Bookshops

Starred review from August 21, 2017
Spanish novelist and travel writer Carrión’s English-language debut explores the place of bookshops (and books) in Western intellectual and consumer history. He weaves together an investigation of the different social functions of bookshops and libraries, a travelogue of bookshops he has visited, and a philosophical inquiry into the role of literature in the world. For Carrión, contemporary readers find in bookshops “the remains of cultural gods that have replaced the religious sort.” He is alive to the contradictions inherent in reading and book collecting, activities that are simultaneously consumerist and spiritual. The idea of books and bookshops as sites of resistance to totalitarianism is discussed but not blindly romanticized; he notes that Hitler was a bestselling writer and Mao an erudite reader. Discussing destination bookshops, including Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the oldest bookshops in the world, and several that claim to be the biggest, Carrión explores the fine lines between pilgrimage destination, touristy gimmick, and decent bookshop. This is the perfect book for those who feel compelled to visit every bookstore they see. Agent: Nicole Witt, Mertin Agency.

August 1, 2017
A literate mappa mundi to bookstores.This is the first of Spanish author Carrion's books to be translated into English. He writes that "every bookshop is a condensed version of the world," this book like a "cartography of a bookshop." Entering this Borges-ian labyrinth of books, readers will encounter bookshops as "archaeological sites or junk shops," police censorship, the lives and works of booksellers, reading as "obsession and madness," and the "bookshop as the world." This is no mere travel guide but rather a philosophical, reflective, wide-ranging inquiry into the world of books. Carrion began the first of his many voyages in 1998 at a bookshop in Guatemala City. He reminds us that the "oldest bookshop in the world" is in Lisbon, not far from his home in Barcelona. Along this journey, readers are guided by Montaigne and Diderot epigraphs as well as wisdom from a vast array of writers, including Goethe, Mallarme, and Benjamin. The bookseller is a "critic and cultural activist," and since ancient Rome, bookshops have been "spaces for establishing contact." Carrion is excellent discussing Paris' most famous shops, American Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company, where Joyce's Ulysses was born, and Adrienne Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres. Both also functioned as lending libraries, art galleries, hotels, and cultural centers. Carrion sees bookshops as political bastions and recounts The Satanic Verses uproar, Hitler as bestselling author, Mao Zedong's bookshop/publishing house, and book burnings. His trip across America includes visits to New York City's Gotham Book Mart and the Strand, Denver's Tattered Cover, Portland's Powells, and San Francisco's City Lights. The author also discusses the impact of the brick-and-mortar chains and Amazon, the "supreme Virtual Bookshop," as well as the sad story of a 100-year-old Barcelona bookshop that became a McDonald's. An insightful, educational, and erudite paean to bookshops.

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