The Bookshop Book

245 Pages·2014·5.98 MB·English

by  Jen Campbell

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