Of books and bookshops

Wouldn't it be nice if there's a bookshop where the people there can remember your name? Of course, it wouldn't be at a Borders or an MPH store; perhaps at Silverfish if you go there often enough. In Paris, there is one bookshop, where not only will they remember your name but they will also give you a bed to sleep on if you're in dire straits. The story of this one-of-a-kind place is told by Jeremy Mercer in Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs.

A few words about 'Shakespeare and Company', regarded as one of the world's most famous bookshops. It was opened by a woman called Sylvia Beach in 1919, and soon became a favourite gathering place of literary greats such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. It was forced to close down in 1941 when Beach refused to sell the last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. Ten years later, another bookshop was opened on the Left Bank. Called 'Le Mistral', it was run in a free-spirited manner and even provided beds for the literary-inclined who were down on their luck. The shop was renamed 'Shakespeare and Company' in 1964 and was a regular meeting place for Beatnik poets. The shop's ethos has remained and writers, such as Canadian crime reporter Jeremy Mercer, find their way to this sanctuary.

A book that I picked up at a recent Big Bad Wolfs' sale is The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton - it was a bargain at just RM8.00! A foreign correspondent, Hamilton served in Africa in 2006, where she was inspired by the Kenyan Camel Mobile Library to write this novel.

Although fictional, the book draws on the real-life efforts of a group of librarians who dedicate themselves to reducing the illiteracy rate of more than 80% of  the bush people. Camels are used to bring boxes of books to the nomads, wherever they may be. 

Source for the two photos above.

While the book above is about the basic need to read, Used and Rare by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone brings us to the other end of the spectrum - that of the collector of vintage books. It is a delightful account of the writers' 'travels in the book world', of how they stumbled into book-collecting when Nancy was looking for a hard-cover edition of War and Peace to buy for Lawrence's birthday. At the end of the day, the Goldstones concluded, "It had been all too easy to catch the... 'First Edition Fever'. To think that a book had no value unless it was a pristine first edition of a book that everyone else wanted... The more we thought about it, the more we came back to our original view. You don't really need first editions at all. They are just affectations, excuses for dealers to run up the price on you, charge you a lot of money for something that doesn't read any better than any other edition."

To know how astronomically expensive a rare book can be, John James Audubon's The Birds of America, published in 1827, was sold at auction in January 2012 for US$7.9 million!