Bookshops

  EPILOGUE

  Virtual Bookshops

  Over the first few months of 2013, I watched how a bookshop that was almost a hundred years old became a McDonald’s. Of course, it is an obvious metaphor, but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. I am quite sure that the Catalònia, the bookshop that opened its doors on the edges of Plaza de Cataluña in 1924, was not the first to be transformed into a fast-food restaurant, but it is the only time I have personally witnessed such a metamorphosis. For three years I walked past the glass door in the morning and sometimes went in to take a look, buy a book, make an enquiry until suddenly the shutters stayed shut and someone stuck up a precarious notice, barely a page long, which read:

  After over eighty-eight years of being open and eighty-two years of activity at Ronda San Pere 3. After surviving a civil war, a devastating fire, a property dispute, the Llibreria Catalònia will close its doors for good.

  The severe crisis in the book trade has generated a slump in the sales of books over the last four years that has made it impossible for us to continue in these circumstances and conditions.

  It has been very sad, difficult and painful to take this irrevocable decision. We have tried to find every possible solution, perhaps too late in the day, but either they didn’t exist or we couldn’t find them.

  Nor could we have prolonged this situation, because we wanted to ensure that the business closed in an orderly way and met all its obligations. If we had continued any longer, the end would have been much worse.

  As we make this decision public we would also like to remember all those who have worked throughout the years in the Llibreria Catalònia and the enterprises that depended on it, especially the Selecta publishing house, and also all our customers—some over decades and generations—and our authors, publishers and distributors. Jointly they have allowed the Llibreria Catalònia to make an important contribution to the culture of Catalonia and Barcelona.

  Now and in the future, in all the forms that the dissemination of culture will take, there are and will be individuals, associations, collectives and enterprises ensuring the survival of literature and written culture in general. Unfortunately, the Llibreria Catalònia will not be part of that future.

  Miquel Colomer, Director, Barcelona, January 6, 2013

  Day after day I was witness to the disappearance of books, to empty shelves, to dust, that great enemy of books, books that were no longer there, only ghosts, memories, books that were gradually being forgotten until one Wednesday there were no shelves for them to be on, because the premises were emptied, filled with workers who yanked out the bookcases and the brackets and the place was all noise and drilling, a din that shocked me for weeks, because I had been used to the silence and cleanliness it had emanated for years; when I walked past that same door, I was met with clouds of dust, carts loaded with rubble, with debris, the gradual transformation of the promise of reading, the business of reading into the digestion of proteins and sugar, the fast-food business.

  I have nothing against fast food. I like McDonald’s. Indeed, I am interested in McDonald’s: I search one out on most of my trips, in order to try the local specialities, because there is always a breakfast or a fajita or a hamburger or a sweet that is the McDonald’s version of one of the favourite dishes of the locals. However, that didn’t make this supplantation any less painful. For months, every morning I watched the destruction of a small world, occupying that same space like an ambassador from another world, and in the afternoons I read about reading and finished writing this book.

  There is a traditional, multicoloured bookshop in Turin called La Bussola. All bookshops are compasses: when you study them they offer you interpretations of the contemporary world that are more finely tuned than those provided by other icons or spaces. If I had to choose another bookshop to explain partially—complete explanations do not exist—the schism within the book trade in our era it would be Pandora’s in Istanbul. It has two well-stocked premises, one opposite the other: one exclusively sells books in Turkish; the other, titles in English. The prices in one are in Turkish lira; those in the other in dollars. Pandora makes a symbolic reality explicit: all bookshops live between two worlds, the local and the one imposed by the United States, traditional business (of a local sort) and the one in huge shopping centres (chains), the physical and the virtual. This metaphor is not as obvious as the one afforded by an old bookshop, a classic, vintage bookshop, a bookshop that was founded by Josep López, Manuel Borràs and Josep Maria Cruzet, survived the wintry bunker of a dictatorship and systematic harassment by a real estate company, after fierce political and moral resistance yielded to the cold, implacable, abstract rules of economics, shut down its premises, a few metres away from the Apple Store, two hundred metres from Fnac, opposite El Corte Inglés, and was transformed into a McDonald’s. In effect, the Pandora metaphor is more oblique but more hopeful, because it leads to survival rather than closure. All bookshops are divided into at least two worlds and are forced to consider other possible worlds, and I write that without a scrap of naivety.

  Green Apple Books—as Dave Eggers recalls in his chapter in the anthology My Bookstore—is lodged in a building that has survived two earthquakes that brought turmoil to San Francisco in 1906 and 1989; perhaps that is why one experiences between its shelves the feeling that “if a bookshop is as unorthodox and strange as books are, as writers are, as language is, it will all seem right and good and you will buy things there.” I bought there a short bilingual book, published by a Hong Kong poetry festival, the English title of which is Bookstore in a Dream. Four lines about the bookshop as a quantum fiction really caught my attention: its multiplication through space, its mental realm, its existence in parallel universes on the Internet, a compulsive survivor of all earthquakes. If Danilo Kiš’ narrator dreams of an impossible library that contains the infinite Encyclopedia of the Dead, Lo Chih Cheng dreams of a bookshop that cannot be mapped out. A bookshop, like any other, that is soothingly physical and horribly virtual. Virtual because digital, or mental, or because it has ceased to exist. A bookshop that is born, like Lolita in Santiago de Chile, like Bartleby and Company in Berlin or Valencia, like Librería de la Plata in marginal Sabadell. Like Dòria Llibres, which has filled the space left by Robafaves in another small Catalan city, my Mataró: at what point do projects become completely real? Bookshops of the memory, gradually invaded by fiction.

  Like the shop run by the wise Catalan in One Hundred Years of Solitude, who came to Macondo during the Banana Company boom, opened his business and began to treat the classics and his customers as if they were members of his own family. Aureliano Buendía’s arrival in that den of knowledge is described by Gabriel García Márquez in terms of an epiphany:

  He went to the bookstore of the wise Catalonian and found four ranting boys in a heated argument about the methods used to kill cockroaches in the Middle Ages. The old bookseller, knowing about Aureliano’s love for books that had been read only by the Venerable Bede, urged him with a certain fatherly malice to get into the discussion, and without even taking a breath, he explained that the cockroach, the oldest winged insect on the face of the earth, had already been the victim of slippers in the Old Testament, but that since the species was definitely resistant to any and all methods of extermination, from tomato slices with borax to flour and sugar, and with its one thousand six hundred and three varieties had resisted the most ancient, tenacious, and pitiless persecution that mankind had unleashed against any living thing since the beginning, including man himself, to such an extent that just as an instinct for reproduction was attributed to humankind, so there must have been another one more definite and pressing, which was the instinct to kill cockroaches, and if the latter had succeeded in escaping human ferocity it was because they had taken refuge in the shadows, where they became invulnerable, because of man’s congenital fear of the dark, but on the other hand they became susceptible to the glow of noon, so th
at by the Middle Ages already, and in present times, and per omnia secula seculorum, the only effective method for killing cockroaches was the glare of the sun. The encyclopedic coincidence was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Álvaro, Germán, Alfonso and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore at 6.00 p.m. and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation.

  That wise Catalan was in fact Ramon Vinyes, the Barranquilla bookseller, cultural activist, and founder of Voces magazine (1917–20), first Spanish immigrant, then Spaniard in exile, teacher, dramatist and storyteller. His bookshop, R.

  Viñas & Co, a pre-eminent cultural centre, was burnt down in 1923 and is still remembered today in Barranquilla as one of the mythical bookshops of the Colombian Caribbean. When he went into exile in Latin America as a Republican intellectual after crossing France, he took up teaching and journalism and became the master of a whole young generation known as “the Barranquilla Group” (Alfonso Fuenmayor, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas, Alejandro Obregón, Orlando Rivera “Figurita,” Julio Mario Santo Domingo and García Márquez). On one of my strangest mornings ever, I gave a taxi driver at the Barranquilla bus station the following address: calle San Blas, between Progreso and 20 de Julio. Librería Mundo. As we drove on, he told me that the names had changed, he did some consulting and discovered that I was referring to calle 35 between Carrera 41 and 43. We headed there. The Librería Mundo run by Jorge Rondón Hederich was where the legendary group of intellectuals met, the spiritual heir of R. Viñas & Co. that had been reduced to ashes twenty years earlier. When I got there, I discovered that it, too, no longer existed. It was obvious, but neither Juan Gabriel Vásquez (who had given me the information) nor I had thought to check it. The bookshop should have been there, but it wasn’t, because for quite some time it had only existed in books:

  In any case, the axis of our lives was the Librería Mundo at twelve noon and six in the evening, on the busiest block of calle San Blas. Germán Vargas, an intimate friend of the owner, Don Jorge Rondón, was the one who convinced him to open the store that soon became the meeting place for journalists, young writers and politicians. Rondón lacked business experience, but he soon learned, and with an enthusiasm and a generosity that turned him into an unforgettable Maecenas. Germán, Álvaro and Alfonso were his advisers in ordering books, above all the new books coming from Buenos Aires, where publishers had begun the translation, publication and mass distribution of new literature from all over the world following the Second World War. Thanks to them we could read in a timely way books that otherwise would not have come to the city. The publishers themselves encouraged their patrons and made it possible for Barranquilla to again become the centre of reading it had been years earlier, until Don Ramon’s historic bookshop ceased to exist. It was not too long after my arrival when I joined the brotherhood that waited for the travelling salesmen from the Argentinian publishers as if they were envoys from heaven. Thanks to them we were early admirers of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Felisberto Hernández, and the English and North American novelists who were well translated by Victoria Ocampo’s crew. Arturo Barea’s Making of Rebel was the first hopeful message from a remote Spain silenced by two wars.

  That is García Márquez writing about those two bookshops, the one he didn’t know and the one he visited, both melded into one in the virtual reality of his masterpiece. I have been unable to find photographs of R. Vinyes & Co. or Mundo on the web and I now realize that this book has found its rhythm in searches inside material books and on the non-material screen, a syntax of to-ing and fro-ing as continuous and discontinuous as life itself; how Montaigne would enjoy the ability of search engines to generate associations, links, fertile byways and analogies. How his heir, Alfonso Reyes, would also have learned from them about whom the narrator of the first part of The Savage Detectives says: “Reyes could be my little home. Reading only him and those he liked one could be incredibly happy.” In Books and Bookshops in Antiquity the erudite Mexican noted:

  Parchment was cheaper and more resistant than papyrus, but the book trade did not adopt it as a matter of course[. . .] Ancient producers of books preferred this light, elegant material, and there was a degree of aversion towards the weight and coarseness of parchment. Galen, the great doctor from the second century AD, was of the opinion that, for reasons of hygiene, shiny parchment hurt and tired the eyes more than smooth opaque papyrus that did not reflect the light. Ulpianus the jurist (died AD 229) examined as a legal problem the issue of whether codices made of vellum or parchment should be considered as books in library bequests, something that did not even have to be debated in the case of papyrus items.

  Almost two millennia later, the slow transition from reading paper to reading onscreen gives these arguments a contemporary twist. We now wonder if the screen and the light it radiates do more damage to the eyes than electronic ink, which does not allow us to read in the dark. Or whether, after someone’s death, it is right for their heirs to inherit, through books, vinyl records, CDs and hard discs, the songs and texts their parents bought for themselves. Or whether television and video games harm the imagination of children or adolescents, because they stimulate their reflexes but damage the activity of their brains and are so violent. As Roger Chartier has studied in Inscription and Erasure, Written Culture and Literature from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, it is in Golden Age Castile that the danger fiction represents for the reader is first formally expressed, with Don Quixote arousing the greatest social fear: “In the eighteenth century, the discourse is medicalized and constructs a pathology of excessive reading that is thought to be an individual sickness or collective epidemic.” In this period the reader’s sickness is related both to the arousal of the imagination and the immobilizing of the body: the threat is as mental as it is physiological. Following this thread, Chartier analyses the eighteenth-century debate over traditional reading that was called intensive, and modern reading that was said to be extensive:

  According to this dichotomy, suggested by Rolf Engelsing, the intensive reader was confronted by a restricted range of texts that were read and reread, memorized and recited, listened to and learnt by heart, transmitted from generation to generation. Such a way of reading was heavily impregnated with sacred purpose, and subjected the reader to the authority of the text. The extensive reader, who appears in the second half of the eighteenth century, is very different and reads countless new, ephemeral printed works and devours them eagerly and quickly. His glance is distanced and critical. In this way, a communitarian, respectful relationship is replaced by irreverent, self-assured reading.

  Our way of reading, inextricably linked to screens and keyboards, must be about the spread, books having been produced at an ever-increasing rate, of more and more audio-visual information and knowledge platforms, of that broadening out, with all its political implications. The loss of the ability to concentrate on a single text brings the gain of a glimmer of light, critical, ironic distance, the ability to relate and interpret simultaneous phenomena. Consequently, it brings an emancipation from authorities that restrict the range of reading, the deconsecration of an activity that by this stage in evolution should be almost natural: reading is like walking, like breathing, something we do without even having to think.

  Whilst the apocalyptically minded revamped worn-out arguments from worlds that no longer existed rather than accepting perpetual change as the immutable engine of History, Fnac bookshops filled up on video games and television series and prestigious bookshops began to sell commentaries about video games and television series, as well as eReaders and eBooks. Because the moment a style ceases to be a fashion or trend and becomes mainstream, it will probably undergo a process of sophistication and end up on bookshop and library shelves and in museum rooms. As a cultur
al product. As a work of art. As a commodity. Scorn of emerging and mainstream styles is fairly common in the world of culture, a field—as they all are—dominated by fashion, the ego and the economy. Most of the bookshops I have mentioned in this essay, on the international circuit where I have slotted myself in as tourist and traveller, nurture a class fiction to which greater millions now have access—fortunately—but they are still a minority. We represent the broadening out of the chosen people that Goethe met in the Italian bookshop. A class fiction that is eminently economic—as they all are—even though it wears a veneer of an education that is more or less refined. We should not deceive ourselves: bookshops are cultural centres, myths, spaces for conversations and debate, friendships and even amorous encounters, due in part to their pseudo-romantic paraphernalia, which is often championed by readers who love their craftsmanship, and even by intellectuals, publishers and writers who know they form part of the history of culture. But above all bookshops are businesses. And their owners, often charismatic booksellers, are also bosses, responsible for paying the wages of their employees and ensuring their labour rights are respected, managers, overseers, negotiators skilled in the ins and outs of labour legislation. One of the most inspiring and sincere pieces of those gathered together in Rue de l’Odéon is in fact the one that links freedom to the purchase of a book: