Bookshops

by Jorge Carrión

  Hopscotch immediately struck a chord with his youthful contemporaries. The Paris he delineates revives the classic image of the bohemian city; the proliferation of topographical details transforms it into a possible guide for cultural tourists, which has been underlined by editions that incorporate a map or a list of the writer’s favourite cafés; its encyclopedic dimension (literature, painting, cinema, music, philosophy . . .) means a reading can never be exhaustive. A classic work is one that always offers a new reading. A classic is a writer who never goes out of fashion. And Paris was precisely where fashion as we understand it today was born, so it is hardly surprising that, at least until the 1960s, and thanks to a continuous stream of artists from all over the world, it was able to sustain a seductive horizon of expectations for certain readers with respect to certain works, a fetishist aura. Pascale Casanova writes:

  Gertrude Stein neatly summed up the question of the localization of modernity in a single sentence: “Paris,” she writes in Paris France (1940), “was where the twentieth century was.” As site of the literary present and capital of modernity, Paris to some extent owed its position to the fact that it was where fashion—the outstanding expression of modernity—was created. In the famous Paris Guide of 1867, Victor Hugo insisted on the authority of the City of Light, not only in political and intellectual matters, but also in the domain of taste and elegance, which is to say of fashion and everything modern.

  The logic that partially explains the relationship between Greek and Roman culture in antiquity, when revision, continuity, imitation, importing and usurping were the ways in which the empire could secure cultural hegemony, in which the original myths were reformulated (from Zeus to Jupiter) and the epic rewritten (from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Virgil’s Aeneid) could be our model for understanding the relationship between the United States and France in the contemporary era. Although London is also of cultural importance in the nineteenth century, Paris establishes itself—as we have seen—as the international centre of literature and the visual arts. In the 1920s and 1930s, celebrities like Hemingway, Stein, Beach, Dos Passos, Bowles or Scott Fitzgerald found in Paris the feeling of being at the heart of bohemia. For a whole generation of American intellectuals—the names selected are a tiny fraction of all those who travelled to Paris and took their ideas from there like so many souvenirs—France was a model for cultural grandeur and an adopted heritage. If Hemingway was right and the French capital was “a moveable feast,” it is hardly surprising that he would leave in the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power in Germany and the Second World War finally broke out. Picasso stayed in Paris, where he created the marketing system for contemporary art; Beach also stayed on and Hemingway returned as a soldier of liberation. But the majority of the French avant-garde and American novelists met up again or for the first time in New York, together with artists, gallery owners, historians, journalists, architects, designers, film directors and booksellers. The same city where, after big exhibitions like the Van Gogh or Picasso, the Museum of Modern Art began to create from that subsoil its own narrative for contemporary art, first raising the standard of abstract expressionism and then pop art with Andy Warhol and The Factory leading the way. The 1950s and 1960s are fascinating because the American writers who are most in step with the times continue to visit Paris. But their approach is different. When Kerouac or Ginsberg travel to France they do so—reversing the route taken by Bowles—by stopping off at Tangier, as if one city was not more important than the other. Kerouac’s mother tongue was French, Ferlinghetti translates surrealists like Jacques Prévert. Later on, other American writers with strong links to the fictionalized bookshop, like Paul Auster—Mallarmé’s translator—will travel to Paris, but the key literary reference points for the later generations are American, not European. Paris has been transformed into a Library of Universal Literature, while San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago or New York are continually launching bookshops destined to be some of the most important cultural centres of the twentieth century. Whether for good or for evil, and not on United States soil, whether as ambassador or intruder, one such is the second Shakespeare and Company.

  In the documentary “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man,” somebody says that George Whitman was the most American person he had ever known, because he was completely pragmatic and penny-pinching: the tasks in the bookshop had to be carried out by young lovers of literature, who did not receive a wage in return, but a bed, a meal and—though he does not say this—wonderful experiences working and living in Shakespeare and Company, in the heart of Paris. Whitman simply created the dream of every young American reader and the bookshop responded to a stereotype—like Flourish and Blotts in Harry Potter—and became a tourist attraction with a very powerful marker, as important for a student of literature as the Eiffel Tower or the Mona Lisa, with the extra bonus that you could live there; like the map in Hopscotch, it allowed you to create a literary space, to transform it into a home or hotel. “Living the dream”could have been its slogan. And it did so via a conceptual and commercial operation that went back to Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company, which can be seen from two perspectives: after-life or legacy on the one hand; appropriation, or even usurping, on the other. Whitman said in an interview: “She never found out anything about our intentions. We waited until she died, because if I’d have asked her and she’d said no, I couldn’t have taken over the name after she died. All the same I think she would have said yes.” Clearly, if he chose not to call his business Maison des Amis des Livres, it was because, being Anglo-Saxon, he saw the commercial potential of a name that guaranteed a stream of tourist pilgrims. Also because of his insecurity.

  The film depicts an unstable, despotic bookseller as prone to handing out wounding insults as to being poetically maudlin, using his guests as volunteers in a labour camp whose working conditions he never properly spells out. Despite the bookshop’s handsome income and the five-million-euro-estimated value of its building, he was a frugal, bohemian bookseller who spent no money on clothes or food, and had no social or emotional life outside his picturesque kingdom. We will never know whether he burnt his hair off with two candles in front of the camera because he was suffering from senile dementia or to save on the cost of a barber. And he called his daughter, who now owns the business, Sylvia Beach Whitman.

  To be fair, his portrait should be balanced against the chronicle Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer. Whitman appears in its pages as an unstable old man, but also as very generous, affectionate and dreamy, ready to share his essential books and personal memories of Paris with anyone who sleeps in his bed. Memories of Lawrence Durrell drunk at night after spending all day writing The Alexandria Quartet; of Anaïs Nin, who may have been the bookseller’s lover; of Henry Miller, the beat generation and Samuel Beckett, who naturally only ever paid silent visits; of all the books and magazines sent on their way by his bookshop; of Margaux Hemingway, whom he guided through Paris in search of her grandfather’s city.

  What was and is Shakespeare and Company? we wonder, after seeing the film and reading the book. A socialist utopia or a business run by a miser? A tourist icon or a really important bookshop? Was its owner a genius or a madman? I don’t think answers exist to these questions and, if they do, they won’t be black or white, but a range of greys. It is quite clear that L’Écume des Pages and La Hune are not mythical bookshops in the sense that Shakespeare and Company is, and are not internationally renowned, and that forces us to ask yet again: what is the stuff that myths are made of? And, more particularly, how can we demythologize them?

  I too am guilty of contributing to this process of mythologizing (mystifying). All journeys and all readings are partial: when I finally visit Le Divan—the origins of which go back to the 1920s in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was resurrected by Gallimard in 1947 and lodged in the 15th Arrondissement since 1969—and research its history; when I discover Tschann, founded i
n Montparnasse in 1929 by two friends of the leading lights in the artistic life of that once-bohemian, now chic district, the Tschanns, whose daughter Marie Madeleine was a decisive supporter of Beckett’s work in France, I will at last be able to repay the persistence of translator Xavier Nueno, who I hope will introduce me to the present person in charge, Fernando Barros, who emphasizes in interviews that he is equally conscious of the past and the future of the bookshop; when—finally—my reading or travels or friends take me to other neighbourhoods and new bookshops, my topography of Paris will change and, with it, my discourse. In the meantime, I accept the limitations of this impossible, future encyclopedia, which is as full of chiaroscuro as they all are and which I am perpetually writing.

  X

  Book Chains

  From 1981, Shakespeare and Company also becomes a chain of independent bookshops, with four branches in New York and all near university campuses. Although many universities have their own bookshop that sells manuals, reference books and, above all, textbooks, T-shirts, tracksuits, mugs, posters, maps, postcards and other tourist items linked to the university experience, Barnes & Noble has colonized this market with more than 600 college bookshops in the United States, in addition to 700-plus branches in cities, each with its own Starbucks (it remains to be seen how this figure will be affected by the 2013 announcement that a third of their premises would be closed down over the next ten years). Although the first bookshop with that name opened in 1917, the Barnes family has had interests in the printing industry from the 1870s. A hundred years later, it became the first bookshop to advertise on television; and, in the present century, the main threat to the survival of small independent bookshops. Which is quite paradoxical, because many businesses that start with a single shop tend to multiply and become links within the same brand or chain. Many well-established chains also began as single, independent bookshops. Long before it owned dozens of branches throughout Mexico, Ghandi, opened in 1971 by Mauricio Achar, was a bookshop to the south of the capital. The biggest chains in Brazil originated as projects started by immigrants: Joaquim Inácio da Fonseca Saraiva, from the Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal, opened the first Saraiva in 1914, although at the time it was called Livraria Acadêmica; the first Nobel was founded in 1943 by the Italian Claudio Milano (in 1922 his grandson adopted a leasing system and branches quickly multiplied); the Livraria Cultura was the idea of a German-Jewish immigrant, Eva Herz, and arose from the idea of the book-lending service she started from the front room of her house in 1950; it did not become a bookshop until 1969. The three empires were born in the same city, São Paulo, and spread throughout the country. Family Christian Stores now have almost 300 branches. In 2012 they donated more than a million Bibles to be distributed by missionaries across the world, but the Zondervan brothers began with remainders from de-catalogued stock on a farm in the 1930s. Their growth came down to the success of their cheap editions of out-of-copyright religious works, including a number of English translations of the Bible.

  Thanks to the fact that Holland was a haven for Calvinists and to the absence of religious and political censorship, it became one of the great world book centres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Elzevir family was pre-eminent among its printers, and, between 1622 and 1652, published authentic pocket-book classics annotated by academics. Martyn Lyons reminds us that the 1636 edition of Virgil’s complete works was such a success it had to be reprinted fifteen times. Pocket-sized classics were known as “Elzevir editions,” regardless of whether the Elzevirs were the publishers. Despite their success, this kind of publication was aimed at the literate elite. One has to remember that the Encyclopédie, a genuine bestseller that sold almost 25,000 copies, was mainly purchased by the nobility and clergy, the social classes whose pillars it was undermining. Ordinary people read mostly slim chapbooks, booklets full of drawings, or the bibliothèque bleue bound with the blue paper from sugar packets distributed by itinerant sellers known as colporteurs in French, Jahrmarksttrödlers in German and leggendaio in Italy. The lives of saints, nonsense stories, farces, parodies, drinking and rabble-rousing songs, myths and legends, tales of chivalry, harvest calendars, horoscopes, gaming rules, recipe books and even abbreviated versions of universal classics were the real bestsellers before the explosion of the romantic and realist novel in the nineteenth century and its spread in the form of mass-produced serial fiction.

  The book as a money-making success began with Walter Scott and was consolidated by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. The volume of sales of books by Scott was so high in Europe that, starting in 1822, his novels appeared simultaneously in English and French. In 1824 a parody of his fictions, Walladmor, where Scott himself figured as a character, was published in Germany because, as we all know, there is no better guarantee of success than imitation or parody. The Lévy brothers launched a collection of works that cost one franc in Paris in the middle of the century. Michel and Calmann had become wealthy by commercialising opera libretti and plays and opened one of the great nineteenth-century bookshops on the Boulevard des Italiens, where there was a bargain section. Apart from investing in the bookshop, they also poured money into railways, insurance companies and public services in the colonies. In the same period, Baedeker and Murray popularized travel guides that could now be bought like so many other kinds of books from infinite outlets: grocery stores, kiosks, itinerant sellers, independent bookshops and chains. In Reading and Riding, Eileen S. DeMarco has studied the network of Hachette bookshops in French railway stations, a project that lasted almost a century, from early in 1826 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, with the launching of the first premises in Paris in 1853 en route. Trains rapidly became the principal vehicle for books: their trucks transported paper, printing presses, spare parts, the workforce, writers, finished books from one city to another and, above all, readers. The chain based its efficiency, for the first time in history, on the contracting of female shop assistants, femmes bibliothécaires, given that the initiative was called Bibliothèque des Chemins de Fer. In the letter Louis Hachette sent to the owners of the main railway companies in France to persuade them of the viability of his proposal, he emphasized its pedagogic nature, since the light, portable books would have an educational aspect as well as providing entertainment for the journey. By July 1853, forty-three branches had opened their doors and offered close to 500 titles. The following year they set up the daily press that, over time, would become their main source of income. And three years later they incorporated part of the output of other publishing companies, thus maintaining a monopoly on sales in stations. This was extended to the Métro network at the end of the century.

  The A. H. Wheeler bookshop chain had a monopoly on book sales in stations in India until 2004. Like that of Hachette—which is now a transnational publishing group that shifts 250 million books a year—its railway history makes for fascinating reading. The first branch opened its doors in 1877 in the station of Allahabad, after Émile Moreau and his partner, T. K. Banerjee, borrowed the name from someone who probably never stepped on Asian soil: Arthur Henry Wheeler, who owned a bookshop chain in London. An agreement with the Indian government gave them a monopoly on the distribution of books and newspapers, with an evident social and educational intent: for over a century it was the principal way culture reached the most remote parts of the country, where A. H. Wheeler was often the only bookshop for many miles around. In 1937, with independence on the horizon, Moreau transferred his share in the ownership to his Indian friend and partner, whose family has run it ever since. The company entered the present century with some 600 sales points in almost 300 stations, but it lost the monopoly in 2004 in a nationalistic political move by Lalu Prasad Yaday, the Minister for Railways, against the British resonances in the Indian company’s name. However, the decision was revoked six years later: the bookshop chain is too emblematic for it not to be treated as part of the country’s cultural heritage.

  As She
khar Krishnan explains in an article in the Indian Express that is my source for this information, “See you in Wheeler’s” is a common expression in Mumbai. The name is deeply rooted in the country’s daily life. It is common to meet friends or acqaintances in its bookshops and kiosks while buying a newspaper before boarding the train and sharing the journey home. Conversations about politics and literature have for decades been organized around those sales points where people stand and drink their cups of tea.

  Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai and his fate was linked to the name “Wheeler,” which was shared by the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, the first daily newspaper that the future writer worked for at the age of seventeen. He spent two thirds of the day at the paper’s office, even in hellish summer temperatures: sweat and ink transformed his suit into the coat of “a Dalmatian dog” in the words of one of his companions. His train journeys to cover imperial events in Hindu and Muslim territories, with six-month stays that anticipated his famous trips to Japan or South Africa and supplied him with anecdotes and atmosphere for the first stories he published in 1888 in “The Railway Library,” the paperback series published by A. H. Wheeler, who thus became his first publishers. Over time, memory would cloak those colonial experiences within the dreamlike, mythical exoticism of novels like Kim or The Jungle Book.