsberg visited the bookshop five years earlier and gave a reading in the basement. When Ginsberg returned to Turin in 1992, he read a continuation of “Hum Bom!,” the poem he had begun in 1971, with Bush and Saddam as characters (I’m listening to it on YouTube as I write: an echo of the beat that bookshop had in the 1970s). Pezzana changed the name of the shop again in 1975: Luxemburg Libreria Internazionale. It continued its political and cultural activity: it was behind the inception of the International Gay Association, the Italy-Israel Foundation and the creation of the Turin Book Fair. Under wooden stairs at the back of the first floor, the bookseller’s small office is decorated with Italian and Israeli flags, and the Jewish section is almost as well stocked as the international magazines section in the entrance or books in other European languages on the floor above. There is a black-and-white photo of the beat poet and a yellowing press cutting testifying to his visit. One glass cabinet displays invoices and orders made by Francesco Casanova. Pezzana himself, his spectacles teetering on the last millimetre of his nose, takes my money for a copy of Alessandro Baricco’s latest novel, which I am buying as a present for Marilena. Access to the basement is shut off.

  A Bertrand Livreiros catalogue has been preserved from 1775, the year of the Lisbon earthquake. In it, the French brothers list almost two thousand titles, a third of which are history books, a third sciences and art, and a third law, theology and literature. The majority are written in French and were published in Paris. Many Italian and French booksellers in the Portuguese capital resumed their activities a few months after the earthquake, and although we do not have Bertrand Livreiros catalogues from those years, order forms for titles sent to the Holy Office and to the censorship body that took over its role do exist. They bought the bookshop’s definitive premises, in what was then called rua das Portas de Santa Catarina, in one of the public auctions of land devastated by the 1775 earthquake. It remained a family firm until 1876, the year it was sold on by the last direct descendant, João Augusto Bertrand Martin, to the firm Carvalho & Cia. It has since become one of the many brand-name commercial enterprises to incorporate the date 1732 into the initial B, so nobody could question its antiquity.

  On the card Pezzana gave me before we said goodbye, it says: “Fondata nel 1872.”

  IV

  Shakespeare and Companies

  I shall begin this chapter with a quotation from L’Histoire par le théâtre (1865) by Théodore Muret, recorded by Walter Benjamin in his unfinished The Arcades Project:

  There were, first, a great many milliners, who worked on large stools facing outwards, without even a window to separate them; and their spirited expressions were, for many strollers, no small part of the place’s attractions. And then the Galeries de Bois were the centre of the new book trade.

  The association between weaving and writing, between thread and text, between seamstress and artist, is a constant in the history of literature and art. The attraction to artisans and their bodies is related, in Muret’s lines, to cultural consumption. He emphasizes the absence of glass, in an era when all bookshops begin to have windows, a transparent display of the merchandise they share with toy or clothes shops. When Zweig describes the return of Jakob Mendel to Vienna, after being interned for two years in a concentration camp, he refers to “window displays of books” in the city, because that is how the inner experience of bookshops is projected outwards, and with it, the exuberance of urban cultural life. The following jotting by Benjamin surely derives from the association of ideas:

  Julius Rodenberg on the small reading room in the Passage de l’Opéra: What a cheerful air this small, half-darkened room has in my memory, with its high bookshelves, green tables, its red-haired garçon (a great lover of books, who was always reading books rather than taking them to others), its German newspapers which every morning gladdened the heart of the German abroad (with the exception of the Kölnische Zeitung which on average made an appearance only once every ten days). And when there is any news in Paris, it is here that one can receive it.

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bsp; Salons, reading rooms, athenaeums, cafés or bookshops act as second homes and political spaces for the exchange of information, as one can see in The Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, who also described bookshops as momentary homes. Local and foreign presses enter a dialogue in the extraterritorial brains of travellers and exiles, who move from one European capital to another as the Grand Tour dies out. Europe becomes a great space where books flow thanks to their industrial production, which is accompanied by proliferating bookshop chains, the promotion of serial fiction as the main form of commercial novel, an exponential increase in literacy and the transformation of the Continent into a vast tangle of railway tracks. In parallel, the institutions that look after the production and sale of books become stronger. In Germany, for example—as Svend Dahl reminds us—the Association of Booksellers was created in 1825, and twenty-three years later it succeeded in getting censorship abolished and, in 1870, in establishing a norm for the whole country that meant that an author’s copyright remained in place for thirty years after his death. By then a system of commission and intermediary wholesalers was in place. Like other consumer goods, books are also subject to the rules of labour legislation, competition, publicity or scandal-mongering.

  It was no coincidence that the two major literary scandals of the nineteenth century took place simultaneously in Paris (with apologies to Oscar Wilde, who died, poverty-stricken, in the French capital). The 1857 prosecutions for offences against

  public morality and propriety brought against Charles Baudelaire, for his masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal, and against Gustave Flaubert, for his work of genius, Madame Bovary, constitute a perfect nexus of controversy with which to illustrate the changes that were taking place in the book industry and the history of literature. Possible answers to questions like: to what extent is a writer responsible for what he writes? And what if it is fiction? Is censorship legitimate in a democratic society? To what degree can a book really influence individuals? What is a publisher’s legal relationship with his books? And the printer’s, distributor’s and bookseller’s? These are questions with distinguished precedents. After being denounced by his parish priest, Diderot was prosecuted in 1749 for his Letter on the Blind and imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes until associated booksellers managed to get him released, arguing that if the Encyclopédie project continued in abeyance, the nation’s industry would be the main victim of the damage. When El origen del narrador, which brought together the proceedings of both trials, was published, Daniel Link astutely reinterpreted the volume’s title: “Above all it concerns the (modern) notion of author: his simultaneous appearance and disappearance from the scene (of the crime) and the way in which (penal and ethical) responsibility allows specific statements to be related to specific proper names.” Baudelaire lost his case (a fine and the suppression of six poems); Flaubert won his. The proceedings reveal that the main protagonist of both trials was the prosecutor Ernest Pinard. Strangely enough, it was in the case that he lost that he showed himself to be an excellent literary critic. We owe to him the interpretation of the novel that still remains in vogue today. Every reader is a critic, but only those who make their opinions about their reading in some way public become literary critics. Pinard was one of the latter, and rightly so, as can be seen from the proceedings.

  The poet spent his whole life wanting to write “a history of Les Fleurs du mal,” in order to demonstrate that his book was “deeply moral” (although it had been found guilty of immorality). What happened to the book physically? Poulet-Masset, its publisher, continued to sell the unexpurgated edition at double the price, and even sold mutilated copies with pages missing. In 1858 he brought out a second edition, now complete again, which sold out in a few months. Unlike Wilde’s, which was a genuine tragedy, the scandals provoked by Flaubert and Baudelaire had no serious repercussions. However, they still frame the reading of both masterpieces in the present century—and of the books that followed.

  Because of its social impact, the reading of literature is conditioned by countless critical and micro-critical agents. That a critic could be a prosecutor, and that we can pursue the process through the texts he wrote, is extraordinary, as much as if a bookseller were to reveal himself in a similar way. Nonetheless, the two most important Paris booksellers of the first half of the twentieth century—perhaps in the world and of the century—did publish memoirs that enable us to glimpse how key bookshops functioned critically and related to the culture in general. A parallel reading of Rue de l’Odéon by Adrienne Monnier and Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach allows us to speak of twin projects. Even, by chance, in their initial financing, because Monnier was able to open La Maison des Amis des Livres in 1915 thanks to compensation her father received (as a result of a railway accident) and Beach’s mother lent her all her savings so she could invest them in a business that opened its doors at a nearby address in 1919 and moved to l’Odéon two years later. The most important aspect of the trade for both women was the opportunity it afforded to mix with writers who were their customers and who also became their friends. Most of their respective books are dedicated to celebrating their distinguished visitors: Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Paul Valéry, Jules Romain or Léon-Paul Fargue, amongst others, in the case of La Maison des Amis des Livres; Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Prévost, André Gide, James Joyce or Valéry Larbaud, in the case of Shakespeare and Company. That is, if such a division is even possible, because visiting the rue de l’Odéon meant paying a visit to both bookshops and the clientele and friendships of the two booksellers meshed as much in their cultural activities as in their personal lives. While Monnier maintains a degree of balance and devotes similar amounts of space to all her favourite authors, Beach comes down overwhelmingly on the side of Joyce, whom she considered to be “the greatest writer of our era” even before she met him. The entire Joyce family linked up with Shakespeare and Company from the start: youngsters Giorgio and Lucia carried boxes when the bookshop moved from its original premises on rue Dupuytren to its definitive base on l’Odéon, which acted as post office and bank for the whole family, and later Lucia was the lover of Samuel Beckett, her father’s assistant, and of Myrsine Moschos, who helped Beach in her bookshop. The story behind the publication of Ulysses is the central thread of her book and its author’s personality permeates the text, for good or for evil, like a cloud of black-and-white butterflies. I do not think it is pure chance that that book and author are key: literary bookshops shape their discourse by creating a sophisticated taste that prefers difficulty. As Pierre Bourdieu says in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste: “The whole language of aesthetics is contained in a fundamental refusal of the facile, in all the meanings which bourgeois ethics and aesthetics give to the word.”

  Monnier talks of “the beautiful visits: by authors and well-read fans,” Beach of the “pilgrims” who come from the United States, attracted by the aura given the city by the presence of Picasso, Pound or Stravinsky. In fact, she becomes a genuine “tourist guide” when visitors like Sherwood Anderson—one of many—ask her to take them to the residence of Gertrude Stein, and she documents such activity in her pilgrims’ sanctuary thanks to the collaborations of Man Ray, whose photographs festoon the establishment. Both places were also lending libraries (in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway comments that there was no money to buy books in those days). And Shakespeare and Company also had a guest bedroom. So they acted as art gallery, library and hotel. And embassy: Beach boasts about buying the biggest United States flag in the whole of Paris. And cultural centre: readings and lectures were given periodically in both, and La Maison was home to the first public performance of “Socrate” by Erik Satie in 1919, as well as the first reading of Ulysses two years later. Music and literature that were difficult and distinguished.

  Beach decided to keep the bookshop open during the Occupation, but her nationality and Jewish friendships came to the attention of the Nazis. One day, in
1941, “a high-ranking German officer” turned up and in “perfect English” told her that he wanted to buy the copy of Finnegans Wake that was in the window. She refused to hand it over. He came back a fortnight later and threatened her. The intellectual decided to close her business and store all its material in a flat in the same building, above which she herself was living. She spent six months in an internment camp. She remained in hiding on her return to Paris: “I visited the rue de l’Odéon daily, secretly, and heard the latest news of Adrienne’s bookshop, saw the latest volume of the clandestine Éditions de Minuit.” Hemingway was the soldier in the Allied Armies who, in 1944, liberated the street with the mythical bookshops (and then he went to the bar at the Ritz to “liberate” that as well). La Maison continued to be open until 1951, four years before the death of Monnier, who committed suicide after eight months of hearing noises inside her head.