Patricia Marechal

The story of Widener Library starts with a tragedy. Widener is not only a place of study and one of the largest reservoirs of books and periodicals in the world, it’s also a memorial. The act of devotion of a mother who lost her son in the Titanic shipwreck. A real Trauerarbeit. Harry Elkins Widener, Harvard class of 1907, loved and collected books. Upon his death, his mother decided to donate his enviable collection, plus a considerable amount of money, to build what today is Harvard’s most impressive library. Widener is both the geographical and symbolic center of Harvard University, and the building that every tourist wants to see. One cannot climb the thirty steps of Widener’s broad front stairs without having to dodge a tourist guide immersed in the act of narrating the tragedy of the ... Read More »]]>

Patricia Marechal

The story of Widener Library starts with a tragedy. Widener is not only a place of study and one of the largest reservoirs of books and periodicals in the world, it’s also a memorial. The act of devotion of a mother who lost her son in the Titanic shipwreck. A real Trauerarbeit. Harry Elkins Widener, Harvard class of 1907, loved and collected books. Upon his death, his mother decided to donate his enviable collection, plus a considerable amount of money, to build what today is Harvard’s most impressive library. Widener is both the geographical and symbolic center of Harvard University, and the building that every tourist wants to see. One cannot climb the thirty steps of Widener’s broad front stairs without having to dodge a tourist guide immersed in the act of narrating the tragedy of the Widener family. It’s hard to blame the overeager undergraduates that officiate as amateur guides for their excitement. How to avoid the temptation of mentioning the story of the library’s birth? It’s simply too good to be true. An aura of personal heroism, or madness, surrounds the building: legend has it that Harry Widener was about to step into a lifeboat when he remembered that he’d left behind a rare copy of Bacon’s Essais that he’d purchased in his travels around the Old Continent. So he went back to recover it, and in that attempt he “lost the boat” and his life. In other words, books killed Harry.

As impressive as the Titanic itself, Widener emerges from the heart of the so-called New Yard, an area adjacent to the old university campus where the first buildings of Harvard College, which date back to 1636, are located. Is Widener Library the most emblematic building of the New England red-brick campus? Perhaps on its best days. The building that stood out to my eyes when I first arrived was Memorial Church, right opposite Widener Library. “Universities here have churches,” I worried. My worries only increased when I came to realize that, while Memorial Church has its doors open to all, accessing Widener Library is not so easy. In fact, it’s almost as difficult to “get in” as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. To access Widener one has to pass a guarded gate wielding a Harvard ID that few possess. Harvard students like to contrast the restrictive access of their library with the democratic “all-welcome” policy of Harvard’s Cambridge cousin, and at times rival, MIT. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg that serves as illustration and summarizes the Harvardian lifestyle.

If you are one of the chosen few, once you get in Widener its imperial style salutes you. Immediately you find yourself in a panoptic hall where you have to choose your own adventure: periodicals at your right, stacks at your left, and majestic marble stairs at the front, leading to a special room with a Gutenberg bible and copies of the first folio of Shakespeare. Like the Titanic, Widener has several levels. Above the ground, the splendor and poshness of the reading rooms and exhibition halls dominate. Two First World War murals by John Singer Sargent stand at the sides of the main exhibition room. Incised below one is the motto “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped Death and Victory.” Below the other, “They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help. The nations battling in a righteous cause.” In both an American eagle spreads its wings. As a scholar, the link between victory and death seems a ghastly prospect. Even more discouraging is the strong suspicion that one’s dissertation is far from being worthy of the label “righteous cause.” All in all, the eagle speaks to me more of Prometheus’ punishment than of glory.

The next level is below the ground. Unbeknownst to those who see it from the outside, there is a subterranean Widener: a labyrinth of tunnels where most of the collection of books is stored. To look for a volume, scholars have to descend deep down and cross narrow paths illuminated by dim artificial lights, impregnated by the rancid smell of moss and enclosed spaces, and transversed by rusty leaking pipes. The infra-world of Widener’s arteries hosts the stacks of books, stored in pliable metallic book-shelves that, to gain space, fold and unfold like an accordion. At the pressing of a button, hundreds of dusty books are revealed and become illuminated by tenuous lights hanging from the roof. I often feel as if I were in some 1940’s archive of a noir film secret police. When the shelves display their fruits, one rejoices by the finding of an eighteenth century copy of Anacreon, or a bilingual edition of Petrarch. Once the coveted issue has been found, one is ready to emerge, treasure in hand, to the luminous, sunlit exuberance of the reading-room paradise. The return from the nerdy Hades comforts and cures momentary claustrophobia: students are once again able to breath clean aristocratic air.

But the reading rooms are not always a recovered paradise for the regulars of Widener Library. For most of its inhabitants, the feeling is of purgatory. Doctoral students populate the large halls, which are lit by lamps with cliché darkened green or golden glass shades. One can smell the anxiety of “dissertating.” Open-ended writings that never seem satisfactory, piles of reserved books that always multiply like the bread and fish, but often offer no nourishment, frantic hands scanning hundreds of pages in vain. Looks of support between students mix with gazes of envy each time someone seems “in the zone.” The scholars form departmental clusters, taking over specific areas of reading rooms. In the Phillips Reading Room, the Romance Language Department gathers. Every now and then, someone asks their colleagues in a whisper if they want to take a break for coffee—not for cigarettes anymore, as the university has recently passed a tobacco ban.

It takes a little while to realize that there is a third floor (maybe paradise, finally) where private libraries are located. A Russian nesting library. The smaller libraries inside Widener belong to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for short FAS, and are even more secure and demand yet more special permission to gain access. Not any Harvard ID can open their doors. One can only wonder what bibliophile dreams lay inside; their windows occluded by opaque 1950s khaki curtains. Walking through the narrow corridors with high ceilings where the FAS Departmental Libraries are located is like a trip to Widener’s past: the Celtic Seminar Library, the History of Science Library, the Paleography Library, the Sanskrit Library are all flanked by old library index card cabinets. The first time I walked down those corridors, it was impossible not to notice, smirk, and shiver when I glanced at some of the yellow labels indicating the first and last cards archived in each cabinet: “Moscow ~ North,” “Fisheries ~ France,” “Economic ~ English,” “Warsaw ~ World,” “Bhagavadgita ~ Businesswomen,” “Argentina ~ Bhagavadgita,” “A.A.A ~ Argentina.”

Recently, I discovered a Poetry Room. Sadly, I have no access to it.

Rafael Toriz Translated by Julia Ostmann

Chatting Over A Drink Conversation in the Convent

Being, appearing to be, and running a bookstore in Mexico is a high art, not suitable for the lazy and much less for the novice. In a country where drinking is a national sport and where disorganized realities demand constant interpretation, the invitation to buy and read books seems at first like a mistake, then a deviation. In the end, it seems like a warm welcome. For this reason, and so the endeavor bears fruit, a few daring people have put together—with distinct success—a fascinating hybrid that fulfills two essential needs: the bookstore bar, that is, the wineglass lubricated by books, a concept not far off from my idea of paradise. Among the various options for getting hammered among a few though learned books, the most conspicuous, elegant, ... Read More »]]>

Rafael Toriz
Translated by Julia Ostmann

Chatting Over A Drink
Conversation in the Convent

Being, appearing to be, and running a bookstore in Mexico is a high art, not suitable for the lazy and much less for the novice. In a country where drinking is a national sport and where disorganized realities demand constant interpretation, the invitation to buy and read books seems at first like a mistake, then a deviation. In the end, it seems like a warm welcome.
For this reason, and so the endeavor bears fruit, a few daring people have put together—with distinct success—a fascinating hybrid that fulfills two essential needs: the bookstore bar, that is, the wineglass lubricated by books, a concept not far off from my idea of paradise.
Among the various options for getting hammered among a few though learned books, the most conspicuous, elegant, and sumptuous in the nation is Profética in Puebla, an amazing place that contains, within walls dating back to the viceroyalty (the building belonged to the former Convent of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception), all kinds of intoxicating drinks, with a fountain of clear and timeless water at its center. To set foot in Profética, in all its nobility, is to set foot in the 17th century Mexico of Sor Juana, the baroque, and the cheeky, bare-bottomed cherubs of Tonantzintla: Profética, for many years now, has been the promise that the heart of another country, gorgeous and intoxicating, beats in the boundless Mexican night.
Whenever I am in Mexico, whatever it takes, I make time to visit this resplendent courtyard. Beneath Profética’s sky I have heard the years that whisper through the magnificent bookstore and in the still more surprising library. Whether I am being presented books or chatting over a drink under the stars, it is clear to me that Profética is not only an instant suspended in time, but also one of my favorite places on Earth. For this reason, each time I am given leave to cross its threshold, I let myself be led into the depths of mezcal on chariots of fire.

**

3 sur 701. Centro
Puebla, México.
Tel (222) 2469101

Victoria Liendo translated by Victoria Lampard

To Charles Coustille, guilty of making me love France, he who declares himself innocent of everything.

Libraries very much resemble churches: there are some that can make you feel even closer to God. There are so many libraries in Paris that it’s hard to decide which to visit on a daily basis. There’s your neighborhood library, your university library, your country’s library, the Scandinavian countries’ libraries—more modern—the Grandes Écoles, the famous ones like Saint-Geneviève, the cool ones like Beaubourg, and then there is the official, unquestioned Cathedral of French Wisdom, immense, solemn, silent: the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Against all expectations, the lofty, serious BnF is the only place in which someone as restless as myself is able to sit down and study.

Before the main branch of the library was at Richelieu, near the Opera and the ... Read More »]]>

Victoria Liendo
translated by Victoria Lampard

To Charles Coustille,
guilty of making me love France,
he who declares himself innocent of everything.

Libraries very much resemble churches: there are some that can make you feel even closer to God. There are so many libraries in Paris that it’s hard to decide which to visit on a daily basis. There’s your neighborhood library, your university library, your country’s library, the Scandinavian countries’ libraries—more modern—the Grandes Écoles, the famous ones like Saint-Geneviève, the cool ones like Beaubourg, and then there is the official, unquestioned Cathedral of French Wisdom, immense, solemn, silent: the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Against all expectations, the lofty, serious BnF is the only place in which someone as restless as myself is able to sit down and study.

Before the main branch of the library was at Richelieu, near the Opera and the stock exchange and known as “BN” (Bibliothèque Nationale). They’ve since added an “F” (as in France)—apparently a needed addition—and placed it in Tolbiac, on the east side, right up against the invisible wall that separates Paris de rigueur snobbery from the banlieue. Its new location lent it freedom of form and expansiveness. The people who designed it in the 80s thought of everything. They must have said: “let it be on the riverside,” as a metaphor for eternity; “let it boast an esplanade thousands of meters in size,” in defiance of urban modernity; and—which they somehow managed to achieve—”let it take the form of a book.” The four buildings, each 80 meters in height and in the shape of an open book, form the vertices of a rectangular esplanade 60,000 square meters in size that extends to the bank of the Seine. At the center is a wild garden into which nobody is allowed to go.

To be admitted into the most exclusive rooms on the ground floor that surrounds the garden, the first step required is purification: you leave all your worldly possessions in the cloakroom, keeping only the bare essentials in a plastic briefcase—transparent, like the study rooms, the garden, and the cafe, the walls of which are made entirely of glass. Before passing through the final turnstile, you must open four enormous metal doors and go down two flights of an endless set of escalators. At times I feel as if I am following the descent of Orpheus, other times I find the Get Smart theme tune stuck in my head as I navigate the secretive doorways. Once inside, in your own area and with your materials brought from home, procrastination involves the bleak prospect of physical exertion which, allied with the guilt brought about by leisure time, quashes any desire to attempt an escape from your blank page. The bathroom is twenty minutes worth of carpet and four Maxwell Smart doors away. The café, the same again. You thus resign yourself to spending several hours under the blanket of silence.

For every room, a letter. For every letter, a mythological character. It is said that in V there are girls as beautiful as nymphs. The nerds in R will bring about good work. Their concentration is contagious, but you will fare poorly if mired in existential angst, for they are scientists, and know that we do nothing but invent things with our words. I prefer U. There is sunlight, there are friendly faces, and all the books we need are at our fingertips, although some have yet to arrive. You get all kinds of hubris in U. Dissertators flaunting piles of books they will never read. Computers abandoned for hours, yet monopolizing the only available internet cable. Latin-American work-mates who breathe heavily as they write, as if aroused by some unspecified excitement. We all need a bit of privacy when studying. To this end, many U’s secretly emigrate to S at the far end, or they cross the border—the impenetrable garden—along its perimeter, and after a long stretch of red carpet arrive at the other side, at P, at O, at M, where the frustrated or pretentious psychoanalysts gather.

Sometimes, while traversing the red carpet that connects the study rooms, the Café du Temps, and the bathrooms, I see rabbits on the other side of the glass; mother ducks with their trail of baby ducklings, flocks of birds unaware that they are no longer in the wild, but the most surprising creatures are seated on this side, in the study rooms, on the staircases in the hallways or in the café, where for five o’clock tea the intellectual fauna emerge for a sort of wild leporine display of their own. My favorites of these are the French lit folk, whose finest asset—besides their attire, taken straight from the films of Truffaut—is in responding in the emphatic negative to any question asked of them. Talking among themselves, they complain—in sly competition—about the page count of some dissertation or another, as if they were New York finance men comparing bank balances without the slightest inkling that they may well be yuppies too, in their own way. We faithful dissertators of the BnF are united by the shame of the plastic cases we carry that really look like the plastic trays you see in school cafeterias; by institutional rivalries; the certainty of an uncertain income; and academic desperation. We are divided, meanwhile, by a delicate and unspoken caste system built on the basis of literary tastes; the awareness of aesthetics or the intentional lack thereof, as evidenced in dress; by name-dropping, and by what I call “name-manner.”

Saying “béhène” (BN) is not the same as saying “béhèneffe” (BnF). The BNers—as was explained to me by a BnFian friend when I asked about the difference—are nostalgic old professors who were around during the times of the Richelieu location and who now flaunt antiquity like a luxury accessory or who put it on when they want a retro look. For our generation—said my friend, and I saw that it was true—the default was to be a BnFian, given that the acronym “BN” has been stricken from all official documents by now, the library’s employees all use the F, and the website is www.bnf.fr (it was here that my friend noted his allegiance to this group). But there is a third category: the under-30 BNers. Serious snobs or just imitators of their elders, these people affect an impossible agedness for the vile purpose of seeming to have academic credentials. “C’est très malin,” said my friend, it’s such a cheap way of basking in apparent authenticity for anyone who utters these initials in an academic conversation. Even among long-time BnF veterans, the difference helps to distinguish between the initiated—whose career paths will no doubt be admirable—and the profane—said my friend, gazing downwards—who are really shooting themselves in the foot when they say “BnF.”

But there is another type of BnFians, for whom my friend predicted a bright future (he belonged to this type). Though not belonging to any oral culture, these men of the written word insist on typing “BnF” and never “BNF,” as the vulgar do, or, even worse, “BNf,” as the posers do, hoping for a likeness to the NRf (Nouvelle Revue française). This overcorrectness can be compared with the use of “École des Hautes Études” (mark of the feisty connoisseur) for “EHESS” (mainstream), or, too, the use of “Ulm” (the name of the street) for “ENS” (École Normale Superièure), intended to make it quite clear that they, having graduated from the university’s Latin Quarter branch, are not among the icky offspring of Lyon, Fontenay, or who-knows-where-else. Even more serious is the distinction made by true perfectionists between the use of “à la Sorbonne” and “en Sorbonne” (it’s one thing to go to school there and another entirely to attend a conference held in the historic building). Here my friend refused to name names. “C’est trop grave,” he said solemnly. In sum, he said, the BNers are either ancient morons or super-duper ambitious; the BnFians are either very innocent and undereducated, or spineless and ignoble.

Entering the BnF is a real commitment; it is to engage in ritual, and to suspend the anxieties of the everyday—quite unlike studying in the swaggering Pompidou library, where pop, color, food, TV, clochards, hipsters and low muttering stand as trademarks of freedom and knowledge. In Beaubourg you feel as if you were in Brooklyn, but in the BnF you are, quite definitely, in France. Differences aside, at the end of the day we all find ourselves in the same purgatory, fighting to reach Paradise. Every dissertator experiences their own crisis of faith. Once, a despairing Italian came into the cafe crying: “I have no dissertation, my dissertation does not exist,” to which a French workmate answered, exhaling the smoke from his cigarette, “aucune thèse n’existe.”

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Images: Victoria Liendo

Álvaro Bisama translated by Julia Ostmann

My favorite bookstore is a ghost bookstore. It was called the Orellana and was located in the center of Valparaíso. It closed a couple of years ago. It just couldn’t hold out anymore. Its owners were an old couple that had been there since the mid-’50s or ’60s. He was tall and thin; she was tiny and wore thick glasses.

I never knew their names.

My grandmother had kept an account at the bookstore ever since it opened. My grandmother read a lot: in the house where I grew up, my parents’ books were mixed with hers. That library formed or deformed me. Many of those volumes came from the Orellana, easy to recognize thanks to a stamp on the first page. When my parents got paid at the end of the month, they would give ... Read More »]]>

Álvaro Bisama
translated by Julia Ostmann

My favorite bookstore is a ghost bookstore. It was called the Orellana and was located in the center of Valparaíso. It closed a couple of years ago. It just couldn’t hold out anymore. Its owners were an old couple that had been there since the mid-’50s or ’60s. He was tall and thin; she was tiny and wore thick glasses.

I never knew their names.

My grandmother had kept an account at the bookstore ever since it opened. My grandmother read a lot: in the house where I grew up, my parents’ books were mixed with hers. That library formed or deformed me. Many of those volumes came from the Orellana, easy to recognize thanks to a stamp on the first page. When my parents got paid at the end of the month, they would give me Astérix comics which came with that stamp, for me a sort of sacred mark. That stamp was in almost all of the Boom novels I read in my teens and in the literary theory manuals that had been on the shelves since the 1970s. I still leaf through those volumes, now scattered here and there, in my parents’ house and in mine, in the curves of my memory: Greek classics edited by Porrúa, books by Kayser, Wellek and Warren’s New Criticism publications translated by Gredos, editions of Droguett or Vargas Llosa from the 1960s.

The Orellana was not a museum, but it looked like one. Nothing ever seemed to move on the display tables; the bookcases revealed the geological layers of our literary styles. And that made the place reliable: They never got rid of anything. You could buy out-of-print things there, you could find on the shelves the same books that had been carried for decades. I remember that the bookstore’s science fiction section was terrific and that for years you could find Alianza’s old tomes by Kafka, Canetti, or Lovecraft.

Sometimes, I believe those stamps are time machines.

The bookstore survived more or less a half-century, in a city where all the others went bankrupt time and time again. In fact, since I can remember, hardly a single bookstore lasted very long in Valparaíso. The Orellana was there before them all, and it seemed that nothing was going to happen to it. Or that’s what I believed. I should have read the setting more carefully: Everything surrounding the bookstore had changed. During the past decade, the area (getting more and more touristy) had been overtaken by large department stores appropriating that corner-store aesthetic, the old soda fountains had become pubs, the clothing stores had mutated into Chinese importers; the noise of the buses turned everything intolerable. Perhaps that is the problem or the illusion that literature poses: the confidence that, in the moment when everything comes crashing to the ground, books can elegantly navigate any entropy.

I trusted in the Orellana’s survival almost instinctively. It was an illusion: At the beginning of 2011, when I returned to the area to write a feature about the Viña del Mar Festival, my mother and brother told me that the bookstore had closed. The reasons were what they always are—it wasn’t self-sustaining as a business, and it was better to sell the land, which was located in the city center, yards from the Cinzano, inches from the Plaza Aníbal Pinto, in the heart of every tourist route. When a fire started in the office next door, nothing happened to the bookstore. Nor did anything happen when the owners of the soda fountain on the other side turned it into an abominable restaurant-bar. I believe that events like these ended up confirming the mythic aura that enveloped the bookstore. It was a fragile myth, created to find the way back to a lost time.

Ghosts are mirages; they revoke the progression of time. The Orellana is one of my favorite ghosts. I like to think about ghosts: they are the echoes that we leave in the places we once inhabited, they are the memory of the books that we once saw on a display table and dreamed of reading and, although we never did, that we pretend occupy a space in our memories. The Orellana is a ghost, a landscape that is no more, a library that exists only in dreams.

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Librería Orellana – Avenida Esmeralda 1148 – Valparaíso, Chile

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Image: Álvaro Bisama

Julián Fuks translated by Sarah Bruni

Call it bookstore anxiety disorder. I know I’m not the first to suffer from this affliction, and I won’t be the last. This particular illness should be described in some list of new pathologies—at once intense and subtle, it can attack anyone wandering amid long shelves of shiny, attractive volumes. Nausea, maybe, an angst whose cause is difficult to name: it’s something in the exaggerated order of the books, their eagerness, something in their obvious hierarchy. The larger the store, the clearer its windows, the stronger the feeling—although even in airport bookstores, this malaise can be unexpectedly intense.

I’m sure that this phenomenon has spread to a hundred countries, but São Paulo is one of its origins. Forced to shop at big chains and impassable megastores, the city’s last remaining literate residents are ... Read More »]]>

Julián Fuks
translated by Sarah Bruni

Call it bookstore anxiety disorder. I know I’m not the first to suffer from this affliction, and I won’t be the last. This particular illness should be described in some list of new pathologies—at once intense and subtle, it can attack anyone wandering amid long shelves of shiny, attractive volumes. Nausea, maybe, an angst whose cause is difficult to name: it’s something in the exaggerated order of the books, their eagerness, something in their obvious hierarchy. The larger the store, the clearer its windows, the stronger the feeling—although even in airport bookstores, this malaise can be unexpectedly intense.

I’m sure that this phenomenon has spread to a hundred countries, but São Paulo is one of its origins. Forced to shop at big chains and impassable megastores, the city’s last remaining literate residents are left without alternatives where they can roam freely between books and browse through their purchases. They have, however, a slight remedy—or a consolation, as the name of the place suggests. Situated under one of the city’s main avenues, “Passagem Literária da Consolação” (Consolation Literary Underpass) offers relief to lungs clogged with glitter, a breath carrying the dust of old forgotten books. No organized inventory, but the disorder of life itself. No striking images and ads, just covers faded by time. No price gouging, just the books’ essential worth going straight into the pockets of a few booksellers who work as a cooperative.

Of course, you won’t find the newest release by the pop writer of the moment there, or the shifting oddities hailed by the critics. Nor is going there a longstanding routine for me: I can’t invent afternoons I spent here, giving in to the pure pleasure of literature, to its indelible instruction. I should be honest: it’s not even one of my usual destinations. But every time I pass through there, I feel something in me unwind, something in me is consoled. I can continue my walk and my day with a greater sense of calm.

*

Passagem Literária da Consolação: pedestrian walkway at the corner of Consolação and Paulista Avenue.

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Read this in PORTUGUESE

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Image credit: Julián Fuks

By Marfa Nekrasova translated by Nathan Jeffers

The word Hyperion has many possible meanings; it can refer to a book, a poem, a tree, a spaceship, one of the 12 Titans, or even one of Saturn’s moons. However, ask a Muscovite about Hyperion and the reply you will most likely hear will lead you to a bookstore. What you will find is not so much a small back-alley bookshop, stuffed from floor to ceiling with dusty books, but rather a straight up book megastore.

The fact that this bookstore is located in a former house of Culture (a Soviet institution used to host performances and other large gatherings) means it is doomed to have an enduring ‘underground’ vibe. The space of the house of Culture has been used over the past three years in an ... Read More »]]>

By Marfa Nekrasova
translated by Nathan Jeffers

The word Hyperion has many possible meanings; it can refer to a book, a poem, a tree, a spaceship, one of the 12 Titans, or even one of Saturn’s moons. However, ask a Muscovite about Hyperion and the reply you will most likely hear will lead you to a bookstore. What you will find is not so much a small back-alley bookshop, stuffed from floor to ceiling with dusty books, but rather a straight up book megastore.

The fact that this bookstore is located in a former house of Culture (a Soviet institution used to host performances and other large gatherings) means it is doomed to have an enduring ‘underground’ vibe. The space of the house of Culture has been used over the past three years in an increasingly strange assortment of ways. Moscow’s creative youth has been opening (and closing) shops, cafés and studios, as well as running workshops for connoisseurs of modern art.

It was with both their own creative ambitions, and a respect for the Soviet past, that Hyperion’s founders set about opening its doors to the public. On the lawn by the entrance they built a sandbox, scattered with toys, so as to allow parents to peruse the store’s shelves freely. Benches have been installed to accommodate browsers who wish to have a smoke break, and above the entrance hangs a realistic raven carved from wood (after the dove, the raven is Moscow’s favorite bird). Two more things that grab one’s attention are the unexpectedly large collection of children’s books and the fact that in every book there is a Hyperion Ex Libris, the design of which every book-lover is invited to submit an entry in an on-going competition.

Inside Hyperion, near the well-chosen and carefully arranged books, are handmade decorations, postcards, and store-branded mugs featuring hidden patterns that only reveal themselves upon coming in contact with hot liquid. From these mugs one can sip tea while sitting and reading on one of the many ottomans.

In the evenings, Hyperion takes on a more social atmosphere offering readings and concerts by talented, though perhaps not well-known, performers. Further included in Hyperion’s evening repertoire are classes on fruit-preserve making, the Japanese art of flower arrangement (Ikebana), and nights for young poets. So if you ever happen to find yourself in Moscow’s Kitai Gorod region, then it would undoubtedly be worth your while to pop in and see for yourself one of the most welcoming and increasingly popular bookstores in Moscow. That, and to drink tea out of a transforming mug, of course.

***
read this also in Russian
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 Natalka Sniadanko Translated from Ukrainian by Jennifer Croft

“No photos,” barks the geezer wearing the typically Soviet hat with the visor, synthetic leather sandals, an untucked shirt, and pants that haven’t been washed in ages.

He says it in Russian, but I answer in Ukrainian. “Too bad,” I say with a sigh and survey once more his wares arrayed across a sheet of pleather cast across the cobblestones: a shoddy photocopy of an abridged Mein Kampf in the very center, and next to it a treatise of similar quality on the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1920s, both against the backdrop of a generous assortment of Komsomol, Young Pioneer, and World War II symbolism: badges, photographs, belts, and Soviet-style cockades. The selection on neighboring tables and mats is neither less varied nor less noteworthy. Soviet and Italian pop hits on ... Read More »]]>

 Natalka Sniadanko
Translated from Ukrainian by Jennifer Croft

“No photos,” barks the geezer wearing the typically Soviet hat with the visor, synthetic leather sandals, an untucked shirt, and pants that haven’t been washed in ages.

He says it in Russian, but I answer in Ukrainian. “Too bad,” I say with a sigh and survey once more his wares arrayed across a sheet of pleather cast across the cobblestones: a shoddy photocopy of an abridged Mein Kampf in the very center, and next to it a treatise of similar quality on the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1920s, both against the backdrop of a generous assortment of Komsomol, Young Pioneer, and World War II symbolism: badges, photographs, belts, and Soviet-style cockades. The selection on neighboring tables and mats is neither less varied nor less noteworthy. Soviet and Italian pop hits on vinyl; aluminum forks and spoons; Russian and Polish cookbooks spanning the whole of the past century; editions with and without illustrations of books on everything under the sun; fashion magazines from all over the world, ranging from issues that are relatively recent to veritable antiques; a wooden abacus beneath a taut, sign-bearing cord, whose words—“Danger! Archaeological investigation underway”—tremble a little in the wind. Standing pointedly in one of the aisles is one of those classic partly plaid bags on wheels that old folks cart their groceries in; it is capped with a handwritten note announcing the availability of copies of a Polish guidebook to Lviv originally published in 1920. I buy a copy. It’s all the same terrible-quality photocopies at exorbitant prices, but the contents of the guidebook are worth it: in addition to the detailed descriptions of the old streets and buildings, it also contains maps, indispensible in a city where street names change just about every other year. There are piano études by Chopin and Rossini’s biography alongside the memoirs of Soviet General Zhukov; Polish detective novels from the 70s in the original language as well as Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz in Russian translations; collections of reproductions of the works of Russian painter Vasily Surikov and rare editions of Ukrainian poet Vasily Stus, censored yet nominated for the Nobel Prize; a biographical publication in Russian called Marx’s Daughters and a Cossack history of Ukraine; an open suitcase displaying maps of the Bieszczady Mountains in Polish and a guide to Krakow in Russian; sun-bleached umbrellas advertising Ukrainian beer, shading books by Henry Miller, Darya Dontsova, and Agatha Christie.

And towering above it all, there is the great stone figure of Ivan Fedorov, who in the sixteenth century printed the first Ukrainian book. Traversing the books, brides in long white dresses climb the stairs to have their pictures taken in front of the monument while the booksellers sit back in their folding chairs reading whatever they happen to have gotten their hands on. I spot one engrossed in a book with a dingy green pleather cover, titled Alcoholism, author unnamed.

Perhaps out of all of contemporary Lviv, covered as it is in Soviet scabies, excessively sweetened for tourist tastes, this is where real multiculturalism has survived. It is here where German-Polish dictionaries from the Habsburg era rest beside works by the head of Ukraine’s first government and prominent historian Mikhail Grushevsky; Soviet Woman Magazine; old right- and left-wing pamphlets; the graphomaniacal ensembles of Soviet literati; and Ukrainian literature forbidden in the Soviet era, published by the Ukrainian diaspora around the world and smuggled into Lviv as contraband. And although this current array of bookly chaos is geared more toward tourists than toward bibliophiles, as it once was, the shift is understandable, was even inevitable, and it does not mar in any significant way the experience of buying books.

Further down, past Fedorov, there is the entrance into the city’s archives. Its massive wrought iron gates open for a moment, and the geezer with the hat with the visor appears in an aisle. Squinting a little, he glances at my camera—but I don’t quite manage to take my shot in time: the gates have shut again.

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Read this in Ukranian

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Hugh Ferrer

For as little as $140, anyone now can now buy his or her own little bookstore—for that is essentially what an e-book reader is: a combination of book and private store, a boutique, almost, with minimal overhead and a vast selection, a distant warehouse’s franchise outlet, scaled for the hand, serviced by a single employee, who is also the owner and the store’s sole customer.  And, contrary to inherited wisdom, the success of these handheld machines suggests that there are actually armies of people who have wanted to work in a bookstore, but had never before had the chance.

In the meantime, beautiful independent bookstores like Prairie Lights (est. 1978) have become multi-layered symbols: as bookstores, they resist the unwanted apotheosis of “book culture” into the cloud; as “independents,” they are the victims of the latest corporate assault ... Read More »]]>

Hugh Ferrer

For as little as $140, anyone now can now buy his or her own little bookstore—for that is essentially what an e-book reader is: a combination of book and private store, a boutique, almost, with minimal overhead and a vast selection, a distant warehouse’s franchise outlet, scaled for the hand, serviced by a single employee, who is also the owner and the store’s sole customer.  And, contrary to inherited wisdom, the success of these handheld machines suggests that there are actually armies of people who have wanted to work in a bookstore, but had never before had the chance.

In the meantime, beautiful independent bookstores like Prairie Lights (est. 1978) have become multi-layered symbols: as bookstores, they resist the unwanted apotheosis of “book culture” into the cloud; as “independents,” they are the victims of the latest corporate assault on “local business,” the lifeblood of “main street,” which big-box malls and now online retailers have been relentlessly siphoning off.

But when I begin to think like this, there is only one place to go.

The high ceiling on the first floor is wired with a softly bright, shadowless, alert lighting scheme, and the floor-plan, which seems wide open at first, carries you in, swallows you, and the reading chairs scattered about feel wonderfully secluded.  Like all great bookstores, Prairie Lights feels secure and comforting.  There are many sections I never browse—it’s healthy to feel limited; and, given the store’s 40,000 titles, inevitable.  A staircase rises to the natural light of the second floor, where a café buzzes, and the bookcases roll away for the almost-nightly readings.  On a recent Sunday afternoon, it was overflowing with a crowd of young and old who had turned out for a reading by the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; at the end of an hour, it seemed as if absolutely everyone were standing in the lines for an autographed copy.

It is at such moments, and not only during a bad day at work, that I wonder why I didn’t, fifteen years ago when I arrived in Iowa City, apply for a job.  I wouldn’t mind unpacking and labeling and section-coding and alphabetizing new arrivals, or learning the art of buying from a publisher’s backlist.  When I walk past a case, my hand, of itself, aligns a spine reshelved too deeply.  And I’ve come to notice that these opportunities to surreptitiously straighten are rare, because the shelves tend to be immaculate, resonating with the loving attention paid to them.  And then I can’t help suspecting that there are more hands at work than just the staff’s—that many, if not most, of the customers are, like me, always working there in spirit; and that this is why Prairie Lights feels like everyone’s store.

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 15 South Dubuque Street – Iowa City, Iowa

I used to live in Madrid, but now I only go when I’m able, and feel like it. When I get there I perform certain rituals, like a pilgrim arriving at Santiago de Compostela. One is to have a beer at a great bar called Pepe Botella, and another is to give in to the temptation of Arrebato (“Rapture”), a bookstore on La Palma street, right in the middle of Malasaña. It’s a second-hand bookstore, but that second hand has a soft touch. Pepe, the bookseller, finds objects of value to the literary sybarite and offers them up for sale instead of keeping them for himself, which is what I would do. It’s not like Tipos Infames, a nearby bookstore with a Michelin star for selling new work. It’s a space for exploration, a place where you never ... Read More »]]> Juan Soto Ivars

I used to live in Madrid, but now I only go when I’m able, and feel like it. When I get there I perform certain rituals, like a pilgrim arriving at Santiago de Compostela. One is to have a beer at a great bar called Pepe Botella, and another is to give in to the temptation of Arrebato (“Rapture”), a bookstore on La Palma street, right in the middle of Malasaña. It’s a second-hand bookstore, but that second hand has a soft touch. Pepe, the bookseller, finds objects of value to the literary sybarite and offers them up for sale instead of keeping them for himself, which is what I would do. It’s not like Tipos Infames, a nearby bookstore with a Michelin star for selling new work. It’s a space for exploration, a place where you never know what you’re going to find. Pepe knows everything about Spanish and Spanish American poetry, and laughs a little when he sees me with the Stephen King novels I scoop up from this fount to feed my collection spilling from my arms. I tell him I’m a bit of a freak, and he indulges me. Then we get to talking about poets, about our friend Ajo Micropoetisa, and about the situation in Spain. Arrebato is my School of Continuing Education.

I did penance there, once.

 * *

Arrebato Libros – La Palma 21 – Madrid

The fire began surreptitiously, away from the bar’s carousing punters, but soon crept into the kitchen. There it licked at the piled gas cylinders, unleashing a conflagration of such ferocity that in no time at all the store next door was engulfed. It was no ordinary establishment. Pilgrims Book House was perhaps the largest, certainly the most loved, purveyor of books in Nepal.

The owner came running, summoned the fire brigade and appealed to his neighbours to employ their buckets. It took 12 hours to tame the fire. There was relief that no lives were lost, that the inferno hadn’t spread through the tourist quarter of Thamel. But for booklovers across the Kathmandu Valley, this was a tragedy of Alexandrian proportions: tens of thousands of books on literally every subject in the cosmos lay scattered in a sodden heap outside the ... Read More »]]>

The fire began surreptitiously, away from the bar’s carousing punters, but soon crept into the kitchen. There it licked at the piled gas cylinders, unleashing a conflagration of such ferocity that in no time at all the store next door was engulfed. It was no ordinary establishment. Pilgrims Book House was perhaps the largest, certainly the most loved, purveyor of books in Nepal.

The owner came running, summoned the fire brigade and appealed to his neighbours to employ their buckets. It took 12 hours to tame the fire. There was relief that no lives were lost, that the inferno hadn’t spread through the tourist quarter of Thamel. But for booklovers across the Kathmandu Valley, this was a tragedy of Alexandrian proportions: tens of thousands of books on literally every subject in the cosmos lay scattered in a sodden heap outside the eviscerated husk of Pilgrims Book House.

In the three decades since he’d set up Pilgrims, Nandaram Tiwari of Benares had built up a veritable library with a specialization in the spiritual, cultural and material existence of the Himalayan region. Over the years, I’d purchased books on Indian philosophy, Nepali architecture, alpine flowers, Hatha yoga, spirit possession as well as old copies of the Paris Review, and I frequented the store long enough to see my own collection of short stories appear in the section for Nepali authors.

The last time I was at Pilgrims was to drop off copies of La.Lit, our literary magazine, a week before the disaster. They met a fiery end, no doubt. In the days that followed, the sage-like Tiwari spoke to journalists of the impermanence of existence, and reminded them that he “wasn’t quite on the street yet”—a much smaller branch of Pilgrims remains open for business down the road. Small comfort for those readers nursing memories of browsing through the quiet rooms jammed floor to ceiling with esoterica.

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Photo by Shashank Shrestha
Image 2 (modified) via