Bookshops

  He had come round one of the corners of the Sahaflar Carsisi that is Turkish for “Book Bazaar.” Located in an old courtyard, boxed between the Beyazit Mosque and the Fesciler entrance to the Great Bazaar, close to Istanbul University, it occupies approximately the same number of square metres enjoyed by the Chartoprateia that was Byzantium’s market for paper and books. Perhaps because a bust of Ibrahim Müteferrika sat in the centre of the courtyard, accompanied by the titles of the first seventeen books published in Turkish thanks to the printing house he ran from the beginning of the eighteenth century, I thought I might be able to secure the anthology of travel writers employing the same tactic I had used in Budapest. Because Müteferrika hailed from Transylvania and we don’t how he came to Constantinople or why he converted to Islam, in my eyes his Turkish journey was linked with my incursions in the Balkans and along the Danube. I soon got into the habit of going there every day and upping my offer by five dollars on each visit.

  I also adopted the habit of reading in the afternoons on the terrace of the Café Pierre Loti, with its views over the Marmara, and strolling at nightfall along the Istiklal Caddesi, or Independence Avenue, the other great book centre in the city. Like Buda and Pest, the two banks of Istanbul separated by the Galata Bridge have their own idiosyncratic character which could be summed up by the two different focuses on writing: the Bazaar and the Avenue. Merchants from Venice and Genoa established themselves around the latter; there are beautiful arcades and bookshops with the price of each book printed on a white label stuck on the back cover. I looked in vain for the travellers’ anthology in places like Robinson Crusoe 389, where, conversely, I bought two books by Juan Goytisolo translated into Turkish. The photographs included in the edition of Ottoman Istanbul do not include any of the old or modern bookshops, because they have never featured in travel literature or cultural history. I searched for a bibliography on the Armenian genocide and, at the end of the avenue that looks over the Galata Tower, I finally found a bookseller who spoke perfect English—with a London accent—who referred me to the two volumes of The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey by Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw. Their index of topics left no room for doubt: “Armenian nationalism, terrorism; Armenian revolt; the Armenian question; war with Turkish nationalists.” Equally shocking but less comprehensible is the fact that the historical summary offered by Lonely Planet: Turkey also avoids mention of those systematic massacres that took the lives of a million people, the first of the genocides of the twentieth century.

  In premises close to the bust of the first Turkish printer—who was Hungarian—I had several conversations with a bookseller who spoke good English and who—as the days went by—became less and less wary. Orhan Pamuk, who had just won the Nobel Prize, was, so he said, a mediocre writer who had made the most of his foreign contacts. And the Armenian genocide was an episode in history that really did not deserve that name, because one should separate out facts from propaganda. I cannot work out if his name was Burak Türkmenogˇlu or Rasim Yüksel, because I have kept his card as well as one from the middle-aged, always freshly shaven man, who on the day I took the night bus to Athens sold me the blue-cased volume for forty dollars. However, I do remember very clearly the way his eyes shone like silver paper reflecting flames in the half-dark of his premises.

  There is an abundance of denial literature in Turkey, as there is of anti-Semitic material in Egypt or anti-Islamic books in Israel. In the Madbouly bookshop on Talaat Harb Square in Cairo I saw three copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though they also had the complete works of Naguib Mahfouz on display, the only Egyptian writer who emulated Stein or Bowles and transformed himself into a tourist attraction in his lifetime, as a regular customer at the Fishawi or Café of Mirrors. In Sefer Ve Sefel in Jerusalem, which was founded in 1975 with the idea of offering books in English and had to close down during the intifada, or in Tamir Books, on the same Jaffa Road, where they only sell books in Hebrew, and all the different political and historical tendencies, including the indefensible kind, coexist: generalist bookshops tend to be a micorcosm of the wider society: radical minorities are represented on shelves that are also in themselves minimal. But I went to fewer bookshops in Jerusalem than in Tel Aviv, a city less obsessed by religions and thus more tolerant, and the bookshop I visited daily during my stay in Cairo was the one in the American University that is apolitical and secular, and deliberately so. There I bought one of the most beautiful books I have ever given as a present: Contemporary Arabic Calligraphy by Nihad Dukhan.

  I have never seen an Arabic calligrapher in action, though I have seen a Chinese one. I visited dozens of bookshops, as is my wont, in the main cities of China and Japan, but I must say I was less interested in those big, perfectly ordered stores, from which I was driven by characters I couldn’t understand, than in another kind of space and style that attracted me with their magnetic Oriental power. I was surprised to discover in Libro Books in Tokyo that Haruki Murakami had published several volumes of cybernetic correspondence with his fans. In Shanghai’s Bookmall I liked leafing through the Chinese translation of Don Quixote. However, I particularly sought out a mixture of discovery and recognition in the Hutong tearooms on Philosophy Way, in a few gardens, in antique shops, in an old calligrapher’s workshop. Perhaps it was because I could not understand them when they spoke to me, but I liked to hear the musical rhythms of Zhongyuan or Rui’an. Perhaps because I was denied any possible access to Japanese literature in the original language, I fell in love with the paper they used to wrap books, boxes of sweets, glasses or plates, and their extraordinary, refined art of paper-making.

  I had another memorable tussle with the practice of haggling in an antiques shop in Beijing. After reviewing the dusty shelves packed with lovely objects, I was set on buying a teapot that seemed more affordable than the engravings, tapestries or vases. As we did not understand one another, the adolescent attending to me grabbed a toy calculator with huge letters and keyed in the price in dollars: 1,000. I snatched the device and keyed in my counter-offer: 5. He immediately went down to 300. I went up to 7. He asked for help from the owner, an impassive, ancient man with an alert gaze who sat down opposite me and, with a couple of whirls of his hands, indicated that it was now serious bargaining: 50. I went up to 10. He asked me for 40, 30, 20, 12. That was what I paid and I was so pleased with myself. He wrapped my teapot in white silk paper.

  It was when I saw the American tourist in Budapest paying three times more for the same box that I understood the value of my own box and, above all, my would-be value as a tourist. It was in a Beijing market the day after my new purchase that I saw a hundred teapots identical to mine except that they gleamed, without a speck of dust, mass-produced, on a carpet, priced at one dollar, and realized that aura has to do with context (or was reminded of that yet again). Comparison and context are also factors when it comes to valuing the importance of a book, the text of which is tied to a specific moment of production. That is what literary criticism is doing continually: establishing comparative hierarchies within a specific cultural field. The framework of a bookshop is the physical place where we readers compare most. But to make that comparison we must understand the language in which the books we are looking at are written. And that is why, for me and so many other Western readers, the cultural ecosystems that we call the Orient, and the bookshops in which they are given material form, constitute a parallel universe that is at once fascinating and frustrating to navigate.

  Paper was invented in China at the beginning of the second century AD. A eunuch, named Cai Lun was responsible: he made the pulp from rags, hemp, tree bark and fishing nets. Because paper was less exalted than bamboo and silk, it took centuries for it to establish itself as the best support for the written word and it wasn’t until the sixth century that it travelled beyond the Chinese frontiers and until the twelfth that it reached Europe. In France its production coincided with the production of linen from
flax fibre. By that time Chinese printers were using movable type, but the thousands of characters in the language stopped printing from really constituting a revolution, as would occur with Gutenberg four hundred years later. Nonetheless, as Martyn Lyons has noted in Books: A Living History, China had produced more books than the rest of the world put together by the end of the fifteenth century. Each volume: an object. A body. Matter. Secretions and silk-worm paper. Gutenberg had to perfect oil-based indelible ink by experimenting with soot, varnish and egg-whites. Forging type with alloys made from lead, antimony, tin and copper. In the following centuries a different combination was reached: nut-shells, resin, linseed and turpentine. Though industrial production of paper was later standardized through the use of pine or eucalyptus wood, together with hemp or cotton, its manufacture from cotton rags, pure cellulose free of any bark, was still synonymous with quality in the eyes of the experts. Books depended on the rag-and-bone man until the eighteenth century, after which modern systems were developed to extract paper from wood pulp and the price of books was halved. Rags were cheap, but the process was expensive. In his studies on Baudelaire—as we have seen—Benjamin highlights the figure of the rag-and-bone man as a collector, as the archivist of everything the city has reduced to bits and pieces, flotsam from the city’s shipwreck. As well as the analogy between fabric and the syntax of writing, between the rags used and the ageing of what is published, the closing of the circle is important: recycling, the reabsorption of rubbish by industry, so the information machine doesn’t grind to a halt.

  In the Orient, the idea endured for centuries that the best way to absorb the contents of a book was by copying it manually: that intellect and memory work with words in the same manner as ink does with paper.

  VII

  America (I): “Coast to Coast”

  The classic route for the coast-to-coast ride begins in New York and ends in California. As this is a classic essay, a bastard child of Montaigne, this chapter will tease out the route, despite scant intermediate stops; a route that will inevitably develop into a journey as textual as it is audio-visual—though it is anchored quite firmly in particular bookshops that are exemplary in their way—through myths of American culture, a culture that is surely characterized, above all, by its creation of contemporary myths.

  Nevertheless, most of them are individual and generally linked to significant spaces that often have collective connotations. Elvis Presley is a unique body in movement, and hence an itinerary, a biography; but he is also Graceland and Las Vegas. And Michael Jackson expressed himself spatially in Neverland, as Walt Disney did before him in his first theme park in California. Similarly, one can visit the cultural history of the United States in the twentieth century by focusing chronologically on certain emblematic places, examples of a complete picture one could never encompass. The 1920s saw the famous lunches at the restaurant in New York’s Algonquin Hotel, where writers, critics and publishers like John Peter Tooley, Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson or Harold Ross argued about aesthetics and the national and international publishing industry; in the 1930s the Gotham Book Mart established itself in the same city, specializing in the dissemination of experimental writers, organizing all manner of lectures and literary parties and gradually becoming a rendez-vous for avant-garde artists exiled from Europe; during the 1940s Peggy Guggenheim’s New York Art of This Century gallery was the decisive launch pad for abstract expressionism as the form adopted by the nation’s avant-garde; in the 1950s, the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco brought onto the market some of the most representative books of that period and promoted them with launches and readings; under the leadership of Andy Warhol, The Factory in Manhattan stood out in the 1960s as a film studio, art workshop and home to druggy parties, and in the 1970s and early 1980s the nightclub Studio 54 picked up the baton.

  Obviously, these are key places for their times. Especially on the East Coast, although one cannot understand the culture of the United States without the perpetual Coast-to-Coast movement: “I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re so beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic,” said Andy Warhol. If I had to choose a single building to symbolize, if only tangentially, intellectual life in the United States in the twentieth century, it would be the Chelsea Hotel, established in 1885 and still going strong. The list of its celebrities and important moments could begin with Mark Twain and end with Madonna (photographs of room 822 appear in Sex), not forgetting a few survivors of the Titanic, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Dylan Thomas’ suicide in 1953, the writing of 2001: a Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, the composing of Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, the performing of “Chelsea Hotel” by Leonard Cohen and some scenes in 9 1/٢ Weeks. The hotel is like a bookshop. It is equally central to the history of ideas, as a meeting place for migrants, as a site for intense, solitary reading—which Edward Hopper portrayed so well—for writing and creation and the interchange of experiences, contacts and fluids. It is also at a crossroads between uniqueness and cloning, independence and chain, with a museum-like vocation. And it falls outside the institutional circuit and hence has a history hewn from discontinuities. Although more than a hundred and thirty years in New York guarantees the possibility of a chronologically structured narrative, as it has been visited—bombarded—by the biographies of hundreds of artists, the Chelsea Hotel and the other hotels where hundreds of artists have lodged on their endless travels, can only be recounted through a constellation of stories and dates.

  The beat generation had to experience their fetish in the flesh, the Beat Hotel in Paris, that city which, in Burroughs’ words, “is a disgusting hole for anyone without a dime,” full of French people, “genuine pigs,” but where he managed to finish The Naked Lunch and work on his cut-ups thanks to the facilities provided by a Frenchwoman, Madame Rachou, who ran that hotel without a name (9 rue Gît-le-Cœur) where he stayed with Ginsberg, Corso and other friends. When the movement transformed into the beat trend, the beat fashion, all things beatnik, that Paris hotel was christened the Beat Hotel. The same city that had watched the birth of Cubism half a century earlier via the brushes of Juan Gris, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso now welcomed the postmodern éclosion of cut-ups and literary montage. After Tangier and Paris they continued to take drugs and create in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Burroughs wrote that it was a place that “seemed to have specialized in the deaths of famous writers.” The shooting of Chelsea Girls, Warhol’s experimental film, can be seen as another turning point: the end of a particular way of understanding Romanticism, a wild, vagabond style, the start of serial production and the spectacular showcasing of contemporary art.

  Were the beats good bookshop customers? They weren’t, if one believes the legend. It is much easier to imagine them borrowing or stealing books, taking them for a while from the shelves of Shakespeare and Company rather than buying them. Indeed Whitman’s bookshop—to judge by the copious correspondence—was above all a source of income: “The bookseller here, who is a friend of Ferlinghetti’s, has fifty copies of my book in the window and sells several every week.” The big book thief was Gregory Corso, who often tried to sell the books he had stolen the previous night the next morning. They were no doubt keener for second-hand than for new. And on reading originals, addicted as they were not only to chemical substances but also to the epistolary art, automatic writing, lyrical rhapsody and jazz rhythms. However, legends exist to be disproved: in Paris, for example, they took advantage of their access to Olympia Press books to acquire works by banned French and American authors. “Ferlinghetti sent me $100 yesterday, so we ate, I paid Gregory’s 20 dollar back rent he’s moved in with us temporarily,” Ginsberg writes to Kerouac in a letter dated 1957. “We bought Genet and Apollinaire dirty book and a paper of junk and a matchbox of bad kief and a huge quart expensive bottle of perpetual maggi seasoning-soy sauce. While they lived in the Chelsea Hotel they went to New York bookshops like the Phoeni
x that mimeographed copies of Ed Sanders’ magazine Fuck You and was behind a poetry collection in the form of chapbooks that included titles by Auden, Snyder, Ginsberg and Corso. Sanders himself opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in 1964 in an old kosher butcher’s. It sold books as well as articles for counterculture fetishists, like a collection framed by the pubic hair of sixteen innovative poets or Ginsberg’s beard. It quickly became a site for political activism and defended the legalization of marijuana amongst other things. On January 2, 1966 the police raided the shop and arrested its owner, accusing him of stocking obscene literature and lewd prints. Although he won his case, they never returned the confiscated material and he was eventually forced to close the bookshop.

  If the abstract expressionists became heirs to the European avant-garde in the 1950s through a complex cultural, economic and political operation driven by institutions as different as the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA, it was thanks to a confluence of new sociological forces, new ways of understanding life and travel, music and art, as performative as the brushstrokes of Jackson Pollock, that the beat generation were to become the heirs to the lost generation and the French surrealists; namely, the usual suspects on the rue de l’Odéon. Until the Second World War, Gotham Book Mart was the United States equivalent of the original Shakespeare and Company. As we read in Anaïs Nin’s diary, Frances Steloff’s bookshop played the same role as Sylvia Beach’s in Paris. The same infectious enthusiasm, the same support for nonconformist poetics: the shop lent Nin one hundred dollars, offered her all the publicity possible so she could self-publish Winter of Artifice and celebrate it with a launch party. But immediately after Hiroshima, Frances Steloff couldn’t accept, or refused to acknowledge, the power of the beats and her renowned bookshop stayed anchored in the pre-war literary world. Art was a different matter: she found Duchamp an artisan to make the prototype of his famous suitcase-museum, and her shop window displayed an installation by him on the occasion of the launch of a book by André Breton and together with Peggy Guggenheim he designed another with the Art of This Century in mind. But the gesture that most emphatically defines the bookshop was the founding, in 1947, of the James Joyce Society, the first member of which was T. S. Eliot. Almost a decade later, when the Irish writer was still alive, Steloff dedicated an ironic shop-window display to Finnegans Wake, in the form of a wake in sync with the mood of the present. However, linking the bookshop to a dead author now afforded it a dangerously premature museum status, even if it was still a relatively young establishment (it opened in 1920 and did not disappear until 2007) when its Alma Mater was under fifty and destined to be a hundred-year-old bookseller.