Bookshops

by Jorge Carrión

  The Last Bookstore occupies the former premises of a bank in downtown Los Angeles and has preserved the original giant columns: the counter is made entirely of books and overlooked by a sculpture of a large fish that has also been made from hundreds of books. The old industrial premises in Lisbon’s Alcántara district, home to Ler Devagar, have preserved—intact and rusty—the printing press from the old days. At the back is a vast wall packed with books that is continuously flown past by a bicycle with wings that open and shut as if applauding in slow motion. The applause is for a project that is without parallel in the bookselling world. Having had two former shops, one in the Barrio Alto and the other in an old weapons factory, Ler Devagar is now the most widely stocked bookshop in Portugal. It is a limited company with forty shareholders who receive no return on their investment, and enjoy no hope of one, because they have purchased all the books in the main premises and those in other parts of the country. It is a huge library that sells books and encourages one to read slowly. It is also a first-rate cultural centre, where things are always happening. I can’t think of a better definition of an ideal bookshop. The white platforms that make up the ceiling in Bookàbar, the bookshop and café in Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, have been set on an incline and punctured as if they were supremacist sculptures. An installation of books hanging on threads from the ceiling dominates the view of Cook & Book in Brussels. In the case of Beijing’s Bookworm, a giant orange awning fights the horror vacui. Because it is all about humanizing the space, reducing the dizziness provoked by all those square metres between the walls, about camouflaging the height of ceilings that are on a factory rather than human scale.

  The majority of these twenty-first-century bookshops have one or two cafeterias, if not a restaurant, harmoniously inscribed in a varied whole where books provide an Ariadne’s thread. Décor, furniture, a children’s section disguised as a games room, or the interplay between different colours and textures respond to an emotion-based interior design, the aim of which is to prolong a customer’s stay in the bookshop, transforming it into an experience that draws on all the senses and on human relationships. I believe that minimalism is more than a stylistic resource: it can be read as a statement of intent. A hierarchy is established on three levels. At the top is the architecture, almost always propelled by straight lines in a space so huge it ends up imposing itself on everything that exists there but doesn’t fill it, to the tiniest letter. At an intermediate level the stairs, picture windows, shop windows, murals, sculptures, period furniture and lights are the protagonists whose function is to try to reduce the intensity of a space that was usually conceived for a different kind of social function and has now been recycled and refurbished. At the bottom comes the display of books, the raison d’être of the whole structure, which can never be as important as they were in the twentieth century when bookshops were made to measure, to fit our hands and eyes, because of the magnificence, the lighting, the art-gallery or vintage-store status of their new abode.

  In this way, the bookshop becomes a possible metaphor for the Internet: as on the web, texts occupy a significant but small, limited space in comparison to what is invaded by the visual, and above all by what is so indefinite and empty. As in cyberspace, where things are always happening, and are mostly invisible, a visitor to these multi-spaced bookshops is conscious that stories are being told in the area of children’s books, that a poet-singer is performing in the cafeteria, that the new-books table or window display has been changed that morning, that a book

  launch will begin in a moment, that there is a new dessert menu in the restaurant or literary workshops are about to finish their first session. As in the virtual world, we are witnessing new forms of socializing, social networks, but the bookish variety clings to personal contact, to the fulfilment of the senses, the only thing the Internet cannot offer us. 10 Corso Como makes its intentions very clear via the “slow shopping” tag at the heart of its spectacular bookshop project. The longer you linger mentally or physically in the shop’s atmosphere, the more you buy and consume. Although the Italian chain has premises in Seoul and Tokyo, only the original in Milan adds a bookshop to its fusion of hotel, café-restaurant, garden, art gallery, and clothes and design shop. If the centre of gravity is still occupied by a cinema in the Trasnocho Cultural complex in Caracas, opened in 2001 around which are grouped gastronomic, artistic or bookish spaces (the El Buscón bookshop), it is testament to a twentieth-century trend, which in any case never caught on: multi-screen cinemas are usually on the top floor and bookshops are simply just another shop with no particular uniqueness or prestige. In 10 Corso Como the nucleus comprises the restaurant and the hotel, around which we find a couple of cultural outposts that legitimize the cultural activities of the complex as a whole. Its bookshop is generically named: Book and Design Shop, because it has no meaning beyond its glamorous context. In an era when gastronomy is now recognized as an art, culture has broadened its boundaries. This can be seen in tourist experiences that encompass every form of cultural consumption. Something similar has been happening from the inception of modernity: when Goethe travelled through Italy, his visits to bookshops formed part of the spatial continuum that shaped every journey alongside churches, ruins, the houses of learned men, restaurants and hotels. Travel and bookshops have always stimulated a love of the marketplace.

  Intellectual pleasure fuses with voluptuous delight. Today’s bookshops are learning more than ever from the success of shops in contemporary art museums where catalogues are only part of what is on offer, and are usually not even the most significant items alongside jewellery, clothes and industrial design pieces. Strengthened by a minimalist context highlighting the unique facets of every item, objects become a focus of attraction. As in my encounter with that teapot in Beijing, we often find the same T-shirt or cup in another shop, at a lower price, but then it does not enjoy the prestigious aura lent by the Pompidou Centre or the Museum of Modern Art. So it is not exactly the same object. If it were only a few metres away, within the framework of the exhibition, we would not be able to touch it, but we can do so in the shop. We can touch and buy everything in a bookshop, which is not the case in a museum or the most important libraries. The profit margins on arty presents are much higher than on books. New bookshops are very clear about how tactile experience adds value to their offerings: premises cannot simply justify their existence as the physical space for electronic sales, they must offer everything that web pages can’t.

  And that necessarily involves luxury. Because a visit to a bookshop distinguished by its history, architecture, interior design or publishing stock spotlights us as subjects who like luxury, members of a different community to the one that consume culture in shopping centres and the big chains. Paul Otlet, in his Traité de Documentation (1934), writes: “Comfort competes with luxury and beauty in sales rooms. A refined atmosphere, comfortable lounges, fresh flowers. Some bookshops like Brentano’s, Scribner’s or Macmillan are real palaces.” Megalomaniac bookshops have existed at the very least from the eighteenth-century Temple of the Muses. Policy in eighteenth-century salons was regulated precisely by refinement, by an aristocratically refined taste. With the advent of democracy, the dream of the troubadours is multiplied exponentially: whether readers belong to the most excellent communities of their era depends on their culture, education, artistic insights and not on their acquisitive power or blood. Nevertheless, it is true that if one wants to be able to evaluate and interpret the architecture, design or stock of spectacular bookshops it is a costly educational process. Not everyone can afford the trips that allow one to explore the high-profile places touted in tourist guides. As in all tourist scenarios, different levels of awareness, intellectual insight and class fictions coexist: as many as the brains and gazes browsing there at a particular moment.

  In A Life of Books, Joyce Thorpe Nicholson and Daniel Wrixon Thorpe make it very clear that Australian booksellers in the 1970s were aware of how cr
ucial it was for their premises to project what the authors called “a trendy appearance.” They mention Angus & Robertson in Sydney, whose owners decided to paint each floor a different colour when they moved to new premises; the Angus & Robertson, in Western Australia, that up and went to a period hotel and tavern and started a campaign based on the coupling of “books and beer”; and the Abbey’s Henry Lawson’s Bookshop, in the basement of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, with its black wood bookcases and impressive offer of “any book published in Australia.” There are many other precedents for the spectacular bookshop waiting to be disinterred in libraries, newspaper collections and personal reminiscences. Two nineteenth-century stations that were converted into bookshops still exist: Barter Books opened its doors in 1991 in Alnwick, Northumberland, and four years later Walked a Crooked Mile Books did so in Philadelphia.

  The revamping of hotels, railway stations, cinemas, palaces, banks, printer’s, art galleries or museums as bookshops is a constant over recent decades and has accelerated in the twenty-first century. In a new historic context in which recycling has taken on a new meaning, in which culture has been digitized and, above all, in which the existence of all that is real is—simultaneously—physical and virtual, these cathedrals to the written word acquire a deeply capitalist, religious-cum-apocalyptic significance that also reveals unprecedented artistic ambition. The impact of the spectacular is decisive on both fronts. Via El Pendúlo’s web page you can make virtual visits to each of its cafebrerías. Google Images and other platforms are awash with photographs of the world’s most beautiful, most interesting, most spectacular bookshops. For the first time in the history of culture these bookshops have immediate access to the international tourist circuit, markers gather pace and generate immediate contagion—at a stick-and-paste rate—on web pages, social media, blogs and microblogs, all of which create a desire to visit, to get to know, travel and photograph without any recourse to History or the participation of famous writers or acclaimed books. The image of a church, railway station or theatre transformed into a bookshop is more compelling in the new logic of tourism than the hundred thousand books in the picture or their ten billion words.

  XIII

  Everyday Bookshops

  J. R. R. Tolkien’s first poem, “Goblin Feet,” was published in a poetry collection by Oxford’s Blackwell’s Bookshop, which cancelled his debt in exchange for the advance on his rights, and because he had been a regular customer in that establishment, founded in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, which was later transformed into a publishing concern by his son Basil, the first member of the family to go to university and the publisher of the author of The Lord of the Rings. As the business grew and became a chain, each branch attracted its parishioners, its usual suspects, its congregation, people who chose Blackwell’s in Edinburgh, Liverpool or Belfast as their everyday bookshop.

  If you hunt around the main premises in Oxford, it is still possible to imagine how the few square metres where the business was created gradually increased until several houses were transformed into a single monster of a house. As you enter, to the left, a nineteenth-century fireplace and wooden beams are the archaeological traces of the original establishment. If you ask, you can visit the reconstructed founders’ office next to the fireplace on the floor above, where pipes, spectacles and letter-openers are laid out on the table as if they had been left there only a few hours, and not a whole century before. The successive owners of Blackwell’s bought up all the flats in the building as business expanded. The most recent, definitive extension is a huge basement at the back that occupies the space under Trinity College Gardens. It has its own name: the Norrington Room. It is an Olympic swimming pool of shelves and books. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the frequent power cuts, it relied on kerosene lamps that ensured people could still read, whatever the obstacle. I imagine those readers as if they were marooned in a post-nuclear bunker. From above, despite the rectangular shape, it looks like a giant brain. This is what it is: the brain of a collective intelligence, which is in fact what its eighty employees are for the most part; what Oxford University is, expanding exponentially and intellectually, just like its best bookshop.

  The last time I was in Berlin, before I went to photograph the decomposing remains of the Karl Marx Bookshop, I bumped into César Aira, quite by chance. We went to the nearest cafeteria and chatted for a while about the latest literary titles out in Argentina. “We would meet almost daily,” he said halfway into the conversation, “in the International Argentina, Francisco Garamona’s bookshop, Raúl Escari, Fernando Laguna, Ezequiel Alemián, Pablo Katchadjian, Sergio Bizzio and other friends.” Dominated by a sofa and a small table for your glass of wine, the site of the Mansalva publishing house is probably the only bookshop in the world where you can buy most of Aira’s books, even in translation, although naturally there will always be ten or twenty that not even Garamona can supply. One of those places where the ways of a past era have become established. Like the Ballena Blanca, Alejandro Padrón’s place in Mérida, Venezuela, where university teachers like Diómedes Cordero and writers like Ednodio Quintero meet daily to talk about the country’s great poets, about Japanese literature or political issues in Spain or Argentina while they prepare the next edition of the famous Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas, which was to inspire the exploits of Aira and an army of Carlos Fuentes clones in The Literary Conference. Because literature is polemical, and is about the future and about books to imagine.

  “In the afternoon our bookshop seemed more like a club where scientists, literati and artists met up, talked, to find relief from the prosaic nature of daily life,” wrote Mikhail Osorgin on the subject of the legendary cooperative in Moscow, The Writers’ Bookshop. Although conversations about literature are as old as Western culture, it is, of course, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they would become institutionalized as literary conversazione. It should be no surprise then that this coincided with the moment when bookshop and café began to fuse into a single organism, as Adrian Johns has observed in The Nature of the Book. Apprentices were part of the family and the boundaries between private space and public business were not at all obvious, so that the presence of armchairs, seats and sofas where one could enjoy reading while drinking was often due to the fact that they belonged to the bookshop owner’s house. Since then, many booksellers have developed salons and literary conversations that double as debates about culture and buying and selling sessions: “The foremost example of ‘amphibious mortal’ was surely Jacob Tonson. Among aristocrats he looked like a bookseller; among booksellers he appeared an aristocrat.” The confusion between private and public life parallels the confusion between bookshop and library. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys writes of bookshops where “seats were available so customers could read for as long as they wished.” And booksellers themselves in the eighteenth century were the driving force behind lending libraries that were much more democratic than literary societies and the only way in which artisans’ apprentices, students or women could have access to literature without incurring the huge expense of a book. One could even say that, despite appearances, bookshops have never really been sure about their real boundaries.

  I have found a haven in many of my travels, fleeting homes far from the home I did not actually possess, and found refuge in their ambiguous nature. I remember my daily visits to Leonardo da Vinci’s basement during my stay in Rio de Janeiro, to the Seminary Co-op when I lived in Chicago and to the Book Bazaar in Istanbul for as long as my foolish haggling lasted trying to secure that Turkish travellers’ book, to the Ross bookshop in Rosario on every one of my sojourns in that city with a river without shores, even though it was in the nearby premises of El Ateneo that I found the complete works of Edgardo Cozarinsky, and, in its café, where I read Rinconete y Cortadillo and El licenciado Vidriera. Since re-establishing myself in Barcelona, whenever I escape to Madrid, as well as visiting La Central in the Reina Sofía art museum, I t
ry to have a coffee in Tipos Infames, a bar and gallery in step with the latest trends in international bookshops; I go to say hello to Lola Larumbe, who manages Rafael Alberti in such a charming, professional manner, a bookshop designed by the poet and painter in 1975, where water seems to swirl over the basement; I visit Antonio Machado, in the basement of the Circle of Fine Arts, with its delightful selection of books from small Spanish bookshops and by whose cash register over the years I have discovered the main studies of bookshops that I’ve used for this essay. I go to Naples twice a year and am duty-bound to visit Feltrinelli’s in the Central Station and the Librería Colonnese, on via San Pietro a Majella, surrounded by churches, artisans making Nativity cribs, remains of ancient walls and altars dedicated to San Diego Maradona.

  There is no doubt that a bookshop is much more hospitable when, as a result of repeated visits or coincidence, you strike up a friendship with one of the booksellers. When I lived in Buenos Aires and Rosario and had to leave the country every three months, I used it as an opportunity to explore parts of Uruguay by sea, land and river. Every one of my journeys ended in La Lupa, the bookshop where one of its owners, Gustavo Guarino, gave me leads into Uruguayan literature on every visit: only by travelling to the place where things happen do you find access to what resists visibility on the Internet. One of the pleasures that awaits me in Palma de Mallorca is La Biblioteca de Babel, where I can lose myself in its essay and fiction sections, and Literanta, where critic and cultural activist Marina P. De Cabo stands behind the counter; it was she who discovered me when I became interested in the work of Cristóbal Serra. For years I visited La Central de Raval in Barcelona on Fridays, knowing that César Solís would be there to recommend the latest titles from Latin America, or supply me with the latest book by Sebald or on Sebald to be published in one of the main European languages. Ever since he moved to Madrid, I now go to Damià Gallardo, in the Centre for Contemporary Culture’s Laie bookshop, who solves my problems as a reader. Because every good bookseller must be something of a doctor, chemist or psychologist. Or barman. Francisco, Alejandro, Gustavo, Marina, César and Damià form part of my own bookseller tradition, the restless tradition of habits you take up again as soon as you arrive in distant cities where you once lived.