As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, (enough of the Super Spreader events already!) the Destination: Books business plan of venturing out into the world of popup books stalls remains on hold for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I must be content to put more books online at the Destination: Books Alibris Store and reading about other booksellers.
One story comes from the Liz Alderman of The New York Times, “Amid Rows of Classics Along the Seine, a Sad Ending in the Making”(November 8, 2020). Alderman writes sbout the Paris open air book sellers known as “les bouquinistes” which have been selling books and magazines along the left and right banks of the Seine River since the Middle Ages. The article gives an account of the approximately 230 books shops who are struggling during the Pandemic, because tourism has nosedived in the Eternal City along with curfews and quarantines that have limited local pedestrian traffic. (The color photographs accompanying the article will take you right there.)
I have not been to Paris to see these booksellers, but when I was in Ljubljana, Slovenia last year they had a few booksellers along the promenade overlooking the scenic Ljubljanica River (See photo above). It is not Paris, I guess, but it did feed my wishful romantic idyll of book selling on the streets.
One can be easily disabused of this notion by reading the popular Diary of a Bookseller (2018) by Shaun Bythell. The book is part memoir and part occupational handbook as Bythell, who owns a large used bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland gives daily account of the trials of being a bookseller, dealing with customers and maintaining an online inventory. To keep his stock up, Bythell must go look at estate sales and is often forced to wade through heavy boxes of discarded books in various states of decomposition in order to find a few gems to make it worth his while. He is crusty and candid about his customers and those who wish to sell him books. He reinforces the theme of one of the chapters from my own book (The Book Shopper: A Life in Review) about book shopping. In the essay, “Book Lovers Are Not Necessarily People Lovers.” I pontificate about the anti-social tendencies of book people, which includes librarians as well as book sellers.
One of the reasons Destination: Books exists is to find homes for what I believe are fine books in my own library that deserve a better fate than the shredder or to be sold for next to nothing. Also, I do not want my books end up in a dismal estate sale (as described by Bythell). This explains why after a year after opening Destination: Books I am sticking by the plan. Online selling only is just kind of transactional and I prefer the interaction to talking to people informally at popup book stall. Bythell (and other bookseller-friends) have disabused any notion of wanting to own a bookstore or rent a permanent site. Not only its financially precarious, but just dealing with customers day after day could be an irritating.
So, in the meantime here at Destination: Books I stay the course of hoping for a vaccine and an end to the pandemic in 2021 and then to reopen on the book popup on some localized version of the Seine here in Atlanta.
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