Bookshops
by Jorge Carrion
translated by Peter Bush
(Maclehouse Press, 2013)
The way a specific story relates to the whole of literature is similar to the way a single bookshop relates to every bookshop.
Page 9.
You create books solely to forge links with others even after your own death, thus defending yourself against the inexorable adversary of all life, transience and oblivion.
Page 17.
Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.
Page 20.
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.
Page 26.
The history of libraries can be told in minute detail, ordered by cities, regions and nations, respecting the frontiers that are sealed by international treaties and drawing on specialised bibliographies and individual library archives that fully document the development of stocks and cataloguing techniques and house minute-books, contracts, press cuttings, acquisition lists and other papers, the raw material for a chronicle backed by statistics, reports and timelines. The history of bookshops, on the other hand, can only be written after recourse to photograph and postcard albums, a situationist mapping, short-lived links between shops that have vanished and those that still exist, together with a range of literary fragments and essays.
Page 27.
Every bookshop is an invitation to travel, and itself represents a journey.
Page 27.
Travel bookshops throughout the world are also stores that sell practical travel items.
Page 29.
For a Western readers the East begins where unknown alphabets start to be used: Sarajevo, Belgrade and Athens.
Page 34.
The centrality of ancient Greek culture, philosophy and literature can only be understood if one considers its position stride the Mediterranean and Asia, between the Etruscans, and Persians, opposite the Libyans, Egyptians or Phoenicians.
Page 34.
Any library is more than a building: it is a bibliographical collection.
Page 36.
The present Library of Alexandria is a far cry from the original: although its architecture is spectacular, although it converses with the nearby sea and 120 alphabets are inscribed on its reflective surface, although tourists will come from all over the world to gaze at it, its walls do not yet contain sufficient volumes for it to be the reincarnation of the building that lends it its mythical name.
Page 36.
The Library cannot exist without the bookshop that has in turn been linked from the outset to the publishing house. The book trade had already developed before the fifth century B.C.
Page 36.
The first publishing houses comprised groups of copyists on whose ability to concentrate, to be disciplined and rigorous and on whose degree of exploitation depended the number if changes and mistakes in the copies that would eventually be put into circulation. To optimise time, someone dictated and the rest transcribed and thus Roman publishers were able to launch onto the market several hundred copies simultaneously.
Page 37.
The first Greek and Roman bookshops were either itinerant stalls or huts where books wwere sold or rented out (a kind of mobile library) or spaces adjacent to the publishers.
Page 37.
Private collections, often in the hands of bibliophiles, were directly fed by bookshops and were a model for public collections, namely libraries, which sprang up in tyrannies, not democracies.
Page 38.
Libraries are power.
Page 38.
The Library of Alexandria was seemingly inspired by Aristotle’s private library and was probably the first in history to have a cataloguing system.
Page 38.
If history ensures the continuity of the Library, the future constantly threatens the existence of the Bookshop.
Page 39.
The Bookshop is liquid, provisional, lasts as long as its ability to sustain an idea over time with minimal changes. The library is stability. The Bookshop distributes: the Library preserves.
Page 39.
The Bookshop is in perpetual crisis.
Page 39.
The figure of Homer is located in the two centuries prior to the consolidation of the bookselling business and his centrality to the Western canon is directly related to the fact that he is one of the Greek writers of whose work we have preserved the most fragments. That is, he was one of the most copied.
Page 40.
There are few metaphors as powerful as that of the palimpsest to represent the way culture is transmitted.
Page 41.
Universities, publishing houses, cultural centres and the most compact part of the souk of bookshops … these institutions feed on each other.
Page 41.
Touching old books is one of the few tactile experiences that can connect you to a distant past.
Page 48.
Manuscripts prevailed over printed books in the first years of printing, by virtue of a veneer of prestige, as was the case with papyrus over parchment, or in the 1960s with handmade over ones that were machine set. In the beginning the printer was the publisher.
Pages 48-49.
Binding didn’t become standard in Europe until the requisite machines began to function around 1823, when bookshops slowly began to look like libraries, because they offered finished products and not half-made books.
Page 51.
We tend to think of literature as an abstraction when the truth is that it is an infinite network of objects, bodies, materials and spaces.
Page 52.
Although he does not intervene directly in the creation of the object, the bookseller can be understood as the craftsman reader, that person who after the 10,000 hours that according to various studies are necessary to become expert in a practical skill is able to combine work with excellence, manufacture with poetry.
Page 53.
Dust is a vitally important issue for a bookseller. He dusts up and down and clockwise in the first half-hour every morning. While doing so, the bookseller memorises where the books are and gets to know them physically.
Page 53.
Readers, like carpenters, are different in each locality.
Page 54.
A bookshop can regenerate the social and economic fabric of an area, because it is the present pure and simple, and a speedy engine of change. That is why we should not be surprised if many bookshops are part of greater social projects for change.
Page 54.
We read as much with our hands as with our eyes.
Page 55.
From the time of ancient Rome, bookshops have been spaces for establishing contact.
Page 55.
The bookshop itself, with or without buyers or browsers, has its own cardiac rhythms.
Page 55.
Bookshelves also enjoy a relationship of conflict with the premises that lodge and partially define them, but do not constitute them.
Page 55.
Salons, reading rooms, athenaeums, cafés or bookshops act as second homes and political spaces for the exchange of information.
Page 62.
Europe becomes a great space where books flow thanks to their industrial production, which is accompanied by proliferating bookshop chains, the promotion of serial fiction as the main form of commercial novel, an exponential increase in literacy and the transformation of the Continent into a vast tangle of railway tracks.
Page 62.
Every reader is a critic, but only those who make their opinions about their reading in some way public become literary critics.
Page 64.
Literary bookshops shape their discourse by creating a sophisticated taste that prefers difficulty.
Page 66.
From the birth of modernity a highly complex literary system has been articulated through sites of consecration: publication by particular houses, praise from specific critics or writers, translation into certain languages, the winning of awards, prizes, important recognition first locally then internationally, knowing the right people and visiting key cafes, salons and bookshops. Paris during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth constituted the world’s pre-eminent republic of letters, the centre where a large slice of world literature was legitimised.
Page 71.
Paris … became the capital for those who proclaimed themselves to be stateless and above political laws: in a word, artists.
Page 72.
People tend to reinforce myths about themselves in retrospective accounts.
Page 73.
It is the hippy movement that really turns the new version of bohemia into a mass movement., now entirely stripped of the recherché, distinguished impulses of the first dandies. A genuinely new mass culture, because there is such a level of literacy and sophistication in the West after the Second World War that several cultural masses can coexist, each with perfectly defined features, and only partially incompatible.
Pages 79-80.
All censorship has its weak points. Books have always been key elements in maintaining control of power and governments have developed mechanisms for censoring books.
Page 88.
It was of course with the printing press that countries began to experience serious problems when they tried to burb the traffic in banned books.
Page 88.
From The Satanic Verses onwards, the damnation of which coincided with the fall of the Wall, the violence in Tiananmen Square and the unstoppable expansion of the Internet, whenever freedom of expression and reading were under attack, the consequences would automatically be global.
Pages 90-91.
The most important consequences of collective education are always long-term.
Page 94.
Mein Kampf not only turned Adolf Hitler into the best-selling author in the Germany of the 1930s, and a millionaire thanks to his royalties, it also made him think of himself as a writer, which is how he describes himself in the corresponding section of his income tax returns for 1935.
Page 95.
By presenting himself as a writer, Hitler changes his image and emerges from the mud where he had operated until then. He is no longer simply a beer-house braggart, a loudmouth, a failed putschist: now he covers himself with the prestige that comes with letters and appears as a new theorist.
Page 96.
I can think of few images that are sadder than an almost empty bookshop or the remains of a bonfire on which books have been burnt.
Page 102.
People rarely consider … how those who designed the biggest systems of control, repression and execution in the contemporary world, who showed themselves to be the most effective censors of books, were also individuals who studied culture, writers, keen readers, in a word: lovers of bookshops.
Page 103.
The dichotomy between fixed prices and haggling could be one of the axes that today polarises East and West.
Page 105.
(Bookstores) Their structures are soothing, because they always seem familiar; intuitively we understand the orderliness, the layout, what they have to offer, but we need at least one section where we recognise an alphabet we can read, an area of illustrated books we can lea through.
Page 113.
Generalist bookshops tend to be a microcosm of the wider society; radical minorities are represented on shelves that are also in themselves minimal.
Page 117.
Comparison and contest are also basic factors when it comes to valuing the importance of a book, the test of which is tied to a specific moment of production. That is what literary criticism is doing continually: establishing comparative hierarchies within a specific cultural field.
Page 119.
Because paper was less exalted than bamboo and silk, it took centuries for it to establish itself as the best support for the written word and it wasn’t until the sixth century that it travelled beyond the Chinese frontiers and until the twelfth that it reached Europe.
Page 120.
Books depended on the rag-and-bone man until the eighteenth century; then modern systems were developed to extract paper from wood pulp and the price of books was halved.
Page 120.
One cannot understand the culture of the United States without the perpetual Coast to Coast movement.
Page 123.
Until the Second World War, Gotham Book Mart was the United States equivalent of the original Shakespeare and Company.
Page 127.
In the 1920s and 1930s the Gotham Book Mart became primarily the focus for spotlighting books banned in the United States.
Page 128.
Culture has always circulated as much through alternative networks as established market channels and writers have always been the biggest shareholders in these parallel poetics.
Page 129.
Bookshops that pride themselves on their huge size remind us that the publishing industry is not based on sophisticated books for a minority, but on mass production, just like the food industry.
Pages 131-132.
A bookshop is defined above all by what stands out: the posters, the photographs, the books recommended or displayed to draw attention.
Page 138.
A bookshop is a community of believers.
Page 139.
As an erotic space, every bookshop is the supreme meeting place: for booksellers and books, for readers and booksellers, for readers on the hoof.
Page 140.
In contemporary fiction a bookshop signifies a space for the kind of knowledge that can’t be found in official institutions - the library or university - because as it is a private business it avoids issues of regulation and because booksellers re even freakier than librarians or university lecturers.
Page 142.
When published, most books are democratically available to everyone: the price is calculated according to factors in the present.
Page 143.
A book can be hunted down as much for its magical powers as its market value, and both factors often go together.
Page 143.
While orderliness tends to predominate in bookshops that sell new books, chaos reigns in second-hand shops: the disorderly accumulation of knowledge.
Page 151.
Bookshops that transform deep, natural and overwhelming sorrow into individual memories that are human, brief and always evanescent.
Page 152.
Every bookseller deals in visibility.
Page 162.
The tradition of bookselling is one of the most secretive. Often it is a family affair.
Pages 166-167.
A bookseller is the being who is most aware of ht futility of a book, and of its importance.
Page 167.
Complexity is the most difficult thing to judge.
Page 169.
All myths exist to be shattered.
Page 174.
Each generation relives a kind of Paris in its youth, which only as one grows older can be gradually demystified.
Page 178.
The bookshop as a partially deconsecrated church transformed into a sex shop. Because a bookshop feeds on the energy generated by objects that seduce by virtue of their accumulation, by the difficulty of defining demand, which becomes palpable when one finally locate the object that arouses.
Page 181.
The most meaningful bookshops in the world highlight, with more or less subtlety, the markers that add commercial potential or transform them into tourist spots; antiquity (founded in, or the oldest bookshops in), size (the biggest bookshops in, so many miles of shelving, so many hundreds of thousands of books) and the chapters in the history of literature to which they’re linked (the base of such and such a movement , visited by, the bookshops where X bought, visited by founded by, as can be seen in the photograph, bookshop linked with).
Pages 181-182.
In the case of literature, publishers first generate the markers, through the blurb on the back cover or the press release, but critics, the academy and bookshops soon create their own, which will determine the book’s fortune.
Page 182.
A classic work is one that always offers a new reading. A classic is a writer who never goes out of fashion.
Page 185.
Paris to some extent owed its position to the fact that it was where fashion - the outstanding expression of modernity - was create.
Page 186.
In the 1920s and 1930s, celebrities like Hemingway, Stein, Beach, Dos Passos, Bowles or Scott Fitzgerald found in Paris the feeling of being at the heart of bohemia.
Page 186.
The Zondervan brothers began with remainders from de-catalogued stock on a farm in the 1930s. Their growth was down to the success of their cheap editions of out-of-copyright religious works, such as a number of English translations of the Bible.
Page 193.
Thanks to the fact that Holland was a haven for Calvinists and to the absence of religious and political censorship, it became one of the great world book centres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Page 194.
The lives of saints, nonsense stories, farces, parodies, drinking and rabble-rousing songs, myths and legends, tales of chivalry, harvest calendars, horoscopes, gaming rules, recipe books and even abbreviated versions of universal classics were the real best-sellers before the explosion of the romantic and realist novel in the nineteenth century and its spread in the form of mass-produced serial fiction.
Page 194.
The book as a money-making success began with Walter Scott and was consolidated by Charles Dickens and William Thackeray.
Page 194.
Trains rapidly became the principal vehicle for books: their trucks transported paper, printing presses, spare parts, the workforce, writers, finished books from one city to another and, above all, readers.
Page 195.
There was a progressive refinement of railway travel, which was soon to offer the same luxuries and advantages as ocean liners and hotels.
Page 198.
The book was now assuming its natural role as a commodity: the list of the remaining titles in the same series or from the same publishers was advertised in the last pages of the book; front pages took on a uniform design to reinforce the identity of a list and innovative illustrations were incorporated; the price began to be printed on the book as a ply to hook readers or as a publicity device.
Page 198.
The average price of a book in France fell from 6.65 in 1840 to 3.45 francs in 1870.
Page 198.
In the nineteenth century there were people who made a living from reading the news out loud or reciting passages from Shakespeare with a flourish.
Page 198.
Mobility is the great invention of the nineteenth-century. The train changes perceptions of space and time; it not only speeds up human life, but transforms the idea of a network, a network structure, into something that can be explored in its entirety in a few days, even though it is so vast.
Page 201.
They can also look up from the page, thread together the fragments of life they sse through the window (thus preparing for the arrival of the cinema),
Page 201.
If the world speeds up in the nineteenth century, the United States is responsible for a second big spurt after the two World Wars.
Page 200.
The shopping centre that initially imitates a European model (the arcade) is established in city centres, and progressively becomes a suburban phenomenon.
Page 200.
With the motel, both connected through the U.S. roadway network, an imperial complex that is duplicated by the air routes, the twentieth-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century European rail networks.
Page 201.
All chains have something in common: what they have on offer is dominated by American cultural products.
Page 201.
The global consumption of fiction is above all the consumption of products from North America or inspired by them.
Page 203.
The purchase of display space creates bookshops that are all the same.
Page 205.
A good bookselle5r must be friendly, interested in culture and able to communicate that interest, be committed to books and what’s more energetic (we mustn’t forget it is physical work, too).
Page 206.
One must distinguish between the world’s great bookshops and emergency bookshops. The latter supply our most urgent reads, the ones that cannot wait, bring light relief on a flight or train journey, allow us to buy a last-minute present, and give us - on the same day it has been released - the book we’ve been waiting for.
Pages 209-210.
Literature cannot be understood if one retains an anachronistic faith in frontiers.
Page 214.
If all religions share some things, it is the need for the book, the idea that walking brings one nearer to the gods and the conviction that the world will come to an end.
Pages 218-119.
It has been our fate to witness the demise of the paper book, though it is proving so slow perhaps it will never happen at all.
Page 220.
Style is more important than content in the global circulation of the image.
Page 227.
Previously the bookshop became a tourist attraction when its historical important and picturesque condition hit the radar; over recent years architectural originality, almost always linked to excess, the grandiose and appeal to the media, has perhaps become a more influential marker than the two traditional ones.
Page 227.
The aim of which …is to prolong a customer’s stay in the bookshop transforming it into on all senses and on human relationship.
Page 235.
As in the virtual world, we are witnessing new forms of socialising, social networks, but the bookish variety clings to personal contact, to the fulfilment of the senses, the only thing the Internet cannot off us.
Page 236.
The longer you liger mentally or physically in the atmosphere of the shop the more you buy and consume.
Page 236.
In an era when gastronomy is now recognised as an art, culture has broadened its boundaries and these can be traced in tourist experiences that encompass every form of cultural consumption.
Page 237.
When Goethe travelled through Italy his visits to bookshops formed part of the spatial continuum that shaped every journey alongside churches, ruins the houses of learned men, restaurants and hotels. Travel and bookshops have always stimulated a lobe of the marketplace.
Page 237.
Intellectual pleasure fuses with voluptuous delight.
Page 238
We can touch everything in bookshop, and that is not the case in a museum or the most important libraries.
Page 238.
Premises cannot simply justify their existence as the physical space for electronic sales, they must offer everything that we b pages can’t provide.
Page 238.
A visit to a bookshop distinguished by its history, architecture, interior design or publishing stock spotlights us s subjects who like luxury, members of a different community to the one that consumes culture in shopping centres and big chains.
Page 238.
The revamping of hotels, railway stations, cinemas, palaces, banks, printers’, art galleries or museums as bookshops is a constant over recent decades and has accelerate din the twenty-first century.
Page 239.
Google Images and other platforms are awash with photographs of the world’s most beautiful, most interesting, most spectacular bookshops. For the first time in the history of culture these bookshops achieve access straight away to the international tourist circuit, markers gather pace an generate immediate contagion - at a stick and paste rate - on web pages, social media, blogs and microblogs and create a desire to visit, get to know, travel and photograph without any recourse to History or the participation of famous writers or acclaimed books.
Page 240.
Although conversations about literature are as old as Western culture, it is, of course, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they would become institutionalised as literary conversazione.
Page 243.
The confusion between private and public life parallels the confusion between bookshop and library.
Page 243.
Booksellers themselves in the eighteenth century were the driving force behind lending libraries that were much more democratic than literary societies and the only way in which artisans’ apprentices students or women could have access to literature without incurring the huge expense of the cost of a book. One could even say that, despite appearances, bookshops have never really been sure about their real boundaries.
Page 244.
A bookshop is much more hospitable when, as a result of repeated visits or coincidence, you strike up a friendship with one of the booksellers.
Page 245.
Only by travelling to the place where thigs happen do you find access to what resists visibility on the internet.
Page 245.
Every good bookseller must be something of a doctor, chemist or psychiatrist. Or barman.
Page 246.
Childhood and especially adolescence are periods when you fall in love with bookshops.
Page 246.
Blogs and social media allow you to exchange data and ideas in the cosmopolis, but your body continues to travel a local, domestic topography.
Page 249.
It is not only the movement of readers’ bodies that threads together the different bookshops in a city, books themselves shift and wander, open lines of escape and create itineraries,
Page 250.
Bookshops imitate the neighbourhoods that welcome them.
Page 252.
Nothing new exists solely in the world of what we can touch.
Page 252.
A democratic city is a network of public and private libraries and small and large bookshops: a dialogue between readers who live in multiple centres and various peripheries.
Page 253.
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.
Page 262.
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.
Page 262.
The reader’s sickness is related both to the arousal of the imagination and the immobilization of the body: the threat is as mental as it is physiological.
Page 268.
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 cultural product. As a work of art. As a commodity.
Page 270.
Bookshops are cultural centres, myths, spaces for conversations and debate, friendships and even amorous encounters.
Page 270.
Above all bookshops are businesses.
Page 271.
Literature is magic and exchange and for centuries has been sustained, like money, by paper and that 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.
Page 272.
We are innate searchers of the physical world … and cannot stop being that in the virtual world as well.
Page 274.
Our brains are changing, the way we communicate and relate is changing … Surface rather than depth, speed rather than reflection, sequence rather than analysis, surfing rather than penetration, communication rather than expression, multitasking rather than specialisation, pleasure rather than effort.
Pages 275-276.
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 re false or have become obsolete.
Page 276.
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.
Page 277.
What matters in the end is the will to remember.
Page 279.