For us the business has a deep and very moving meaning. In our view a shop is a real magic chamber: when a passer-by crosses the threshold of a door that anyone can open, enters this impersonal place, one might say that nothing changes the expression on his face or his tone of voice: with a feeling of total freedom he is carrying out an act he believes has no unexpected consequences.
But which in fact is defined by those consequences: James Boswell will meet Samuel Johnson in Tom Davies’ bookshop on Russell Street; Joyce will find a publisher for Ulysses; Ferlinghetti will decide to open his own bookshop in San Francisco; Josep Pla will enter the Canet bookshop in Figueras as a child and seal his pact with literature; William Faulkner will work in one as a bookseller; Vargas Llosa will buy Madame Bovary in a bookshop in the Quartier Latin in Paris a long time after seeing the film in Lima; Jane Bowles will meet her best friend in Tangier; Jorge Camacho will buy Singing from the Well in a bookshop in Havana and become Reinaldo Arenas’ main champion in France; a psychiatrist will advise a juvenile delinquent by the name of Liminov to go to Bookshop 41 in a provincial Russian city and this will make a writer of him; François Truffaut will find a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché entitled Jules et Jim among second-hand books in Delamaine in Paris; one night in 1976 Bolaño will read the “First Infra-realist Manifesto” in Ghandi Bookshop in Mexico City; Cortázar will discover Cocteau’s work; Vila-Matas will find Borges. Perhaps it was only once that the fact somebody did not enter a bookshop had positive outcomes: one day in 1923, Akira Kurosawa headed off to Tokyo’s famous Maruzen bookshop, renowned because of its building constructed by Riki Sano in 1909 and for importing international titles for the Japanese cultural elite. He was planning to buy a book for his sister, but he found that the shop was shut and left; two hours later, an earthquake destroyed the building and the whole district was consumed by flames. Literature is magic and exchange, and for centuries has been sustained, like money, by paper, which is why it has fallen victim to so many fires. Bookshops are businesses on two simultaneous, inseparable levels: the economic and the symbolic, the sale of copies and the creation and destruction of reputations, the reaffirmation of dominant taste or the invention of a new one, stocks and credits. Bookshops have always been the canon’s witches’ Sabbath and hence key points in cultural geopolitics. The places where culture becomes more physical and thus more open to manipulation. The spaces where, from district to district, town to town, city to city, it is decided what reading matter people will have access to, what is going to be distributed and thus open to the possibility of being consumed, thrown away, recycled, copied, plagiarized, parodied, admired, adapted or translated. It is where their degree of influence is mainly decided. It was not for nothing that the first title Diderot gave to his Letter on the Book Trade was: “A political and historical letter written to a magistrate about the Bookshop, its present and ancient status, its rules, its privileges, its tacit limits, the censors, itinerant sellers, the crossing of bridges and other matters related to the control of literature.”
The Internet is changing that democracy—or dictatorship, depending on how you look at it—of distribution and selection. I often buy titles published in cities I have visited and was unable to buy when I was there from Amazon or other web stores. Last year, on my return from Mexico City, where I exhausted a dozen bookshops looking for an essay by Luis Felipe Fabre published by a small Mexican publishing house, I decided to look on the Casa del Libro page and there it was and cheaper than in its place of origin. If Google is the Search Engine and Barnes & Noble the Book Chain, it hardly needs to be said that Amazon is the supreme Virtual Bookshop. Though that is not very precise: even if it was born in 1994 as a bookshop with the name of Cadabra.com and soon after switched to Amazon in order to shoot up the alphabetical pecking order that ruled the Internet before Google, the truth is that for some time it has been a big department store where books are as important as cameras, toys, shoes, computers or bicycles, although the brand bases its power to pull in customers on emblematic devices like the Kindle, a reader or electronic book that creates customer loyalty. Indeed, in 1997 Barnes & Noble took it to court over its deceitful advertising (that tautology): the slogan “The world’s greatest bookstore” was not true because Amazon was a book broker and not a bookstore. Now it deals in anything that is on offer, except for eReaders that are not Kindles.
We are innate searchers of the physical world—my hunt for the non-existent bookshop in Barranquilla is only one example from a thousand—and cannot stop being that in the virtual world as well: the history of the electronic book is as gripping as a thriller. It began in the 1940s, gathered speed in the 1960s with hypertext publishing and found a format in the 1970s thanks to Michael S. Hart and a description (“electronic book”) thanks to Professor Andries Van Damme, of Brown University, in the middle of the 1980s. When Sony launched its book reader in 1992 with the Data Discman CD, it did so with the tag “The library of the future.” Kim Blagg got the first ISBN for an electronic book in 1998. These are the data, the possible chronologies, the clues that, when combined, create the feeling that we are caught between two worlds, as were Cervantes’ contemporaries in the seventeenth century, Stefan Zweig’s at the beginning of the twentieth or the inhabitants of Eastern Europe the end of the 1980s. In a slow apocalypse in which bookshops are at once oracles and privileged observatories, battlefields and twilight horizons in an irrevocable process of mutation. As Alessandro Baricco says in The Barbarians:
It is a mutation. Something that concerns everyone, without exception. Even the engineers, up there on the wall’s turrets are already starting to take on the physical features of the very nomads they, in theory, are fighting against and they have nomadic coins in their pockets, as well as dust from the steppes on their starched collars. It’s a mutation. Not some minor change or inexplicable degeneration, or mysterious disease, but a mutation undergone for the sake of survival. The collective choice of a different, salutary habitat. Do we have even the vaguest sense of what could have generated it? I can certainly think of a number of decisive technological innovations, the ones that have compressed space and time, squeezing the world. But these probably would not have been enough had they not coincided with an event that threw open the whole social scene: the collapse of the barriers that until now had kept a good part of humanity far from the routines of desire and consumption.
The word desire reappears yet again in this book, that chemical energy that draws us to certain bodies and objects, vehicles towards manifold knowledge. In the post-1991 world, with neo-liberalism strengthened by the fall of the Soviet Union, and increasingly digital and digitized, that desire has been assuming material form in the consumption of the pixel, that smallest unit of information with which we make sense of our writing, photographs, conversations, videos and maps that explain the routes where we sweat, drive, fly or read. That is why bookshops have web pages: in order to sell us pixelated books, and so we also consume images, stories, the latest novelties and gimmicks. All this is substantial, not mere accident: our brains are changing, the way we communicate and relate is changing: we are the same but very different. As Baricco explains, in recent decades, what we understand by experience and even the tissue of our existence has changed. The consequences of this mutation are as follows: “Surface rather than depth, speed rather than reflection, sequences rather than analysis, surfing rather than penetration, communication rather than expression, multitasking rather than specialization, pleasure rather than effort.”
An exhaustive dismantling of the machinery of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought, a final destruction of the last debris of the shipwreck of the divine in everyday life. The political victory of irony over the sacred. It is much more difficult for the few gods of old that survived two world wars on paper to continue to harass us from the dull glow of the screen.
Cultures cannot exist without memory, but need forgetfulness too. While the Library insists on remembering everything
, the Bookshop selects, discards, adapts to the present thanks to a necessary forgetfulness. The future is built on obsolescence; we have to discard past beliefs that are false or have become obsolete, fictions and discourses that do not shed the faintest light. As Peter Burke has written: “Discarding knowledge in this way may be desirable or even necessary, at least to an extent, but we should not forget the losses as well as the gains.” That is why once the inevitable process of selecting and discarding has taken place, one should “study what has been dispensed with over the centuries, the intellectual refuse,” where humanity might have got it wrong, where what was most valuable might have been cast into oblivion, among data and beliefs that did deserve to disappear. After so many centuries of long-term survival, books, due to electronic sourcing, are entering into the logic of inbuilt obsolescence, of a sell-by date. This will bring an even more profound change to our relationship with the texts we are going to be able to translate, alter and personalize to an unimaginable degree. It is the crossroads on the journey that began with humanism when philology questioned useless, hackneyed authorities and Bibles began to be turned into our languages via rational criteria and not according to the say-so of superstition.
If there are still many of us who keep collecting futile stamps on our foolish passports to the bookshops of the world it is because we find there the remains of cultural gods that have replaced the religious sort. From Romantic times to the present, like archaeological ruins, like some cafés and so many libraries, or cinemas and museums of contemporary art, bookshops have been and still are ritual spaces, often marked out by tourism and other institutions as ways to understand the history of culture, erotic topographies, and stimulating contexts to find material to nourish our place in the world. If with the death of Jakob Mendel or the hypertext of Borges those physical places we can cling to became more fragile and less transcendent, with the Internet they are much more virtual than our imagination might suggest. They compel us to create new mental tools, to read more critically and more politically than ever, to imagine and connect as never before, analyzing and surfing, going deeper and more rapidly, transforming the privilege of unheard-of access to Information into new forms of Knowledge.
I devote many of my Sunday afternoons to surfing the web in search of bookshops that still do not exist, though they are out there, waiting for me. For years, I have been a reader-viewer of emblematic places I have yet to visit. Very recently, chance enabled me to get to know two of them: in Coral Gables, whose name had always evoked Juan Ramón Jiménez, twenty-four hours of unexpected stopover allowed me to go to Books & Books, a very beautiful Miami bookshop housed in a Mediterranean-style building from the 1920s. One weekend in Buenos Aires when I had nothing planned, I decided to take the ferry and visit Montevideo to finally discover in person an even more beautiful, equally well-stocked bookshop, Más Puro Verso, with its art deco architecture from the same era and glass display cabinet at the top of its imperial stairs. Just as I coveted those spaces, I have spent years collecting leads to others in books, magazines, web pages or videos. For instance, Tropismes in a nineteenth-century arcade in Brussels; Les Bals des Ardents in Lyons with that grand door made from books and Oriental carpets that invite one to read on the floor; Bordeaux’s Mollat, which has just turned every book-lover’s dream into a reality: the chance to spend a night in a bookshop, and whose website is always bubbling with ideas and activities, a wholly family tradition transformed into 2,500 metres of printed culture overflowing from the very same house where no less a figure than the traveller-philosopher Montesquieu lived, wrote and read at the beginning of the eighteenth century; Candide, its architecture as light as bamboo, in Bangkok, run by the writer, publisher and activist Duangruethai Esanasatang; Athenaeum Boekhandel in Amsterdam, which Cees Nooteboom emphatically recommended to me for its classical aesthetics and, above all, for its importance as a cultural centre and writers’ residence; Pendleburys, a country house devoured by a Welsh forest; Swipe Design in Toronto, because an antique bicycle hangs from its ceiling and a chessboard sits between its two readers’ armchairs; Ram Advani Booksellers, the mythical shop in Lucknow, although now I will not be able to meet Ram Advani, who died at the end of 2015 at the age of ninety-four, and whose memory is perpetuated by his daughter-in-law, Anuradha Roy; and Atomic Books, the favourite bookshop of Santiago García the scriptwriter and comics critic who in an email told me that it is one of the best in the US for a reader of graphic novels, though they also sell literature, countercultural fanzines and even toys and punk records: “What’s more, you can meet John Waters picking up his mail.” I have no information about the history or importance of others, photographs have simply captivated me, because everything I have about them is in languages like Japanese, which I do not understand: Orion Papyrus, in Tokyo, with its parquet floors, its lights worthy of Mondrian and that blend of wood and metal in shelves full of art and design books, or Shibuya Publishing & Booksellers in the same city, with bookshelves in every imaginable geometric shape.
And if I ever return to Guatemala City, I will fight against my nostalgia for El Pensativo, which has disappeared, and will religiously repair to Sophos. I expect I will jot down notes on them all when I pay them a visit, like someone who is paying off their debts, in a notebook similar to the one I used on that far-off trip, because I have now given up on my iPad’s Moleskine app and do not like my mobile phone doubling as a camera and a notebook. You see: what matters in the end is the will to remember.
In “Covert Joy,” a story by Clarice Lispector, we meet a girl who was “fat, short, freckled and had reddish, excessively frizzy hair” but who had “what any child devourer of stories would wish for: a father who owned a bookshop.” Many years ago I started to peel off the sticker with the price and barcode on any book I bought and stick them on the inside of the back cover next to the anti-theft chip. It was my way of maintaining an almost fatherly link. The last wish of writer David Markson, who died in New York in June 2012, was for his library to be sold in its entirety to the Strand and thus be scattered among all those many, many libraries of innumerable anonymous readers. For one dollar, or twenty, or fifty, his books went there, were reintegrated into the market where they once belonged to await their fate and fortune. Markson could have bequeathed his library to a university, where it would have accumulated dust and been visited by the few specializing in his work, but he opted for the opposite move: to share it around, break it up and subject it to the risk of totally unexpected future readings. When the news broke, dozens of the followers of the author of This is Not a Novel rushed to the Manhattan bookshop to locate his annotated, underlined books. A virtual group was set up. Scanned pages started to be published on the Internet. In his copy of Bartleby the Scrivener, Markson underlined every appearance of the phrase “I would prefer not to”; in White Noise, he alternated “astonishing, astonishing, astonishing” with “boring, boring, boring”; in a biography of Pasternak he wrote in the margin: “It is a fact that Isaak Babel was executed in the basement of a Moscow prison. A very strong possibility that the manuscript of an unpublished novel is still around in Stalin’s archives.” One could turn all the marginal comments in Markson’s library into one of his fragmentary novels, where notes on reading, poetic impressions and reflections follow on as if it were a zapping session. It would be an impossible novel because nobody is ever going to find all the books that made up his library: many of them were bought or are being bought by people who do not know who Markson was. That gesture forms part of his legacy. A final, definitive gesture combining death, inheritance, paternity and a single one of the infinite bookshops that sum up all the rest, a unique story dedicated to world literature.
Ideas only exist in things.
David Markson, The Loneliness of the Reader
WEBOGRAPHY
American Booksellers Association: http://www.bookweb.org
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El Pececillo de Plata: http://www.elpececillodeplata.wordpress.com/
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José Luis Checa Cremades. Bibliofilia y encuadernación: http://www.checacremades.blogspot.com.es
Histoire du Livre: http://www.histoire-du-livre.blogspot.com.es
Kipling: http://www.kipling.org.uk
Le Bibliomane Moderne: http://www.le-bibliomane.blogspot.com.es
Libbys Book Blog: http://www.libbysbooksblog.blogspot.com.es
Library Thing: http://www.librarything.com
Libreriamo: http://www.libreriamo.it
Paul Bowles Official Site: http://www.paulbowles.org
Rafael Ramón Castellanos Villegas: http://www.rrcastellanos.blogspot.com.es
Reading David Markson: http://www.readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com
Rare Books Collection de Princeton: http://www.blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/
Reality Studio. A Williams S. Burroughs Community. http://www.realitystudio.org
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