Bookshops

  A bookshop is a community of believers. This idea is nowhere better illustrated than in Dog Eared Books, which since 1992 has created a real atmosphere of empathy with the inhabitants of the Mission District. As well as magazines, books and graphic art, we find in the window on that street corner the perfect expression of the bond of love and respect a bookstore must create with its reader customers: an altar to the dead updated weekly by artist Verónica de Jesús. Anonymous neighbours, personal friends, writers and pop stars come together here. Famous readers or complete unknowns united by death and paid homage in a bookshop that, above all, feels itself to be part of a neighbourhood.

  Somebody had stuck the photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses on a bookshelf in Green Apple Books. The Hollywood Body reading the Mind of an Irish Writer exiled in Trieste or Paris. The United States reading Europe. In the old film Funny Face that kind of opposition had experienced an interesting twist. Under instructions from the editor of the magazine where he is employed, a fashion photographer played by Fred Astaire has to find models who harness beauty and thought, who “think as well as they look.” The bookshop Embryo Concepts in Greenwich Village—invented in a Hollywood studio—is the place where the hunt-and-capture operation is carried out: there Fred Astaire meets Jo Stockton, a beautiful amateur philosopher (with the face and complexion of Audrey Hepburn), and persuades her to accompany him to a fashion show in Paris. She accepts, not because she is attracted by possible photo shoots, but because it might enable her to attend the classes of a philosopher who is an expert on “empathicalism.” The inversion of traditional roles is striking in a film from 1957: he represents superficiality and she intellectual depth. However, in the end, as is only right in a musical, they kiss and the kiss erases, or at least freezes, all previous friction. In Notting Hill there is an opposite starting point: he (Hugh Grant) runs an independent bookshop specializing in travel and she (Julia Roberts) is a Hollywood actress. While she browses upon entering his shop for the first time (the fictional Travel Book Company is in reality a shoe shop now called Notting Hill), he catches a book thief and politely explains the options: buying or returning the book hidden in his trousers. The thief recognizes the famous actress and asks her for an autograph; the bookseller, on the other hand, simply falls in love with her.

  As an erotic space, every bookshop is the supreme meeting place: for booksellers and books, for readers and booksellers, for readers on the hoof. The familiar features shared by bookshops throughout the world, their nature as refuges or bubbles, means that encounters are more likely there than elsewhere. The strange sensation of knowing by the title that that book, published in Arabic or Japanese, is by Tolstoy or Lorca, or else by the author’s photo or some kind of intuition. That shared experience of a re-encounter in some bookshop in the world. It is scarcely surprising that falling in love in a bookshop is a well-established literary and cinematic theme. In Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise, the story of the nine delicious hours the two protagonists shared in Vienna nine years earlier, while they were both travelling through Europe by train, they meet up again in Shakespeare and Company. True serendipity: he has become a writer and that is the place where American writers launch their books in Paris. The moment when he recognizes her has all the magic of a classic erotic performance. While he tells his audience the plot of a story he would like to write, a book made from a minimum present and maximum memories, which would endure for as long as a pop song, by way of flashbacks we enter the coded story of what that other superficial story would in fact retell, fragments of the preceding film, of that night in Vienna. Then he turns to his right and notices her. He recognizes her immediately. He becomes extremely agitated. They only have a few hours to pick up the thread they dropped almost a decade before. What prevails is a romantic attitude to the idea of the bookshop: it is a symbol of communication, of friendship, of love, as one detects in other products of popular culture, from novels like The Shadow of the Wind and Seaglass Summer to the romantic comedies Remember Me and Julie & Julia, both with scenes shot in Strand, and above all, You’ve Got Mail, where an independent bookshop is threatened by the branch of a chain that has opened around the corner while, simultaneously, the person running the first (Meg Ryan) and the manager of the second (Tom Hanks) are engaged in an epistolary relationship, though they don’t know each other’s names or faces.

  Platonic love: love of knowledge. In an episode from the first season of the television series The West Wing, we are shown the police operation that is necessary whenever President Bartlett feels like buying the antiquarian books that are his passion. The majority of volumes he collects are from the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth and are quite eccentric: on bear hunting, skiing in the Alps, Phaedrus and Lucretius. In contemporary fiction a bookshop signifies a space for the kind of knowledge that can’t be found in official institutions—the library or university—because being a private business it avoids issues of regulation and because booksellers are even freakier than librarians or university lecturers. The expert who hoards banned or esoteric knowledge of fantasy or horror genres is now an alternative to the antiquarian shop with a secret room or basement. Several twenty-first century comics have as their refrain the idea of the bookshop as a clandestine archive, for instance The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, where the basement of a comics shop protects the memory of the super-heroic world, or Neonomicon, by Alan Moore, in whose bookshop you can buy all kinds of magic and sadomasochistic titles. This passage from the story “The Battle that Ended the Century,” by H.P. Lovecraft, illustrates perfectly this idea of an alternative subculture on the periphery of the system:

  Mr Talcum’s report on the event, illustrated by the well-known artist Klarkash-Ton (who esoterically depicted the fighters as boneless fungi) was reprinted after repeated rejections by the discriminating editor of the Windy City Grab-bag—as a broadside by W. Peter Chef. This, through the efforts of Odis Adelbert Kline, was finally placed on sale in the bookshop of Smearum and Weep, three and a half copies finally being disposed of thanks to the alluring catalogue description supplied by Samuelus Philanthropus, Esq.

  However, it is not only occultism, magic, religion or books banned by the Inquisition or dictatorships that are to be found in bookshop alcoves and basements, any title bearing the aura of what is secret, little known, of a book for the happy few, the immense minority, connoisseurs, initiates, can be lodged in that crypt for relics or the strong box. When published, most books are democratically available to everyone: the price is calculated according to present-day factors. As the years go by, according to the good fortune of a work (and author), its rarity or aura, its status as a classic and its power as a myth, prices can rocket and enter an aristocratic dimension, or plummet until it is worth the same as any rubbish or cast-off. A book can be hunted down as much for its magical powers as its market value, and both factors often go together. When George Steiner, for example, reminisces about his discovery of the work of Borges, he does so in these terms:

  I recall an early connoisseur in the cavernous rear of a bookstore in Lisbon showing me—this was in the early 1950s—Borges’ translation of Orlando by Virginia Woolf, his prologue to a Buenos Aires edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, his key essay on the artificial language devised by Bishop John Wilkins, published in La Nación in 1942, and (rarest of rare items) Dimensions of My Hope, a collection of short essays published in 1926 but, by Borges’ wish, never reprinted. These slim objects were displayed to me with an air of fastidious condescension. And rightly. I had arrived late at the secret place.

  In Paris, the Alain Brieux bookshop combines antique books and prints with human skulls and nineteenth-century surgical equipment. An authentic cabinet of curiosities. The image of the antiquarian bookshop as a store of rarities oscillates between real referents and what is imagined, like all images with regard to that human impulse we call fiction. The Flourish and Blotts bookshop, in Diagon Alley, with a
secret doorway behind Charing Cross Road in London, is one of the establishments where Harry Potter and the other student magicians go to stock up on school books at the start of each year. The Livraria Lello & Irmão in Oporto was used as the location for the filming of the screen version. On the other hand, Monsieur Labisse’s bookshop in Hugo, which has similar charms, was made expressly for the film. Forty thousand books were required to that end. Alfred Hitchcock also used a Hollywood studio to recreate a bookshop, the Argonaut in San Francisco, in order to shoot a famous scene in Vertigo. The place is renamed the Argosy in the script and portrayed in the terms we have been outlining: an emphasis on its antiquity, a twilight scene, a supply of old volumes that preserve esoteric knowledge, and above all a specialist focus on the California of the pioneers that justifies the visit of Scottie, in his search for data on “sad Charlotte” as defined by Pop Leibel, the fictional bookseller inspired by the real Robert D. Haines, who befriended Hitchcock as a result of the latter’s visits to the Argonaut. “She died,” continues Leibel. “How?” enquires Scottie. “By her own hand,” replies the bookseller, and he smiles sadly. “There are so many stories . . .” The screenplay reads: “It has gone dark inside the bookshop and the characters are reduced to silhouettes.”

  I have just discovered on the web that the Book City bookshop in Hollywood has closed down. It was a huge store of second-hand and bargain-basement volumes, a sort of West Coast replica of Strand, a stone’s throw from the Boulevard of the Stars. They also sold screenplays. There were big cardboard boxes full of them, at $10, $5 or $1: for the price of pulp fiction, typed scripts, stapled together, scripts that were never filmed, perhaps never even read, bought by weight from the production companies that received them in excess, with black-and-white, opaque and transparent plastic covers, bound with plastic spirals, the same plastic that Andy Warhol so adored.

  VIII

  America (II): From North to South

  The Leonardo da Vinci Bookshop in Rio de Janeiro must be the most poeticized in the world. Márcio Catunda dedicated a poem, “A Livraria,” to it, in which he describes the passageway leading to its entrails in the basement of the Edifício Marquês de Herval, the shop’s windows luridly lit to create artificial daylight. The manager, Milena Piraccini, photocopied it for me, and I remember talking to her about the history of an institution that the previous year—it was the end of 2003—had existed for fifty years. We were standing next to two desks, where two huge calculators posed as fake cash registers—computers being banned—next to a complete collection of La Pléiade. Her mother, Vanna Piraccini, an Italian with a Romanian father, officially took over the business in 1965, after the death of her husband, Andrei Duchade, though she had managed it from the very beginning. Vanna faced the greatest adversities in the history of the trade and overcame them: economic recessions, the long military dictatorship, and the fire that completely destroyed the shop in 1973. Her friend Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote: “The subterranean shop/exhibits its treasures/as if defending them/from sudden famines.”

  Right opposite, another bookshop has existed in that underground gallery, one that was also to become a landmark: Berinjela. Founded by Daniel Chomski in 1994—as I was told by the publisher Aníbal Cristobo, who lived in Rio at the beginning of the century, “It’s a bookshop that reminds me of the one in the film Smoke: a meeting place for writers that can as easily lead to a recording label as a publishing house (it brought out the four issues of Modo de usar, perhaps the best contemporary poetry magazine in Brazil), or a quasi-clandestine den for the organization of championships of that mysterious game, futebotão, or simulated football.” I imagine a synergy is created between the two shops similar to the one once experienced on rue de l’Odéon. Though underground. Not anymore. I now discover while updating this book, which is eternally behind the times, that Leonardo da Vinci closed its doors in 2015. Half of that energetic embrace disappeared.

  Also dedicated to the Livraria Leonardo da Vinci is a poem by Antonio Cicero, which I have a photocopy of and will translate:

  Rio seemed infinite

  to the adolescent I used to be.

  Boarding the Castelo bus alone,

  jumping off at the end of the line,

  walking fearlessly,

  to the centre of the forbidden city,

  in a crowd that didn’t notice that

  I didn’t belong there, and suddenly,

  anonymous amid the anonymous,

  feeling euphoric, sure I belonged there,

  and them to me, going into side streets,

  alleys, avenues, arcades,

  cinemas, bookshops: Leonardo

  da Vinci Larga Rex Central Colombo

  Marreca Íris Meio-Dia Cosmos

  Alfândega Cruzeiro Carioca

  Marrocos Passos Civilizacão

  Cavé Saara São José Rosário

  Passeio Público Ouvidor Padrão

  Vitória Lavradio Cinelândia:

  places I didn’t know before

  opening onto infinite streets

  corners forever spreading

  across every city that exists.

  An adolescent gazing at the city, its spaces and culture. An eroticized, all-consuming gaze. For Juan García Madero, poetry—in the beginning—is to be found in the arts faculty of the UNAM and his room in the Lindavista suburb, but it soon shifts to certain bars and cafés and visceral-realist haunts and bookshops where he can satisfy his hunger on those lonely days when he has nobody to talk to. In the opening pages of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, literature is sexualized: it could not be any different given his adolescent protagonists. Juan discovers a poem by Efrén Rebolledo, recites it, imagines a waitress riding him and masturbates several times. Soon after, one of the literary gatherings ends in a blowjob. While drink and sex lord it over literature by night, by day it is framed by bookshops, in the labyrinth of which he tries to find “two disappeared friends”:

  Since I don’t have anything to do, I’ve decided to go looking for Belano and Ulises Lima in the bookstores of Mexico City. I’ve discovered the antiquarian bookstores Plinio el Joven, on Venustiano Carranza. The Lizardi bookstore, on Donceles. The antiquarian bookstores Rebeca Nodier, at Mesones and Pino Suárez. At Plinio el Joven the only shop assistant is a little old man who, after waiting obsequiously on a “scholar from the Colegio de México,” soon fell asleep in a chair next to a stack of books, supremely ignoring me. I stole an anthology of Marco Manilio’s Astronómica, with a prologue by Alfonso Reyes, and Diary of an Unknown Writer by a Japanese author set during the Second World War. At Lizardi I thought I saw Monsiváis. I tried to sidle up next to him to see what book he was looking at, but when I reached him, Monsiváis turned and stared straight at me, with a hint of a smile, I think, and keeping a firm grip on his book and hiding the title, he went to talk to one of the assistants. Provoked, I filched a little book by an Arab poet called Omar Ibn al-Farid, published by the university, and an anthology of young American poets put out by City Lights. By the time I left, Monsiváis was gone.

  The passage comes from a sequence (December 8, 9, 10 and 11 in the first part, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)”) devoted to Mexico City’s bookshops. And to bibliokleptomania: a practice as old as books themselves. There are descriptions of visits to Rebeca Nodier, Sótano, Mexicana, Horacio, Orozco, Milton, El Mundo and La Batalla del Ebro bookshops, the owner of the latter being “a little old Spaniard by the name of Crispín Zamora,” to whom he confesses that “he stole books because he didn’t have any money.” In total: two books Don Crispín gives him, and twenty-four books he steals in three days. One of them is by Lezama Lima: we never find out the title. It is inevitable that in a novel about growing up bookshops are linked to voracious desire. In Paradiso, one of the characters suffers a sexual dysfunction related to books and a friend plays a joke on him, in a bookshop, in fact:

 
When the bookseller came in, he asked him, “And has James Joyce’s Goethe arrived, the one that’s just been published in Geneva?” The bookseller winked at him, detecting the mocking nature of his question. “No, not yet, though we’re expecting it any day now.” “When it arrives, keep a copy for me,” said the person talking to Foción, who did not get the joke referring to a book that had never been written. The voice was thick, coated with crispy meringue saliva, his sweaty hands and forehead revealing to boot the violence of his neuro-vegetative crises. “The same collection has a Chinese Sartre from the fourth century BC,” said Foción. “Ask the bookseller to keep a copy of that too.” “A Chinese Sartre who must have discovered a point of contact between wu wei and the nothingness of the Sartrean existentialists.”

  The crazy conversation about invented books continues, until the bookseller’s interlocutor leaves the premises, walks up calle Obispo and goes to the hotel room where he is living. The narrator then tells us that he was suffering from “a sexual crisis that showed itself in an artificial, precipitate cultural anxiety that became pathological when he confronted the latest books in bookshops and the publication of rare books.” Foción knows that and enjoys the passing lunacy in “the labyrinth,” which is what he calls bookshops. Erection. Fetish. The accumulation of stocks. The accumulation of erotic experiences is like a summation of different readings: their trace is virtual, pure memory. Stealing or buying books or receiving them as presents means possessing them: for a systematic reader, the shape of his library can be read, if not as a correlative of his whole life, at least as a parallel to his development as an individual during his youth, when that ownership is decisive.

  Guillermo Quijas was eighteen when his grandfather, the teacher and bookseller Ventura López, asked him to take the manuscript of a book to a designer, then to the printer, and finally to collect the copies. As if those invisible bytes magically gave rise to volumes with pages, a smell and weight. However, that book did not come out of nothing: its existence formed part of a chain of meaning that went back as far as the 1930s, when a very youthful Ventura López worked his socks off to get a grant and graduate as a rural teacher and, some time later, as a primary-school teacher. He was sacked from his teaching job because he was the driving force behind an agricultural cooperative and had joined the Communist Party in 1949. Then, with the help of some comrades in a similar situation, he created a common fund that allowed them to open a book-cum-stationery shop, which became a cultural centre and literacy project that in the end also published a list of books about local culture. The Maestro died in 2002 but La Proveedora Escolar (the School Supplier) still exists in Oaxaca, thanks to his grandson’s vocation. The two premises he inherited and five new ones coexist with Quijas’ personal project, the Almadía publishing house, an Arabic word meaning “boat.”