Shelves of our lives

Bookshops are a reminder of the importance of discarding and forgetting

With word out that the brick-and-mortar bookshop is a retail model continuing on borrowed time, great claims have been made for its centrality to the examined life. In fact, a curious, and extremely encouraging, trend seems to be gathering strength — the subgenre of books on bookshops is growing, with some bookshops in Delhi, for instance, giving more space to such volumes. The latest one to arrive is Bookshops by Jorge Carrión, who teaches literature at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (it’s translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush). And like the best of such meditations on bookshops, in the end it is as much about the specifics of particular shops as it is an invitation to the reader to reorganise her reading in her mind, to periodically appraise her reading self. A bookshop does so in a way that a library, that even more vital institution, cannot.

Points out Carrión: “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.” Limited real estate would be the obvious reason. And as he indicates elsewhere in the book, we as readers fail ourselves by not studying them closely enough: “The history of bookshops is completely unlike the history of libraries. The former lack continuity and institutional support. As private entrepreneurial responses to a public need they enjoy a degree of freedom, but by the same token they are not studied, rarely appear in tourist guides and are never the subject of doctoral theses until time deals them a final blow and they enter the realm of myths.”

Around the world

Reading Bookshops at one stretch can leave you feeling giddy, as Carrión races through time and history talking of important bookshops. From Altair in Barcelona, to Chatwins in Berlin, from Paris’s Shakespeare and Company in its two avatars to Ram Advani Booksellers in Lucknow, from Foyles of London to Pandora in Istanbul and Gandhi of Mexico City (there’s a lovely story there that a little Googling yields), it’s a tour that screams for a map. And given the fragile existence of most bookshops, it’s also a call to list-making to check which bookshop is still around.

The search for lost, or even fictional, bookshops is part of this belief that there is something to be learnt from how they organised themselves, and from the echoes of that organisation all these years on. As he points out, literary pilgrims still go to London’s Charing Cross Road, looking for number 84, to try to steal a glimpse of something in the street view to connect to Helene Hanff book

84, Charing Cross Road about her transatlantic relationship with the books and staff of the now long gone Marks & Co.

Carrión sees the absence in time and space forming in front of his eyes while writing this book, when Llibreria Catalonia, est. 1923, shuts to make way for a fast food outlet. A notice says in a heart-tugging apology, “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 Catalonia will not be part of that future.”

But Carrion’s “essay” is not simply a tribute to the shops that are gone, it is also a hopeful introduction to the ideas and endeavours behind new or resuscitated bookshops. He is particularly won over by London’s Daunt Books. The first outlet, which opened in the early 1990s, in Marylebone High Street has its books displayed to a geographical classification. Display, in fact, may be crucial to beating the “they are all doomed in the Age of Amazon” chorus, his interview with James Daunt, owner of the Daunt bookshops but who’s also managed Britain’s vast Waterstones chain, suggests. Daunt tells him that key to the revival of the chain was to put “trust wholeheartedly in our booksellers and give them the independence to decide which books they wanted to sell and which they didn’t”. Integral to this was junking the sale of display space to publishers, and therefore also the revenue that came from this model. The challenge, says Daunt, “is satisfying the most intellectual customer without frightening off the least intellectual”.

Importance of listing

Bookshops is also a reminder that the manner in which books are made available to us changes with our sense of distance, time, mobility and leisure. Train travel enabled the success of chains such as WHSmith, Hachette and India’s A.H. Wheeler. Travel time has often determined the texture of reading. So has the spread of American-style consumerism, with “bookshops in the second half of the twentieth century [possessing] the agglutinating character of shopping malls, where the display of books, kindergarten, children’s playground, entertainment palaces, restaurants and, gradually, videos, CDs, DVDs, video games and souvenirs cohabit or are neighbours”.

When the merchandise is books, no bookshop can be bad, but as Carrión says, “One must distinguish between the world’s great bookshops and emergency bookshops.” This book is perhaps the most engaging explanation about why listing the “great bookshops” is so vital.