Bookshops

  One only has to read In Touch with Genius: Memoirs of a New York Bookseller to realize that, although the Gotham Book Mart always defended small reviews and fanzines, it also supported young writers and high-quality literature. The memoir remains faithful to its own roots and champions a particular kind of literature from the first half of the last century, the roll-call of which was defined by the publication of the anthology We Moderns: 1920–1940. The memoirs were published in 1975 and are reminiscent of Beach’s: it was no coincidence that both booksellers were born in 1887 and devoted their lives to promoting the same authors, with James Joyce leading the way. The bookseller emulates her predecessor and assumes an observer’s role (“I never approached my customers unless they looked as if they needed help”) and is a collector of distinguished visitors. She met Beach in Paris and they worked together on several occasions. She ends on this note: “Our bookshops were often thought of as similar projects, but I never enjoyed the advantages she had.”

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Gotham Book Mart became the focus for spotlighting books banned in the United States, an island where treasures by Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller could be found. This was the literary horizon that sealed its reputation and concentrated all its energy in terms of promotion. We find allusions to it in the private correspondence of these writers. For example, in a letter from the Tropic of Cancer author to Lawrence Durrell:

  Naturally the sales weren’t very high, neither for The Black Book nor for Max. But they are selling slowly all the time. I myself have bought out of my own pocket a number of your books, which friends asked for. And now that the ban is off them, in America, we may get somewhere—through the Gotham Book Mart at least. In the next ten days or so I ought to have some interesting news from them, as I have written to them about the state of affairs. Cairns may not have had time to see you, his boat left the day after he arrived. But he has a high opinion of you and all of us—a staunch fellow, full of integrity, somewhat naive, but on the right side. I count him a good friend and perhaps my best critic in America.

  Gotham Book Mart and its famous slogan “Wise men fish here” appear in the graphic memoir Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel, who writes “This bookshop has been here for ever, it’s an institution.” Culture has always circulated as much through alternative networks as established market channels and writers have always been the biggest shareholders in these parallel poetics. Nonetheless, it is worth underlining Miller’s reference to Huntington Cairns to explore the complex relationships that exist between art and political power in the United States, given that the latter was both an excellent reader and a lawyer who advised the Treasury on the matter of importing publications that might be considered pornographic. In other words, he was a censor. Probably the most important one of his time. The letter, dated March 1939, ends on this rather startling note: “I’m a Zen right here in Paris, and I’ve never felt better or more lucid, secure and focused. Only a war could distract me from this.” In another letter from that time to Steloff, he offers her the most recent first editions of Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, and elaborates the idea even further: “My decision isn’t based on fear of a war. I don’t think there will be one this year, nor do I think there will be next year.” Just as well he devoted himself to reading and not futurology.

  In 1959, Gay Talese reported on the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel banned from the country until that year. A federal judge diluted the definition of obscenity that the Supreme Court had formulated two years before in the case of Samuel Roth v. the United States of America for dealing in pornography:

  The liberation of the novel had actually been initiated by the courtroom efforts of a New York publisher, Grove Press, which had filed and won its case against the US Post Office, which until then had assumed broad authority in banning “dirty” books and other objectionable materials from being mailed in America. The courtroom triumph of Grove Press was immediately celebrated by advocates of literary freedom as a national victory against censorship and an affirmation of the First Amendment.

  That was how one more of the infinite chapters on censorship in the history of culture was closed, as if we hadn’t already had access to Diderot’s words from the eighteenth century in his renowned Letter on the Book Trade (1763), a systematic dissection of how the publishing system works, from royalties to the writer’s relationship with his printer, publisher and bookseller that, toutes proportions gardées, can be applied to a good number of areas into which the book trade is still divided legally and conceptually. Diderot, the driving force behind L’Encyclopédie, was himself forced to sell his library in order to provide his daughter’s dowry. He was the author of other famous letters, like those to Sophie Volland or Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, and was possibly a lover of the Empress of Russia. After his death, one of the great novels of the modern era, his Jacques the Fatalist, was published. He wrote the following on the circulation of banned books:

  Please name one of those dangerous works that were banned, then clandestinely printed either abroad or in the kingdom that did not within four months become as available as any book which had been granted the privilège. What book is more contrary to good morals, to religion, to conventional ideas of philosophy and administration, in a word, to all vulgar prejudices, and, consequently, more dangerous, than The Persian Fables? Is there anything worse? Yet there are a hundred editions of The Persian Letters and any student can find a copy for twelve sous on the banks of the Seine. Who doesn’t own a translation of Juvenal or Petronius? There are countless reprints of Boccaccio’s Decameron or La Fontaine’s Fables. Is it perhaps beyond French typographers to print at the foot of the front page “By Merkus, in Amsterdam” like the Dutch printers? Multiple editions of The Social Contract are on sale for a crown by the entrance to the sovereign’s palace. What does this mean? Essentially that we have always managed to secure these works; we have paid abroad the cost of labour that a more indulgent magistrate with better policies could have spared us rather than abandoning us to the black marketeers, who, taking advantage of our double curiosity, tripled by prohibition, have expensively sold on to us the real or imaginary danger which they exposed themselves in order to satisfy that curiosity.

  While small, and often short-lived, bookshops nourish the literary fiction that is outside the mainstream, bookshops that pride themselves on their huge size remind us that the publishing industry is not based on sophisticated books for a minority, but on mass production, just like the food industry. The New York bookshop equivalent to the Chelsea Hotel, in terms of independence, long life and symbolic importance, is possibly Strand, with its “eighteen miles of books,” founded in 1927 by Benjamin Bass, who left it to his son Fred, who in turn bequeathed it to Nancy, his daughter, who handed the business on, in 2006, to her own children, William Peter and Ava Rose Wyden. The expression “family business” must have been coined with them in mind. Four generations and two premises: the original in “Book Row” on 4th Street, where in the good old days there were up to forty-eight bookshops, of which Strand is the only survivor, the current one being at 12th and Broadway. José Donoso wrote eloquently about its importance in an article entitled “A New York obsession”:

  I don’t go to the big bookstores: I inevitably head to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, corner of Twelfth Street, that cathedral of second-hand books where it is possible to find or order everything, and where on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning one can see celebrities from the world of literature, theatre or cinema, in jeans and without make-up, looking for something with which to feed their obsessions.

  I am interested in the insistence on the word “everything”: the idea that there are bookshops like the Library of Babel, as opposed to those like Jakob Mendel’s table in Café Gluck. Strand boasts that it houses one-and-a-half million titles. The record size, quantity and extent are advertising tools that suit a large number of bookshops in the United States, a naturally megal
omaniac country. Its twenty kilometres of shelves were immortalized, in a manner of speaking, in the movie Short Circuit, by the memory machine, the reader on automatic pilot Number 5, when its voracious need for data provokes mayhem in the bookshop. On this side of the frontier, if we are to believe the hype, the biggest academic bookshop is in Chicago. In the months that I lived in Hyde Park I was a fan of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on 57th Street, which was the best refuge when it was snowing, and was close to the university library. Its main distinguishing feature was “The Front Table,” a coloured leaflet that reviewed the new main titles, though there was also a selection of other free cultural publications. It is one of those eminently subterranean bookshops in whose rooms one can spend long periods browsing in complete solitude. However, the store’s main base was not on 57th Street but in the place where the cooperative was founded, in the basement of the theology seminary in the middle of the campus that is now home to the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. The University of Chicago has good reason to be proud of the twenty-four Nobel Prizes in economics its professors, guest researchers and ex-alumni have won, but nobody could give me many clues as to the movements of Saul Bellow and J. M. Coetzee through its corridors and neo-Gothic lecture theatres. On the other hand, in the digital magazine Gapers Block, I did find a bookseller, Jack Cella, who remembered that Saul Bellow used to love leafing through newly arrived books, as they were being unpacked: the latest members of the community.

  Conversely, Prairie Lights did find a way to benefit from the most famous creative writing programme in the country at the University of Iowa. Its web page lists the seven Nobel Prize in Literature winners who have visited them: Seamus Heaney, Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee. It was the personal project of Jim Harris, a graduate in journalism who decided to invest a small inheritance to open the bookshop in 1978. The present premises, now managed by his former employees, coincidentally occupy the space, that in the 1930s, housed a literary society where Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson used to meet. One of the former students of the renowned Writers’ Workshop, Abraham Verghese, writes in the chapter about Prairie Lights in My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop, that his booksellers were also teachers in a way: shaping sensibilities and treating him as a serious writer even when he had little confidence in his own potential. In the same volume, Chuck Palahniuk, focusing on Powell’s City of Books, waxes ironic about the circuits for launching the latest books: Mark Twain died of stress on a reading tour.

  The next stop on our coast-to-coast bookshop ride could be Tattered Cover in Denver, since that is where all important authors on tour in the United States stop, including Barack Obama. This project has been led since 1973 by the activist Joyce Meskis, a genuine civil-rights leader, who is so appreciated by her neighbours and customers that two hundred of them have helped the bookshop in its various moves, transporting boxes of books to other premises. Meskis applies a small profit margin, from one to five per cent on the price of the book, in order to be able to compete with the bookshop chains and show a customer that he or she is the great protagonist, the one who profits most. Her pleasant approach, moreover, is not restricted to personal and economic fields, but is also translated into dozens of armchairs that, according to the owner, are an attempt to remind the visitor that he is in a place like his own front room. Tattered Cover has always been characterized by its defence of civil rights, but in 2000 that struggle became national news when, by appealing to the aforementioned First Amendment, it succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court of Colorado to decide in its favour after the police tried to force Meskis to inform on a customer who bought a manual on how to manufacture methamphetamines. In the end it turned out to be a handbook on Japanese calligraphy.

  Two thousand kilometres further on—leaving Las Vegas and Reno to our left—we come to another North American bookshop that no writer on tour can afford to miss, Powell’s in Portland, whose appeal to Palahniuk must be that it is so like a vast brothel or a casino: countless interconnected rooms, a labyrinth in which each of nine rooms has its own name (Golden, Pink, Purple), like the characters in Reservoir Dogs. As in the Strand or other megalomaniac bookshops, quality is a treasure to be sought amongst layer after layer of quantity. No less than a million-and-a-half books. Visiting this shop is a journey you undertake with a map of the establishment as a guide, whether your aim is to find the Rare Book Room, with its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century volumes, or simply to go to the café to take a breather. Because Powell’s in Portland is so famous owing to its size (it may really be the biggest in the world) it has become a tourist attraction and, as such, is constantly explored by visitors from the whole of this enormous country.

  California lies to the south. To reach Los Angeles, where Quentin Tarantino’s first film was shot and where so many fictional bookshops have been filmed and even built, you still have to cross Berkeley and San Francisco. It is really worth one’s time to visit Moe’s Books in the small university city, a building with 200,000 new, second-hand and old books; a bookshop with over half a century of history. It was founded by Moe Moskowitz in 1959, and consequently established itself as a cultural project in the political years of the 1960s with their protests against the Vietnam War. In 1968 the bookseller was arrested for selling shocking material (like Robert Crumb’s comics and Valerie Solanas’ books). After his demise in 1997, his daughter Doris took the helm, which she now shares with Eli, her own son, a third generation of independent booksellers. And in neighbouring San Francisco four important Californian bookshops await us: the oldest in the state (Books Inc.), the country’s most famous (City Lights), perhaps the most fascinating one I know (Green Apple Books) and one of the most interesting that I have visited in terms of art and community (Dog Eared Books).

  The history of the first goes back to the height of the Gold Rush in the middle of the nineteenth century, when, in 1853, the Swabian traveller Anton Roman started selling books and musical instruments to miners in Shasta City at the Shasta Book Store opposite the El Dorado Hotel. Its horizons were soon broadened by the addition of Roman’s Picture Gallery: it was, after all, a desert where everything had to be created—culture, history, music, the frontier imagination. Four years later it moved to San Francisco, where the trade in texts and images was extended further to include its own printing and publishing business. It has changed place and name so often since then that all that remains is a slogan: “The oldest independent bookshop in the West.” We have already mentioned the establishment is still run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and that was in terms of the French connection we find time and again in the history of North American culture. Naturally, it is based in the centre of the city, next to Chinatown, Little Italy and most of the tourist icons. Green Apple Books, on the other hand, is off the beaten track, on the main roadway through the hybrid district of Clement. It appears in the novel The Royal Family, by William T. Vollmann, as it really is: the place to go in search of answers. The character in the novel opens the Buddhist Scriptures and reads: “Things do not come and do not go, neither do they appear and disappear; therefore, one does not get things or lose things.” However, on my first visit to San Francisco, I went on a devout pilgrimage to City Lights because I still believed in my invisible passport; when I returned ten years later and they took me to Clement Street, I felt I was gaining something I would never lose.

  Green Apple Books unequivocally demonstrates its vocation as a traditional neighbourhood bookshop in the balance it strikes between new and second-hand books, in its calculated improvization, in its dozens of passageways, uneven surfaces, connecting doorways and stairwells, in the dozens of handwritten reviews to guide readers and customers in their imminent choices, and its wooden floor. A bookshop is defined above all by what stands out: the posters, the photographs, the books recommended or displayed to draw attention. In Green Apple Books they have fr
amed the “Open Letter” by Hunter S. Thompson, who came to San Francisco in the mid-1960s attracted by the magnetic power of the hippie movement. The stairs are dominated by a huge map of the United States, but there is also a section in the entrance called “Read the World,” where new translations are recommended and displayed. And the right-hand-side wall in the basement is a genuine museum of African and Asian masks, the work of Richard Savoy, who opened the business in 1967, when he was barely twenty-five, his only work experience being as a radio engineer with American Airlines. But above all, it is about reading. In the labyrinthine bookshop on Clement Street you find them crouching down, almost hidden, as if confined within the cells of a Buddhist monastery or in the catacombs of the early Christians, of all ages and conditions, standing, squatting or sitting down: readers. And that is priceless.