Shelf Life

by Nadia Wassef

  * * *

  Dr. Medhat was right. Books live and die, like languages. Literary classics remain inaccessible to most Egyptians. While translations of Arabic classics proliferate internationally, they have few readers in the Middle East, due to the levels of illiteracy and the inaccessibility of the language. They aren’t rewritten in ‘Amiyya. Our relationship to the past is fraught and often superficial, in part because our doors to history are locked. And I wasn’t sure a bookstore, or even four bookstores, could open it.

  * * *

  “This is just shameful!”

  “Excuse me?” I turned, only to be met by Doktora Ibtisam, one of Diwan’s most distasteful clients, who had migrated from Zamalek to the branch at Cairo University, where she was a professor. Her name in classical Arabic means “smile,” which she never did and never inspired anyone else to do. “Doktora, what offends you today?” Hind asked with forced joviality.

  “I can’t believe how expensive your books are. Bookstores like yours make publishers greedy. They are pricing these books well beyond what anyone can afford. Not all readers have deep pockets like your Zamalek and Maadi devotees.”

  “I would have thought you, as a teacher of literature, would be in favor of investing in our literature and our culture.”

  “This isn’t an investment. This is a rip-off. How do you promote reading if no one can afford your books?”

  “I’m not as well-versed in Arabic literature as you,” said Hind with genuine humility, “so I won’t speak as a reader, but as a bookseller. When I first organized Zamalek’s bookshelves, all we had were old editions that had been rotting away in warehouses. You remember: horrible paper, smudged ink, ugly covers, no spine, bound with rusty staples. Even though they cost a few Egyptian pounds, they weren’t being read much. Now, less than ten years later, independent publishers see a wave of consumers who value quality and are willing to spend on it. Publishers bought available rights. They reprinted whatever was in the public domain. Look at the binding, the crisp type, the beautiful covers. Naguib Mahfouz’s collected works have been released in multiple volumes, each one a wonderful contribution to any library. The masters aren’t just being read, they are being cherished, revisited, and passed on to future generations. The investment in quality isn’t deterring people from reading or buying these books. How many bookstores have opened since Diwan? How many new publishing houses?”

  “Well, I want a discount on this book.” She pointed to a recently released volume of Sufi poetry.

  “As you know, it is against Diwan’s policy to give discounts. However, I would suggest you try a library.”

  * * *

  In the early 2000s, as existing publishing houses were expanding and new ones were building their lists, they moved beyond reprints and began releasing a greater variety of modern Arabic literature. People took renewed interest in Egyptian writers, many of whom had gained recognition in the eighties and nineties but only recently got their full due: Ibrahim Abdelmeguid, Radwa Ashour, Ibrahim Aslan, Salwa Bakr, Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mohamed Mansi Qandil, Edwar al-Kharrat, Abdel-Hakim Qasim, and Bahaa Taher, to name but a few. Not satisfied with what was Egyptian and locally available, Hind had researched and stocked other criti- cally acclaimed Arab authors, like Hoda Barakat (Lebanon), Mohamed Choukri (Morocco), Rabee Jaber (Lebanon), Sahar Khalifeh (Palestine), Abdelrahman Munif (Saudi Arabia), and Tayeb Salih (Sudan), who made it onto our bestseller lists. Before Diwan, these books were only available to Egyptian readers during the Cairo International Book Fair, when Arab publishers showcased their bestselling authors. Otherwise, they’d been trapped under the rubble of failed distribution channels. Hind found their publishers and imported from all over the Arab world. I was proud of her, and a bit jealous. I told myself that I’d find the English translations of her novels. She didn’t share my competitive streak, caring mostly about introducing worthy readers to worthy writers.

  * * *

  Less than two years after opening, with minuscule book sales and rising rents and overheads, we were forced to close our Cairo University store. There must have been some truth to Doktora Ibtisam’s grievances. My utopian vision for the location had met the cruelty of reality: students just wanted a place to hang out. Our café outsold our bookshop.

  Hind always said that we had to go big or go home. Now, we had to go home. On departure day, stoic Nihal oversaw a team of maintenance staff as they packed books into cardboard boxes and dismantled shelves, lighting, and the café section. They would be stored and then repurposed in our next branch, our next attempt. Once we’d erased Diwan from the premises, Nihal handed over the keys to the campus administration. I couldn’t even watch. She reminded me that knowledge was power, that we’d learned from our mistakes. The insights into what people want and don’t want would carry forward. I told her that this had been a costly lesson.

  Hind encouraged me to take a step back. I looked at the basic facts, the bigger picture. I reminded myself that we’d launched Diwan in a culture that had stopped reading. Our education system had emphasized rote memorization and discouraged freedom of thought. Disposable incomes, if people had them, didn’t go toward books. Those who could afford to, like Hind and I, went to foreign-language schools that severed students from their native languages. Readers were alienated at every turn. Cultural output had been in a state of atrophy. And yet against all odds, change came about. Glimmers of hope.

  Our flagship had become a Zamalek landmark. Heliopolis was doing steady business. Maadi was floundering a bit, but I knew that failure was a natural and necessary aspect of every experiment. Our stalls in the Carrefour City Centre Malls were reliably profitable. We were expanding to tourist destinations: the Cairo Marriott Hotel in Zamalek and Senzo Mall in Hurghada on the Red Sea. In the summer months, when Egyptians migrated to the coast, Diwan followed them with a seasonal branch on the Mediterranean coast. Maybe not all was lost.

  Then, we drifted from the black into the unfamiliar red. We were in the throes of a global recession. I knew I was part of an international economy: even though I couldn’t visibly see it, I witnessed its impact on our sales. Faced with diminished incomes, people grew anxious about the future and strove to preserve whatever resources they had. Leisure budgets were being funneled into emergency savings accounts and monthly bills. We sought new revenue streams to offset anemic sales. Cairo is a city that delivers: pharmacies, grocers, butchers, even McDonald’s. Deliverymen double as personal shoppers: picking up a pack of cigarettes or something from a neighboring shop en route. I decided to launch a delivery service for our stores. Minou marked the occasion by designing a new bag with matching bookmarks. To advertise the initiative while the endless paperwork was being processed, I displayed in the window of Zamalek one of the delivery motorbikes that Minou had printed with her designs.

  We started looking for corners to cut. The Diwan bags. It was becoming inescapably clear that we could no longer afford to produce them and give them out for free. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing another of these simple pleasures in service to the bottom line. Later, when I finally broached the subject with Minou, she told me that canceling the bags would be a mistake I’d spend years regretting. I did it anyway, and I told her to fuck off. She was right, as usual. To this day, Minou has never forgiven me, and I have never forgiven myself. In my mind, the growth of Diwan was linked to the brand, and I worried that ceasing production of the bags signaled retreat. Our bags traveled everywhere; their high quality ensured that they outlived the things they carried. They had become classics in their own right. As the Nights had taught me, not all classics survive, and those that do sometimes undergo a reincarnation that remakes their very essence. I watched as Diwan transformed: from something small enough to control to something far more unwieldy. Cairo University was the first store we lost, but it wouldn’t be the last. Still, I knew we’d survive, if only through remaking ourselves.

  * * *

  “Dr. Medhat, I’ve been thinking a
bout what you said,” I tried to interject.

  “At least your sister has the sense not to include Alf Layla w Layla.” He walked off, fuming.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be back,” said Ahmed, arms full of stacks of books, as he watched Dr. Medhat turn the corner into the cashier section of the Zamalek store, disappearing from view.

  7

  ART AND DESIGN

  “This might surprise you, but The Fireplace Book is one of my bestselling titles in the Middle East,” Stephen, a sales representative for the art publisher Thames & Hudson, said.

  “This is one of the hottest regions in the world. Why the fuck would anyone stock—or buy—a book about fireplaces?” I scoffed.

  “Haven’t you sold enough books by now to know that you’re selling far more than books?” He gestured around us, as if enlisting testimony from the books. We were standing in the middle of the Art and Design section of Diwan in Mohandiseen, our newest location. “You are selling an image, an aspirational lifestyle, a parallel reality.”

  We’d created Art and Design to group together books about aesthetics, which were larger in size than our standard fiction and nonfiction fare. But the new category quickly splintered into subsections, including art and artists, architecture, interiors, design, and photography. This was a far cry from Diwan’s early days, when we sold only a few locally produced English- and Arabic-language art and design books, and every one of them focused on ancient Egyptian and Islamic heritage. These sold quite well, probably due to their traditional subject matter; we’d kept them in Egypt Essentials. The new Art and Design section was concurrent with growing global interest in art from the region. More modern art galleries had begun to open across Cairo. Sotheby’s and Christie’s set up shop in Dubai and began seasonal auctions of Near and Middle Eastern art, strengthening the market. Private collectors built private collections. A range of books chronicling contemporary Egyptian and Arab art and artists came out. Collectors bought books to contextualize their acquisitions. Egyptians found a new source of national pride beyond the works of Egyptian antiquity. This groundswell, and the increased demand it fueled, merited sections in both the Arabic and the English parts of Diwan’s bookstores.

  * * *

  Alongside these contemporary movements, there was also an influx of photographic books, with images from late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century Egypt, before the 1952 revolution that ended the monarchy. Despite the massive political turmoil of colonialism and two world wars that marked the period, the photographs are surprisingly tranquil. Streets are clean and wide, punctuated by the occasional horse-drawn carriage or automobile. Images of Cairo’s downtown, modeled on Paris, accentuate the belle epoque buildings and ornate façades. The people in the images are groomed and decorous. While I could see what the images concealed—the tumult and mess of life, the poverty and severe class hierarchies—I found the photographs comforting. They reminded me of the Egypt of my parents’ stories, the distant place where they grew up. I began collecting these books.

  Coffee-table books are all inherently decorative. Their buyers have leisure time, hours to peruse images and host guests. But the books also have an everyday quality. They live in and around us, like pieces of furniture. Their newfound popularity in Diwan’s early years suggested a general shift in reading practices: books were no longer designed just for function, but for form. They were art objects in themselves.

  * * *

  “I’m accessorizing my home, and I’d like a selection of books on Egyptian art and design,” I remember one customer saying to Hussein, our new customer-service hire, one afternoon. I was standing behind the cashier counter, cleaning the area below the till. This space was where damaged merchandise was stored and then forgotten, alongside lunch leftovers, key chains dangling protective evil eyes, and other staff belongings. The customer was a polished-looking woman in her thirties. She sported a Louis Vuitton monogrammed bag—with a matching scarf, of course.

  “What era are you interested in?” asked Hussein. He’d been shadowing a number of seasoned customer-service staff across different Diwans, until being cleared to work in the freshly minted Mohandiseen store.

  Mohandiseen, which translates to “engineers,” was built on agricultural land offered by the government at discounted prices to the area’s namesakes in the 1950s. Nearby neighborhoods followed similar schemes, creating districts for journalists, teachers, and doctors. These were occupations that benefited the community, especially valued after the 1952 revolution, which sought to establish an independent and modern Egypt. By the 1990s, following a dramatic population boom, these neighborhoods transformed; their original villas and spacious apartment blocks were torn down and replaced by densely packed concrete high-rises. Mohandiseen became especially congested: a labyrinth of shops, restaurants, and cafés, and a favorite destination for affluent Gulf Arabs summering in Cairo.

  The neighborhood, known for its standstill traffic and nonexistent urban planning, was studded with towering concrete structures, jumbled shops, and ubiquitous banners and billboards. In short, it was charmless. We worried that Mohandiseen lacked the critical mass of sophisticated readers to call Diwan a third space, but we knew that it was a popular Arab tourist destination. With each location, we tried to learn from our triumphs, like Heliopolis, and our failures, like Cairo University. We tweaked our formula in the hopes of catering to our newly adopted community, or at the very least, entering into a dialogue with them. But we had a problem: our Zamalek flagship was an outlier, and had skewed all of our expectations. Heliopolis was three times the size of Zamalek, so we made the conservative estimate that it would generate twice the sales. To this day, Heliopolis has never fulfilled that expectation. We didn’t realize that the combination of Zamalek’s clientele—literary-minded Egyptians, tourists, embassy visitors, expats, and Francophiles—and its prime location on 26th of July Street would be impossible to replicate. Our expansion was built on a false premise, a stroke of luck. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were trying to replicate a coincidence. We did know that the more we expanded, the higher our expenses, so we gambled on Mohandiseen’s affluent residents to balance our budget. The woman in front of me certainly looked the part.

  “My specs are bright colors, no black and brown spines—I’m not building the national library. I want a maximum height of thirty-five centimeters. But I also want to avoid visual monotony. I can stack a whole pile of them, and put a tray on top to make a side table.” Hussein hesitated, obviously nonplussed. I interjected.

  “Hussein, why don’t you gather all the modern art books, and anything about Egypt from the last two hundred years. And maybe some ancient Egypt titles, but only the ones with happy and bright covers.” I turned to the customer. “Would you like to join me in the café, to discuss the aesthetic you’re interested in? I think we should start with the largest books at the bottom and place them horizontally. Anything you especially like that doesn’t fit with the color scheme could be on the coffee table, and give you and your guests something to speak about.” She gave me a smile that indicated she was pleased. I ventured further. “I know you asked specifically for Egyptian art and design books, but we do have a very special tome that someone with your taste would appreciate.” I moved toward one of the displays for art and design books, an open wooden cuboid with multiple plexiglass dividers. I withdrew a massive book, The World of Ornament, published by Taschen, the German art book company. I exaggerated my struggle to lift the book to make its heft even more impressive. “We only import this for special clients. It weighs about thirteen pounds and stands quite tall, at a little over a foot and a half. It’s a beautiful centerpiece. I promise you that very few people will have seen it before. It narrates the history of ornament, so if you’re truly interested in design…” During training sessions, I would tell my staff that the surest way to sell a book was to put it in the reader’s hands. I thrust this one into hers. She let out a little sigh of surprise. I could see the finish line
. I laid out my final lure of bait. “It is a significant financial commitment, priced at one thousand two hundred and fifty Egyptian pounds, so please take your time considering it.”

  “It’s well within my budget. I’ll take it,” she said with decisive gusto. “Do you have any books on interior design in Egypt?”

  “Unfortunately, I can only think of two, which is surprising, given how many there are on Moroccan style and interiors. Somehow, contemporary Egyptian interiors haven’t received the same degree of international interest.” I brought her a pocket-sized book, also published by Taschen, called Egypt Style, which sold well because it was both cheap and beautiful, replete with lush photographs of interiors, an Egyptophile’s dream. I handed it over.

  “It’s too small. It will get lost in the midst of all these other ones.” She left it unopened on a nearby table. I placed the other title, Egyptian Palaces and Villas, in front of her, lifted the cover, and began turning the pages as I narrated, like a schoolteacher.

  “I think you’ll love this one. It features all the opulent palaces and country homes built since the time of Muhammad Ali, all the way through to Egypt’s golden age as an international tourist destination. The aesthetic and cultural wealth of our country at the time of the Suez Canal, and the railways and cotton industries, was just magnificent. It’s a must-have.” She nodded in agreement.

  “We forget how beautiful our country is. All this concrete gives our eyes amnesia.” I remembered how people had reacted to our flagship store when they first walked in. Many assumed that our books would be overpriced, saying we’d spent too much on our interior. Others said that the design was distracting, that a bookstore shouldn’t hide its function with useless decoration. Beauty was perceived as an unnecessary luxury. “My husband works in one of the leading stock brokerage companies. I’ve been telling him for years that we should collect art. He only recently began to agree with me, when he realized it was a good investment since his broker buddies are buying it, too.”