World Book Day falls today, and it is tempting to draw up an itinerary for armchair travel based entirely on bookshops to be visited around the world. The great bookstores are informed so much by the landscape they inhabit — but curiously they are also in and of themselves special zones permitting a unique discovery of new and familiar texts. The importance of bookshops has been variously explained, as noble sites that expose us to diversity in an ecosystem that otherwise predisposes us to limited algorithm-based choices; that uphold the freedom of expression by allowing the trade of certain texts below the censor’s radar; and that connect us to a whole chain of creation.
Stories from bookstores
As Bob Eckstein, the author and illustrator of the lavish Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores , writes: “Bookstores are emotional places both for their patrons and for the employees. They are built on the sweat and tears of hardworking people, each bookshelf lined with the lifework of hundreds of artists. Each of those books represents endless hours of grind and toil... The bookstore is also a hangout, a place of solace, a community center, and a venue for cultural entertainment. There are many who absolutely live for bookstores, and even those who aspire to live in a bookstore...”
It is great fun then to go scope the terrain outside India (we need a volume that does proper justice to this country’s amazing stores) in Eckstein’s company, as he collects stories from some intriguing bookstores. There’s a story from the iconic City Lights of San Francisco, the first store in the U.S. to sell only paperbacks. A store-hand recalls getting a letter from a woman saying she had left her father’s ashes at different spots in the poetry room: “She said it was her father’s favourite place in the world and she was comforted by knowing he was there.”
A bookshop as a final resting place is evidently a rather popular idea. Michael Cunningham, author of the homage to Virginia Woolf, The Hours , reportedly expressed a desire to be buried under Three Lives & Company, a 600-sq-ft shop in New York City’s Greenwich Village — “but the owners at the time told him they weren’t zoned for that.”
Over in Wordsworth Books, a Cambridge, a Massachusetts landmark that shut down in 2005, the owner recounted the case of man called Ed who “did smell like something long dead”: “He lived under our staircase for 20 years and some cold nights, inside the store. Employees brought him food and shoes. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t always good for business, but that’s what we did.”
In Reykjavik, Iceland, a country which reads the most number of books per capita, the chess champion and enigma, Bobby Fischer, frequented the Bokin bookstore once he settled down in the country after renouncing his U.S. citizenship. He’d have his mail delivered to the shop and often himself fall asleep there.
However, no tour of the great bookstores, to reside in or otherwise, is complete without Paris’s Shakespeare and Company. In another collection of stories about bookstores, The Bookshop Book , Jen Campbell revisits its well-told story. The original store opened by Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses when nobody else would dare, shut in the 1940s when a Nazi soldier got angry when she wouldn’t sell him Finnegans Wake , and threatened her shop with terrible reprisal. She spirited all her volumes out double-quick.
Shakespeare and Company was revived when George Whitman so renamed his existing shop in Paris after Beach’s death, and in time encouraged writers and other kindred souls to sleep among the shelves. “His only demand was that those who stayed pen their autobiography on a sheet of paper and give it to him before leaving.” Whitman’s daughter, named Sylvia for obvious reasons, is now said to be collecting these stories for a history of Shakespeare and Company.
Who moved my book?
But don’t just look out for reclusive geniuses and remains or dozing bodies of readers. There are other ways to find clues about who’s been about among the volumes. Jen Campbell talks to the Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin. When he’s in a bookstore, he says, “I also get to eye up the competition.” Seeing a load of Scandinavian crime novels on display, he’ll put some of his books in front. “You can always tell when you’re travelling, which authors have been through the airport bookshops before you, because their books are the ones facing out on all the shelves.”
Do venture into your neighbourhood bookshop soonest to tease out special stories.
Mini kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu
