Bookshops

  Or they are disappearing: I have just discovered on the web that Boekehuis shut down in 2012.

  Some bookshops, remote if one measures their distance from Barcelona, are to be found at the end of the world. But every single one inhabits a world that perhaps is very, very slowly moving towards its end.

  XII

  The Show Must Go On

  In Venice too I felt that one of the worlds we call a world was coming to an end. It was the beginning of December and high tide was daily transforming the Piazza San Marco into a pond with duplicated columns, into a lagoon crossed by wellington-booted tourists, into a shipwreck of metal tables with long legs that liquid reflection changed into metallic herons’ legs. It was an opportune moment to pay a visit to Acqua Alta, the place Luigi Frizzo has transformed into one of the world’s most photogenic bookshops, with a long gondola stuffed with second-hand volumes in the middle of the central aisle, and a side room that floods several times a year. Planks allowed me to photograph the floor the tide had invaded, part of a city that is adrift, and the stairs Frizzo had built with books gave me access to a beautiful view over the canal. Acqua Alta is not just a bookshop: it is a postcard shop; it is a community of cats; it is a store with boats and baths full of magazines and books; it is a place where you can converse with friendly Venetians who come daily to meet tourists; it is—in the end, above all—a tourist attraction. A notice on the door welcomes you, in English, to the “most beautiful bookshop in the world.” When you leave, your memory full of photos, you purchase a bookmark, a calendar, a postcard, at most a history of the city or a collection of travel pieces written by distinguished visitors, and that is how you pay for your entrance to the museum.

  Many beautiful traditional bookshops have resisted the tourist circuit or have managed to ignore its siren song. London’s John Sandoe Books, for example, has everything an amateur photographer could desire: its façade unites three eighteenth-century buildings in a single picturesque image with dark wooden windows that reflect the clouds, while inside, on three floors, 30,000 volumes are piled on tables or placed on movable shelves, and stairs up and down connect the poetry or children’s basement with other rooms, full of photogenic corners. But the gorgeous body has a soul, I realized when I was about to leave, having leafed through several books without plumping for any. As is my wont, I asked at the till if they had anything on the shop’s history. Then Johnny de Falbe—who, I later read, has been working there since 1986 and is also a novelist—began to perform magic. As if it were bait on a hook, he first regaled me with a delightful little book, The Sandoe Bag, a miscellany celebrating fifty years. While I was glancing through it, a pamphlet on display behind his back caught my eye: “The Protocols of Used Bookstores” by David Mason, which I bought for £5. We talked about the author, a Canadian bookseller, and suddenly de Falbe disappeared—as any self-respecting magician must at some stage—only to reappear with The Pope’s Bookbinder, Mason’s memoirs, recently imported from Ontario. Before becoming one of North America’s great booksellers, he lived in the Beat Hotel, with Burroughs typing furiously in the next-door room, and sought refuge more than once in Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company. On his return to Canada he could feel his vocation as a bookseller germinating deep down. I willingly bought this book that I didn’t know I wanted for £25. I left Acqua Alta, on the other hand, without buying a thing.

  There are two photos of the original Shakespeare and Company in the cafeteria of the Laie bookshop on Barcelona’s calle Pau Claris: one of the façade and one of the interior, with Joyce talking to his publishers around a table. To the right you can see dozens of writers’ portraits on the wall above a defunct fireplace. It is a miniature gallery, a résumé of the history of literature, an altar to idolatry. Monnier says of La Maison des Amis des Livres: “This bookshop hardly had the look of a shop, and that wasn’t on purpose; we were far from suspecting that people would congratulate us so much in the future for what seemed to us precariously makeshift.” Sylvia Beach purchased the sofas for her bookshop in the flea market, where, later, Whitman presumably bought his (perhaps they were the same ones!). Steloff transported her few pieces of furniture and the handful of books with which she stocked her bookshop for the first time on a horse-drawn cart. When such an apparently careless aspect lasts for decades, it becomes a stylistic feature and therefore partly a marker. The essence of tourism is that echo from the past, and a classic bookshop, with its veneer of antiquity, must engineer a degree of disorder, an accumulation of strata linked to what cliché identifies with the Great Tradition of Knowledge: an apparent chaos that gradually reveals its orderliness. In the entrance to Acqua Alta you also find locally made products and, as you walk through the different rooms, despite the dust and variegated displays, you start to decipher a system of classification that no bookshop can escape.

  The original Bertrand, Lello, the Librería de Ávila, City Lights, the Librairie des Colonnes or Shakespeare and Company have been similarly transformed into museums of themselves fragments of the cultural history they represent, and always have more photographs of writers—as representative icons of the printed word—than of philosophers or historians. That is why people talk, quite unjustly, of literary bookshops. With the exception of the ones in Lisbon and Paris, they are also museums of a single bookshop, without branches or clones. The transformation of City Lights into a tourist attraction is practically happening in real time, within the framework of a culture obsessed by distinction and the hectic pace of myth-making that goes with pop culture. The first Shakespeare and Company was part of the American Express circuit and a tourist-laden coach would stop for a few minutes on rue de l’Odéon so photographs could be taken of the place where Joyce published his famous novel and where Hemingway and the glamorous Fitzgeralds used to hang out. All these shops and others that project a bohemian image and an historical importance appear on lists of the world’s most beautiful bookshops that have proliferated over recent years in newspapers and on the web. This has been the case with Another Country in Berlin, a reading club and second-hand bookshop for titles in English. Autorenbuchhandlung, with its refined taste in poetry collections and literary café, and the neighbouring Bücherbogen, five parallel silos dedicated to books on contemporary art and cinema, both in Savignyplatz and under the railway lines: they are the city’s best, most beautiful bookshops. The Writers’ Bookshop gives material form to a classical ideal of the contemporary bookshop. Book Loans, a spectacular ideal: its interior design is fully synchronized with the content of the volumes that comprise its stock. Another Country, on the other hand, simply tries to replicate on a small scale the dusty second-hand bookshop doubling as hostel that gave Whitman such a good return, with a fridge full of beer and American students, the hung-over or night-owls reading slumped on the sofas. Their presence on the lists is the result of two factors: they can be located (and recognized) in English (the journalists compiling these lists also tend to be Anglo-Saxon) and can be summed up by a single image (which is picturesque and responds to what we recognize in the paintings, prints and photographs that circulate globally and tend to be repeated; that is, perpetuated through the basic mechanism that regulates tourism and culture: imitation.)

  These lists are often headed by a bookshop I have yet to visit, the Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, whose shelves and tables of the latest books are housed in a spectacular Gothic structure, a genuine Dominican church that was converted in 2007 by architects Merkx and Girod into a shrine to what our era understands as culture. They used three metal floors with stairs that ascend, with the columns, towards the top, fully exploiting the height of the nave: upwards to the place of light and the old God. A table in the ironic form of a cross is placed at the end of the nave, in the empty altar space, as if the ritual of communion were solely about reading (consumption moves to the nearby cafeteria). Four years later, the same architects refashioned the original façade with a rust-coloured door that looks like a
triptych when open and a box or wardrobe when closed. No doubt it is a masterpiece in architectural and interior design terms, but it’s not so clear that it is a fantastic bookshop. It shuts at 6 p.m. and stocks are exclusively in Dutch. Yet this does not matter: style is more important than content in the global circulation of the image. What is picturesque is more vital than the language that leads to reading. The split between the community of readers that allows the bookshop to exist and the tourists who come regularly to photograph it constitutes an essential feature of a bookshop in the twenty-first century. The bookshop became a tourist attraction previously when its historical importance and picturesque condition hit the radar; over recent years, architectural originality, almost always linked to excess, the grandiose and media appeal, has perhaps become a more influential marker than the two traditional ones.

  I hope the reader will forgive my abuse of italics at the beginning of the previous paragraph: I wanted to emphasize three concepts: spectacle, authenticity and culture. If, in the twentieth century the building of opera houses, theatres, concert halls, cultural complexes and libraries followed the model of the contemporary cathedral, this same tendency has appeared with force in the domain of bookshops in the present century. The first—now second in most lists, having lost first place when Selexyz was inaugurated—was the Ateneo Grand Splendid that, in 2000, reshaped the interior of a cinema-cum-theatre on Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires dating back to 1919, preserving its dome painted in oils, its balconies, boxes and rails and stage with its dark red curtain. The lighting is dazzling, three circular levels of bulbs create the impression that one is at once inside a monument and in the midst of a spectacle in full swing. An uninterrupted spectacle, where the lead role doesn’t fall to customers or booksellers, but to their surroundings. Part of the Yenny chain, the bookshop does not possess particularly remarkable stocks, but guarantees a tourist experience as much for occasional visitors as for locals and keen readers. It offers the experience of a unique place, even though what is on offer is identical to what you find in the chain’s others branches. While Fnac can clone itself in the interior of any historical building, converting Nantes Palace of the Stock Exchange into a space identical to the underground area in Barcelona’s Arenas Shopping Centre, which on the outside still appears to be—respectively—a neo-classical building and a bullring, the Ateneo Grand Splendid displays the uniqueness that is so valued in the symbolic marketplaces of virtual tourism (the image) and of physical tourism (the visit).

  I am quite sure that Eterna Cadencia, at one end of Palermo in the same city of Buenos Aires, is a better bookshop, and probably even more beautiful than the Ateneo Grand Splendid. Wooden floors, stately armchairs and tables, excellent stocks set out on shelving that covers the walls, a delightful café on a refurbished patio where all manner of literary events are held, a list published under the same name, and lamps that transport you to Hollywood bookshops. Clásica y Moderna, like the bookshop with that name on Avenida Callao, like Guadalquivir just along the street that specializes in Spanish publishing houses, follows a similar style to the one Eterna Cadencia has recreated in the twenty-first century. We find in all three the same sober style and traditional attention to detail of some of the great bookshops that sprang up in the 1980s and 1990s, like Laie, Robinson Crusoe 389 or Autorenbuchhandlung. And in others that have opened their doors in the last ten years, like the Book Lounge: lots has been written about taste; our era is characterized by the tremendous range.

  One can see the project of La Central in Barcelona as a possible migration of the main tendencies from the last quarter of the twentieth century to those of the twenty-first, with the proviso that we not forget the importance of uniqueness. The first premises were opened on calle Mallorca in 1996, with a design similar to those I have just mentioned: intimate and human (in step with the reader’s body). Conversely, the second, La Central del Raval, established in 2003, synchronizes with Selexyz and Ateneo Grand Splendid in its transformation of an eighteenth-century Chapel of Mercy into a bookish zone, respecting the original architecture and, consequently, the monumental proportions and human-dwarfing high ceilings. However, it has a monastic sobriety, a sense of measure that has disappeared in what might be seen as the third phase of an unpremeditated project: La Central de Callao, in Madrid, established in 2012, completely refurbished an early twentieth-century mansion, preserving its wooden staircase, brick walls, wood and ceramic ceilings, hydraulic-tiled floor and even its painted chapel, and adding, apart from shelves and thousands of books, a restaurant, bar and permanent exhibition of all kinds of objects directly or indirectly linked to reading, such as notebooks, lamps, bags or mugs. Although the ceilings of each of the three floors are relatively low, the extremely high interior patio, with its monumental alphabet soup, brings it in line with one of the main tendencies in our century: a grandeur that allows bookshops to compete with other cultural icons of contemporary architecture.

  After it opened, one of the owners, Antonio Ramírez, who embodies the tradition of the nomadic bookseller (the path his life has followed recalls Bolaño’s: Colombian by origin, he started in the trade in Mexico City, perfected his training in Paris’ La Hune and Barcelona’s Laie before starting his own business), published an article (together with Marta Ramoneda and Maribel Guirao) entitled “Imagining the Bookshop of the Future,” where he declared:

  Perhaps it is only possible if we locate ourselves in the dimension that cannot be replaced: the cultural density that the material nature of the paper book implies, or rather think of the bookshop as the real space for effective encounters between flesh-and-blood people and material objects endowed with a unique appearance, a unique weight and form, at a precise moment in time.

  And he goes on to list the features of that future space that must already be partially present. Ramírez speaks of an architecture for pleasure and the emotion that abolishes all barriers between reader and book, helpfully sketching in a hierarchy of what is on offer, where the bookseller acts as choreographer, meteorologist, hyper-reader or mediator and has to hand the emotional and practical elements that will stimulate the reader’s memory and channel his choices—purchases—in the direction that can bring him most pleasure. His emphasis on the bookshop as a summation of concrete physical experiences is of a piece with the architecture and interior design we find in a place like La Central de Callao, where the spectacular enters into dialogue with our inner selves, the latest fashion complements stocks, the physical feel of paper or card comes into contact with appetites whetted in the bar or restaurant. Unlike other great bookshops of our time, it is plumb in the centre of the city, in a place where crowds walk by, and competes directly with Fnac or El Corte Inglés, aware that—unlike them and their lack of architectural singularity—it can become a tourist attraction if its grandiose tone and picturesque ambience are incorporated into the international circuit of images.

  The division of bookshop chains into those that respect the peculiar characteristics of the space that welcomes them and those that impose a single design on all their branches becomes problematic in two Mexican instances: the bookshops that belong to the Fondo de Cultura Económica and the El Pendúlo group. The former is a Latin American chain, with spectacular southern premises like the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez in Bogotá, established in 2008 and spanning twelve-hundred square metres, or the Centro Cultural Belle Époque in Mexico City, which is two years younger and a few metres smaller. While the former and the complex it is part of were created from zero by Rogelio Salmona in the middle of the Colombian capital’s historic centre, the Librería Rosario Castellanos is part of the reshaping of the Lido, an emblematic cinema from the 1940s, carried out by Teodoro González de León. It is a dazzlingly white cathedral-like nave where the arrangement of bookshelves and sofas brings to mind a Pharaoh’s hieroglyph. The bookshop’s ceiling was designed by the Dutch artist Jan Hendrix and represents ancient scripts using vegetation. Naturally, it has a
café inside, though it occupies a tiny space.

  Conversely, the first El Pendúlo bookshop opened its doors in La Condesa district in the 1990s as a clear fusion of bookshop and café. This would be accompanied by a hybrid concert hall / literary academy in line with cultural centres proliferating at the time throughout the Western world, and anticipating bookshops’ primary response to the digital threat: one word symbolizes the mix: cafebrería. The bookshop as a rendez-vous point, as a place for business meetings, private classes, events, in a subtly Mexican ambience (tablecloths and plants). Over time, they have opened six premises that maintain a unique style adapted to the features of each new space. In Polanco, for example, the restaurant, bookshop and bar are almost entirely equal in terms of square metres occupied, but the bookcases are instrumental in creating the unifying thread, the overall tone, in forging harmony between the different sections with their diverse cultural products: music, cinema, television series, art books . . . In Colonia Roma the wall at the back of the bookshop is called on to provide the interconnecting function, transformed as it is into a hyperbolic bookcase crammed with books bordering the stairs to the first floor and terrace, evoking Patrick Blanc’s vertical gardens. In El Pendúlo del Sur there is a huge purple panel that plays on its echo of contemporary art. In Santa Fe we find, in its stead, murals that recall pre-Columbian art and Miró. There is a common corporate image that flirts with cool, memorable individual design features. Clearly the grand bookshop is an important development, interacting with installations and other features of contemporary design and art that can be seen in those vast places: particularly walls and, above all, ceilings. In addition to those in Buenos Aires, Maastricht, Madrid or Mexico City, the same kind of projects have sprung up this century in the United States, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and China.