Who Guards the Guards #2

I recently got home from a four-week vacation of sorts in Europe. For the most part, it was a fairly economical trip. I slept in Youth Hostels and ate packaged rice twice a day like any self-respecting college student would. However, there was one respect in which I was not particularly frugal, and that was in buying books. I purchased nine books over twenty-eight days, including one I picked up in the Dublin Airport in preparation for a three-hour layover and seven-hour plane ride. I even splurged on a firsthand hardcover, which not only cost me a pretty penny but also added another eight ounces to my backpack. (The book was Bill Bryson's At Home, by the way, and I heartily recommend it. If you want the copy I bought, you might still be able to find it at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, where I finally parted with it and a few other books I picked up along the way in order to purchase yet more reading material.)


Because I was constantly searching for good reads, I spent a fair amount of time in bookstores during my trip. Given the cities that were on my itinerary-London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, and Tours, to name a few-I reasonably expected beforehand to find good local bookstores along the way. Unfortunately, when pressed to locate a bookstore, shop owners or strangers on the street would almost always direct me to the nearest Waterstone's or WHSmith, chain bookstores that were completely interchangeable save for a couple bookcases featuring authors connected to the given area and local history. Except for the aforementioned Shakespeare and Co in Paris, a few small shops in London's Charing Cross and Soho neighborhoods, and a scattering of rural establishments across northwest England, I didn't actually seek out any particularly special bookstores, generally finding myself in the kinds of stores found in any international airport or large American City, not places that I really would have had to travel 3000 miles to see.



Every time I found myself considering a 3 for 2 deal at Waterstone's (it was just so tempting) I felt a twinge of guilt. No matter how hard I tried to put the idea out of my mind, I kept thinking that I had come this far to shop at a place this dull, and I never felt more guilty then when I actually enjoyed myself or found something I really liked. I'm sort of a sucker for pop sociology and economics, and generally the first thing one sees when one enters a Waterstone's is three or four bookcases of newly released pop sociology and economics, so it became really difficult not to get at least a little guilty pleasure out of those experiences.


I've been to a fair number of bookstores over the years, and I'm quick enough that I can generally tell whether I'll like a bookstore within the first few seconds of entering it. I knew I was going to like the Haunted the first time I came in (fortunately enough, since I was there to ask for a job) and I knew I was going to like the old Northside Book Market when I came in. I got the right vibe off of Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and I got the same feeling from that one bookstore in Chicago I can't remember the name of that my sister hates because it's run by hipsters. And there are certain bookstores (not naming any names, and not referring to any stores in Iowa City) that simply don't feel right. I couldn't tell you what exactly I'm looking for, because if I had to put together a list of my top ten bookstores around the world, they would probably have just about nothing in common. But there are certain stores that I simply like for whatever reason, and certain stores that don't cut it for me.



Now this all probably strikes you as incredibly cliche and trite, and that may be a fair assessment. But I did get to thinking about what the role of the bookstore is in a given context. I used to subscribe to the view, which I now think is much too simplistic, that bookstores exist solely to provide books. But the more I thought about bookstores like that, the less satisfied I was with that theory. The great independent bookstores, whether famous establishments or hidden gems, might not contain books one couldn't find in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere (they do exist, unfortunately) but there was definitely something that made them more enjoyable.

What occurred to me after thinking about this for a while and trying to write on it a couple times-and after all that buildup you might have expected something less obvious or more profound-was that bookstores are very much defined by the context in which they're found. In other words, bookstores (well, most of them) fit in to the surrounding cities, neighborhoods, and cultures. And a few special ones become an integral part of the culture around them. The chain shops didn't give me that good feeling I get from bookstores I know I'm going to like, because they did not really belong. They were simply places where one could find books.


Consider Shakespeare and Co. Founded in the 1950s by an American expatriate, S & C certainly owes some of its fame to its location-Kilometer Zero, Paris, that is to say about one hundred yards from Notre Dame Cathedral and the Ile de la Cite. The bookstore has defined itself by the motto "Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise," and for decades has provided food and shelter to writers struggling to make ends meet in return for a little help around the shop. Shakespeare and Co isn't so much a part of English-speaking culture in the Latin Quarter as a physical manifestation thereof.



A few weeks later I saw a much less subtle attempt to become part of the culture on Charring Cross Road in London. For the first time, and possibly the last, I found myself across the street from a combination bookstore (top two floors) and licensed sex shop (basement). Different neighborhoods have different demands, and this was Soho after all.