Shakespeare and Company and Films

Mourir auprès de toi is a short stop animation film by Spike Jonze, featuring the felt book cover characters created by Olympia Le Tan.

First of all I have to excuse myself for not posting anything on the blog in the last couple of months. My life has become a little less hectic now so I should be able to write here more often. For the time being, I want to share a short film I found via the The New Yorker‘s Book Bench. The film is related to the blog in more than one way. Directed by Spike Jonze, it was created in collaboration with Olympia Le-Tan, who made the book-clutches I mentioned a few months back. The film, called Mourir auprès de toi (To Die By Your Side) is also set in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, in Paris, which I’ve also blogged about. It features Le-Tan’s stitched book covers coming to life at night after the bookshop has closed, and an unlikely love story between the characters on two of the covers… Watch it here! 

P.S. A few weeks ago, G. came across this perfume ad for Lancôme’s impossibly named Trésor Midnight Rose, featuring Emma Watson (aka Hermione Granger). The entire video is awful, by the way, but we’re pretty sure the bookshop at the beginning, where Watson meets her beau, buys a copy of a fictitious book called Midnight Rose, and loses her hat, is also Shakespeare and Company. 

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Enter here for groovy gifts and bargain prices. But where are the good books?

When I was a boy, I would come up to my mom once in a while and declare: “I have nothing to read!” This didn’t happen very often, since, although I was a keen reader, I didn’t devour books. So when it did happen it usually meant (lucky me!) a trip to the bookstore that weekend. Even back then, I liked books not only for the words, for the actual reading experience; I also liked books because they were beautiful objects to be collected and cherished. From a very young age I remember organizing my books, looking at them fondly on the shelves, counting them and measuring how much space they needed and how much additional space I would need to make to fit more books. A trip to the bookstore meant not only something new to read, it meant more books on the shelves, which was something I really looked forward to, and still do today. 

I used to like any and every bookstore I entered, without discrimination. As long as there were books, I was happy. Eventually I started working in a bookstore myself — a well-designed, bright new concept store — and all of that changed. Now that I understand more clearly how the business of book selling works (and more importantly now that my literary tastes have become better defined) it’s very difficult for me to appreciate a visit to a bookstore unless it’s a very very good one — and preferably a bookshop. I can no longer stand large-surface, American-style chains. I’ve grown allergic to their emphasis on quantity as opposed to quality, their focus on bestsellers and recommendations by famous people, their poor selection of literary fiction, the aggressive promotions meant to make you spend your money on books as opposed to read and enjoy them, and of course all that space reserved for non-book product like candles, cards, and cushions.

Now this is more like it. The London Review Bookshop: small, bright, and with a great selection of title to explore.

I understand, of course, why these large format stores have turned to these sales strategies: in the age of internet and e-books (and the low prices only they can offer), bookstores have had to adapt and rely on heavy sellers and non-book product to attract customers and boost their sales. Worse, I know a lot of customers want just that, to read the same things and buy pretty things. Still, it breaks my heart to see bookstores willingly move away from what their principal purpose should be: disseminate good reading. Yet, even among the store closures announced every other week, I feel that independent bookshops are starting to crop up everywhere with renewed vigor. They offer an altogether different experience: not  an appealing, trendy magazine lifestyle; but books for readers, with a much-necessary emphasis on the titles themselves, in all their variety and originality. Bookshops are there to allow customers to browse at leisure, regardless of whether they’ll find something or not. Booksellers are there to read and think and try to get people to know about (not necessarily buy) books that are really important to them. I have found very few bookshops that meet this description, but the search continues.

In order to understand the nature and role of bookshops, and their constant evolution, I recommend Lewis Buzbee’s charming The Yellow Lighted Bookshop. It’s a short, bright read — half memoir, half history — which will guide you through the evolution of bookshops from Roman stalls to American mega-stores, and the readers and booksellers that have shaped them. Buzbee — who has been writer, publisher sales rep, and book seller at different stages in his life — is not only a book lover, but also a passionate book purchaser. Anyone who likes owning books will immediately connect with his description of walking into a bookshop and looking for something — a book, although you don’t know which one yet, which will satisfy some deep urge. Ironically, The Yellow Lighted Bookshop satisfied just that urge when I bought it in Shakespeare & Company, which I wrote about last week.

"I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the evening...like a light in the midst of the darkness." — Vincent van Vogh (That's just a quote in the book, the illustration on the cover isn't by him, obviously.)

I’d be curious to know if anyone knows of a really good bookshops? I’m soon going to write about my favourite one in England, I’d love to know about more great shops out there!

The Travelling Library

The ultimate travelling library: "Archive II", designed by David Garcia, which allows you to walk away with half a ton of books!

The most important part of preparing any trip — be it a weekend at the cottage or a longer stay abroad — is most certainly packing your bags. However, I’ve found that one specific aspect of packing often takes up a lot more of my thoughts and time than it should: deciding what books I’m going to bring along with me. I always take along at least two books, no matter how long the trip, to make sure I have a backup if I finish or get tired of the first one. If travelling involves flying, I find that complicates the decision-making; I always want to bring something really long I’ve been meaning to get to for a while because I tell myself that a flight will give me several solid hours with no interruptions and nothing better to do, although of course I should bring something lighter and really engaging because airplanes are so uncomfortable. I always end up bringing loads of books with me on planes and read only very little — I tend to switch to the little screen rather quickly.

Of course, reading is enjoyable at home, but there’s a very vivid satisfaction in sitting in a park or a café abroad and doing something so usual, so normal. It’s a good way to escape the eery feeling of displacement that travelling gives me, and slip into that very moment, enter the texture of life in the place where I am a stranger. I have very fond memories of visiting a lot of truly fascinating places in Ireland when I went backpacking there for a month in 2008, but I also remember — with equal fondness — reading DeNiro’s Game on a bench in the gardens of Saint-Patrick’s Cathedral, or José Saramago’s The Cave in a hostel common room on a rainy day.

Reading Dostoyevsky with a nice, cold beer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I’ve found it’s really important not to bring something too engrossing to read on a trip, however, or else all I want to do is read and skip all the sightseeing and experiences the place has to offer. On another backpacking trip two years ago, in Turkey and the Balkans, I brought One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, Voyage jusqu’au bout de la nuit, and other stuff I’d wanted to read for a long time. These proved perfect: good to escape elsewhere in long, hot bus rides, but not exactly thrillers. My girlfriend and I learned this truth the hard way when she brought The Shadow of the Wind on the same trip; she mostly wanted to stay by the hotel pool for the (very short) time it took her to read it. I ended up bringing way too many books on that particular trip myself, some of which I didn’t even get around to reading (Le Rouge et le noir, if you really want to know, which still stares at me accusingly from my shelf, as yet unread). All those books did serve a purpose when my backpack was searched in the night train on the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. “Books! Books! BOOKS!” cried the customs officer as she shuffled through my backpack, pulling out volume after volume. She sighed rather desperately and gave up her search. If ever you need to pass anything illegal through Eastern-European borders, now you know how.

My "to read" pile.

I know what you’re thinking: an e-reader would solve that problem, and I could carry an entire library with me in the volume of a single, paperback novella. But the thing is, the love I have for ink and paper books still outweighs the advantages of those clever little machines. I like how I can annotate my books, I like turning the bottom corner of pages I want to read to G., and I like being able to measure how much I have left to read by the space between my thumb and index. I also have a tendency to buy books abroad, where they become mementos of the places I visit. Downloading them abroad just wouldn’t be the same. For example, I cherish my Everyman edition of Ulysses all the more because I bought it in Dublin, from the James Joyce Center. Similarly, I needed to get something — anything — from Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, the first time I went there a few months ago (I finally settled on a book about bookstores, The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore, by Lewis Buzbee, which I felt was appropriate). I didn’t see many decent books in English in the Balkans, although I did find a nice edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in English, with an introduction in Bulgarian, in a street market in Sofia. My foreign book buying activities have gotten a little problematic in the last year, since I’ve been studying abroad in England and, although I brought a decent number of books along with me, I’ve also been buying lots of books here, because I like to surround myself with books — it gives me comfort and makes wherever I live feel like home. The problem is, come June, I need to bring all these books with me back to Montreal.

The nature of residence rooms means bookshelves also holds crockery and wine glasses. It adds to the charm, I suppose.

The core of my library-away-from-home is made up of the books I brought with me (The Measure of Paris, by Stephen Scobie, Possession by A. S. Byatt, and others), then there are books I needed to buy for school (Henry James and Shakespeare figure prominently here), and finally all the books I bought here: The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Al Alvarez’s Risky Business, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita bought at Mr B’s Book Emporium, in Bath), Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (bought in the London Review bookstore), and (too) many others. Some of these I’ve read, some I haven’t. In my defense, I’ve promised to stop buying books while I’m here — if only because of the logistical problem of bringing them back home with me — at least until I’ve read all of those I have.

Meanwhile, I have another problem; it’s Easter vacation and I’m leaving for a short trip to Italy this week… which books, I wonder, will get the chance to visit Florence with me?