The Bookshop Book Read online

  The Bookshop Book

  Also by Jen Campbell

  non-fiction

  Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

  More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

  poetry

  The Hungry Ghost Festival

  THE

  BOOKSHOP

  BOOK

  Jen Campbell

  Constable • London

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Constable

  Copyright © Jen Campbell, 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-666-6 (hardback)

  UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-670-3 (ebook)

  Constable

  is an imprint of

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.constablerobinson.com

  OPEN FOR THE STRANGEST ADVENTURES

  This is a room of transpositions and tricks,

  of tiny time machines lined up, a spectrum of spines.

  In this room, two people kept apart

  for three hundred pages can begin to love each other

  at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air.

  And the air is turning, is it not? It is filling

  with flesh smells and fruit smells,

  it is thick with swarms of flitting black letters.

  Life appears where there was no life.

  Where the world was flat and angular, suddenly

  it is round, like an orange.

  In one corner the Macondo sun shines

  brilliantly on a woman with shoes the colour

  of old silver and a hat made of tiny flowers.

  She browses near a man who moves among the shelves

  systematically, serenely, running his hands

  over covers and titles in the same parsimonious way

  he papered his house with banknotes.

  Elsewhere, a cast of characters become complete,

  three-dimensional and disgraceful in a faded front room,

  answering their own distressing questions.

  Though outside it is raining and unspectacular,

  inside (somewhere in the stopover between

  being and oblivion) there is lightness and weight,

  soul and body, words misunderstood –

  for nothing more than the turn of a page.

  Rebecca Perry

  Contents

  A BRIEF HISTORY: THE WORLD OF BOOKS

  BOOKSHOPS AROUND THE WORLD & THOUGHTS FROM THOSE WHO LOVE THEM

  Europe

  Africa

  North America

  Central and South America

  Australasia

  Asia

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Bookshops

  Index of People

  bookshops are

  time machines

  spaceships

  story-makers

  secret-keepers

  dragon-tamers

  dream-catchers

  fact-finders

  & safe places.

  (this book is for those

  who know this to be true)

  A BRIEF HISTORY:

  THE WORLD OF BOOKS

  Bookshops are full of stories. Not just stories on shelves, but those hidden away. There are the stories of bookshop owners, and all the books they read that made them fall in love with reading. There are the stories of authors, and why they wrote their first book. There are the stories of second-hand books, and all the people who owned them. And there’s the story of every single customer who walks through the door. We all love stories, with their sense of mystery and adventure.

  At the antiquarian bookshop where I work part-time, a little girl once told me she loves bookshops because they are houses for stories. Another asked if she could get to Narnia through one of the bookcases. A young boy suggested I get a dragon to guard all the books in the shop when I wasn’t there. When I asked him if that mightn’t be a fire hazard, he rolled his eyes and told me that obviously I’d have to get a trained one.

  Sadly I’m yet to find a bookshop dragon, let alone a trained one, but it’s true that stories have always been associated with magic. Some of the earliest writing ever found, in southern Iraq from 4,000 BC, was used to record horoscopes. Archaeologists have also found Chinese writing on 50,000 tortoise shells, called Oracle Bones, on which shamans would carve questions before examining them by firelight as an early form of divination.

  I’ve never written on shells myself and, despite a strong desire to work at Flourish and Blotts, I don’t think I’m a witch, but when I was much younger I loved writing short stories about witches, sometimes on tree leaves using gel pens. I also remember writing secret notes using lemon juice as invisible ink – something I’d learnt from Enid Blyton. To make the writing visible you’d have to iron the paper and, as no parent’s going to let their child use an iron, it wasn’t so much invisible ink as impossible ink, but it was still fun. When I was twelve I moved on to machinery, writing a biography of my dead hamster on a ridiculously loud typewriter that would drive my parents mad as I powered on late into the night, the sound of typing punctured by gasps whenever my fingers got jammed between the keys. I thought the story was a masterpiece and secretly posted the manuscript off to Penguin in the hope they might publish it. (Wisely, they didn’t).

  We’ve written tales on many things over the past few thousand years: stone tablets, ivory, tree bark, palm leaves... Historians have even discovered copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey written out on the dried skins of serpents. The Ancient Romans used the inner bark of trees to write on, a peel called liber, which in turn became the Latin word libri, meaning book, and subsequently livre, libro and library. The Ancient Greeks wrote on parchment, the Egyptians on papyrus; the Chinese invention of paper didn’t reach Europe for nearly a thousand years.

  In the Ancient world, most books were read out in public by would-be writers – the notion of silent reading came much later – and if an audience approved, it was likely that a patron would pay to have the author’s work copied out by slaves. Such patrons were the first publishers, and the book stalls they would set up near temples and in the food markets of central town squares were the first bookshops.

  By the 1400s books were being created by carving a print block out of a huge chunk of wood, dipping it into ink and pressing it onto paper – a very inefficient method, because the block would often break. But in 1450, when Johann Gutenberg developed a moving printing press in Germany that enabled books to be produced faster and more cheaply, literacy was able to spread to the masses. Vespasiano da Bisticci, a famous bookseller in Florence, was so outraged that books would no longer be written out by hand that he closed his bookshop in a fit of rage, and became the first person in history to prophesy the death of the book industry.

  So what about the booksellers and bookshops who didn’t throw their toys out of their prams? Bookshops as physical places only became prevalent from the 1500s onwards. For thousands of years before, travelling booksellers went from town to town selling books. (See the booksellers of Montereggio on page 151, and the Bouquinistes in Paris on page 111). The first mention of a bookseller setting up a bookshop permanently in London is recorded as late as 1311. The early booksellers often sold other wares too, such as fabrics and plain parchment, and with the invention of the moving printing press they took on the role of bookbinders, often designing bespoke book covers for customers with their initials embossed on the cloth which, for a premium, could be dyed a particular colour.

  We’ve now reached the twenty-first century through a period of intense change for the book industry in recent years, with the rise of chain bookshops soon followed by their swift decline, the exponential growth of online shopping and the invention of the e-reader. So much has changed, indeed, that a lot of people have again been asking: are physical books and bookshops still relevant? But when so much of our lives is spent on computers, dealing with concepts and files that we can’t actually hold in our hands, the idea of a shopping experience, and of a physical book, is perhaps more important than ever before.

  Running a bookshop is no easy task: some are closing due to increased rents, business rates, and retail giants undercutting prices – but I think we forget that it’s always been a challenge. Think of the travelling booksellers who walked, carrying books, for hundreds of miles; think of monks who, a thousand years ago, had to handwrite every single book; think of the fight for freedom of speech and freedom of information – still a very real battle in many parts of the world today.

  In response to all these challenges, bookshops across the globe are certainly showing what they’re made of. In April 2014 Sanlian Taofen Bookstore in Beijing opened its first twenty-four-hour bookstore, generating a massive boost in sales. Book Towns are sprouting up all over the world, to save local economies and form stronger communities. A
t the Winter Conference of the American Booksellers Association in early 2014, its CEO Oren Teicher reported that sales of e-books were starting to plateau and that many independent bookshops in the States had their best ever Christmas. Philip Jones, the editor of the Bookseller magazine in the UK, is confident that proactive independent bookshops have the room and potential to continue to grow. It’s an exciting time for bookshops: they’re fighting harder than perhaps they’ve ever had to; consequently they’ve become more inventive than they’ve ever had to be.

  As for me, I’ve moved on from writing books about my dead hamster. I’ve worked in bookshops for seven years now, with new and old books, in England and in Scotland, and find them to be magical places, instilling a sense of wonder and adventure in children, and offering a haven in a busy world for all of us to stop and think. They are portals to infinite possibility and they are, as that little girl once said to me, houses for stories.

  Stories connect people: I want to share the stories of three hundred wonderful bookshops across six continents, and thoughts from famous authors about their favourite bookshops, too. These days, we’ve got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we’ve got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We’ve got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We’ve even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war.

  Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.

  All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard.

  BOOKSHOPS AROUND

  THE WORLD &

  THOUGHTS

  FROM THOSE

  WHO LOVE THEM

  Europe

  Set aglow by the setting sun, the magic of The Bookshop was on display. Dark wooden shelves stuffed with books surrounded me as the room opened into a large gallery. My nostrils were filled with the musky aroma of old pages and dust. There were original fireplaces set into the walls, hardwood floors that seemed to stretch on and on, chandeliers overhead, and, in the shadows of the evening, I could see that there were little trinkets and treasures everywhere... Oil paintings rested against the walls while random antiques – a bowler hat here or a stuffed pheasant there – were artfully and often humorously set on display. Through another doorway, past the Children’s section and into a long hall, Euan pointed above me and I looked up to see a skeleton hanging from the ceiling, playing the violin...

  As we continued further in, rooms opened on to each other, each with its own character. The Transportation Room was a small stone room off the main hall filled with books on transportation of all kinds. Under the room’s wooden floor Euan opened a trap door to reveal a working model train, which rode through a replica of Wigtown’s square – it was so secret and hidden that no one would have known it was there... The hall then led to a door into a garden, where there was a small stone building aptly named the Garden Room, stuffed with more books and antiques...

  It was, indeed, the ideal bookshop.

  from Three Things You Need to Know

  About Rockets by Jessica A. Fox

  Scotland

  ♦

  Wigtown

  On the west coast of Scotland, surrounded by salt marsh and forest, you’ll find Wigtown. Known as the National Book Town of Scotland, it’s also a place where everyone (quite charmingly) knows everyone else’s business. It has a population of just one thousand and, when I arrived in 2012, ten people approached me within half an hour asking if I’d met Shaun Bythell yet. Shaun is a bit of a local legend. He runs the largest bookshop in Wigtown – in fact, The Bookshop is the largest second-hand bookshop in Scotland – and for some time he had, as these people kept telling me, been wanting to write a book like my own (Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops). Their advice was to keep my head down and avoid him, because he was apparently quite annoyed that I’d got there first. Not wanting to become the most hated woman in Wigtown or be chased down the street by an angry Scottish bookseller, I spent my first day rummaging through Wigtown’s other bookshops instead, because there are quite a few of those.

  Back in the day, Wigtown used to be on the railway, but the line closed in the 1960s and led to the decline of the town’s main employer, the Bladnoch Creamery. A decade later John Carter, a jeweller based in nearby Newton Stewart, was burgled. He wasn’t insured, and couldn’t afford to re-stock his shop, so he decided to sell cheaper products instead: he decided to sell books. Over the next thirty years the bookshop grew, and relocated to Wigtown’s town square, where it became The Bookshop. With work in the town still short, and the success of the now very large bookshop, the folk of Wigtown got together and put in a bid to become Scotland’s ‘National Book Town’. Five other towns were also bidding for the chance to become the Hay-on-Wye of Scotland (see page 102) – to hopefully share the success of the little town near the Welsh border, whose fortunes had been transformed by its remarkable number of bookshops. Wigtown won, and a call was put out to booksellers and book-lovers across the country: Come on an adventure with us – move here and open a bookshop!

  And people came. Moira McCarty moved her bookshop down from the Orkneys; Richard and Marion van de Voort transported their science fiction bookshop from London to Scotland; Angela Everitt came from the north-east of England to set up a feminist bookshop and café. Scotland’s National Book Town became a big success. Bookshops opened up and down the main square, in warehouses, and in people’s living rooms. Wigtown went a step further: it launched an annual book festival. Every autumn for a week and a half, the literati of the UK and beyond descend, and festival organisers, booksellers, bed-and-breakfast owners, authors, readers and volunteers work around the clock to put on 200 book events in just ten days. It’s brilliant – and utterly mad.

  So that’s how I came to know Wigtown – doing a book talk during festival season. It has two dozen book businesses, from bookshops to book binders and publishers – the Box of Frogs, the Old Bank, Book Corner, Byre Books in a barn filled with wonderfully obscure books on myths and fairy tales – and after a cheerful festival volunteer had driven me the fifty-four miles from the nearest railway station at Dumfries, telling me proudly all about his family heritage, about all the famous authors he’d chauffeured around, and how Wigtown is perfect for stargazing because it has the darkest skies in Europe, I set out to explore as many of these bookshops as I could.

  My first port of call was ReadingLasses Bookshop & Café. There aren’t many things in life better than books, tea and cake (if you disagree, I’m afraid we can never be friends), and at ReadingLasses, where you can get all three at the same time, you soon lose any desire to leave. Not to mention the fact that they have an excellent bookshop dog: a spaniel, who goes by the name of Rupert Earl O’ the Machars.

  ‘Susan and I bought the shop with the aim of making it a place where people can come and just be,’ said Rupert’s owner, Gerrie Douglas-Scott. ‘There’s space to work; there’s space to read; there’s space to eat, and we even have “Rooms Above the Books” for people to stay.’

  Gerrie doesn’t just run the bookshop: she’s also a Humanist Celebrant – so when she’s not organising author events or buying in books she’s whizzing around the south-west of Scotland performing weddings, often on windswept beaches. Indeed, she adds, ‘We’ve done three weddings actually inside the bookshop. At the end of the ceremony I get the town buildings to ring their bells, and then a local piper comes in and we all have a party. There’s something very moving about it.’ As she said this, I resolved immediately to get married inside a bookshop one day, and berated myself for never having thought of it before. As Gerrie says: ‘Who wouldn’t want to get married in a room full of love stories?’

  Several books heavier and contemplating leaving London for the west coast of Scotland, I went on to the Wigtown Book Festival opening party. We were huddled in a tent, rain was falling, there were questions over whether the fireworks would work, and despite advice from the local population, I managed to run straight into Shaun. Shaun-who-apparently-didn’t-like-me-Shaun. Red-faced and embarrassed, I found myself stammering a lot and offering profuse apologies for having written a book called Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops before he had. Shaun raised an eyebrow and grinned. ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, Jen, but I’m too bloody grumpy to pull off a book like that.’ Then he handed me a gin and tonic.