PARIS AND THE BOOKSHOP

ANATOMY OF AN OBSESSION.

ELISE SOLER IN THE DOORWAY OF HER SHOP.

No matter in what country I find myself, I will always,  with the instinct of a salmon swimming upstream , gravitate to a second-hand bookshop.

Even if the books are in a language I don’t understand or deal with subjects of little or no interest to me won’t impair that sense of homecoming.  Factors that govern one’s choice of, say, a café  – comfort, convenience, cleanliness – don’t apply. A bookshop isn’t an amenity. As with a church, the bibliophile enters to affirm, to worship.

Such, at least, had been my experience until I passed a few years in Los Angeles.  California can destroy one’s faith in anything with the speed of Alka Seltzer tablets dissolving in water.  Aside from a few up-market establishments, the surviving  second-hand bookstores  were staffed by drowsing drop-outs who couldn’t price a paperback without ringing the shop owner at home. Others spent twenty minutes researching a book on the internet, then demanded a dizzyingly high price.

“That’s what’s listed here,” they’d say truculently, pointing to the same title on a website.

“Yes,” I explained, “but that’s the first edition, and it has its dust-wrapper. Your copy  is the third impression, with no wrapper. Also, someone has underlined half of page 208 and written ‘How true!’ in the margin. And it looks as if they also used a rasher of bacon as a bookmark.”

   But this just confirmed their suspicion that I was out to cheat them. Anyone who knew so much had to be a crook. “If you don’t want it,” they said with a sullen glare, “you don’t have to buy it.” Paradoxically, this aroused one’s worst instincts, so that when an inattentive assistant misread “$50” as “$5,”  I didn’t correct the error, the devil in me murmuring “Never give a sucker an even break.”

Would French bookshops also be inhabited by the uninformed and the indifferent? The moment I stepped inside the shop opposite our apartment, I knew better.

The lady behind the table just inside the door said, “Bonjour,” and went back to penciling prices into a pile of paperbacks. During the half hour I spent there, dipping into the occasional book, simply soaking up the atmosphere, she never said a word, except as I left. Then she smiled and said “Bon journée,” the equivalent of “Have a good day.”

From eavesdropping on her chats with other customers, I learned that her name was Elise, that she was Spanish, but had lived in Paris for decades. As far as I could judge, her prices were fair and the books in good condition, with the rarest reserved for a neat but not overly fussy window display.  I even bought a few things; French books with interesting illustrations, and the occasional English title that had floated in like a piece of driftwood on the tide.

 Those visits helped me re-connect with a world that, since adolescence, has been more real than the universe of concrete, wood and stone, even of flesh and blood. “Back to your cabbage patch?” Marie-Dominique would joke as I left each morning, knowing I would check the window before heading to an appointment. And it wasn’t hard to visualise myself in overalls, hoe in hand, headed out to cultivate my literary crop.

It took a while to realise how lucky I was to live on rue de l’Odéon. This was a street of bookshops, with almost a dozen in its single block. Ghosts of others lingered, in particular that of the original Shakespeare and Company, where Sylvia Beach had played hostess to the world’s literati between the wars, and also published James Joyce’s Ulysses. Opposite had been La Maison des Amis des Livres, The House of Book Lovers, run by Beach’s companion Adrienne Monnier. They’d  shared an apartment in our building, entertaining Hemingway and Joyce and Pound and the bickering Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Beach and Monnier were long gone, as were their shops. Monnier’s had become a hairdressing salon, while the former premises of Shakespeare and Company were occupied at various times by a Chinese gift store, two or three different dress shops, and a jeweler, from whom I commissioned a couple of pieces for Marie Dominique as an excuse to hang out there. How could its  tiny two rooms have contained all that creativity?

It took me a while to understand that almost all Paris’s bookshops survived by becoming, as Sylvia had been, specialists.  Among those on our street, one sold only plays and books about theatre. Another concentrated on histories and surveys on France’s regions, with scholarly texts on genealogy and the architecture of remote chateaux.  A little shop in Montparnasse, truly limited in its focus,  sold only dictionaries. But every one of these stores always had a few clients. Why wait a week for a copy bought on line when a selection awaited you just a few Metro stops away?

One Odéon shop puzzled me for a while. Its window was filled with multiple editions of Jules Verne dating from the end of the 19th century,  often the same titles – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Mysterious Island, Around the World in Eighty Days – but all in superficially identical vividly coloured bindings of embossed cardboard.  Eventually someone explained that these bindings were unique to one publisher, Hetzel.  If you examined them in detail, each differed minutely  – sufficiently so, anyway, for the covers to be worth hundreds of dollars to a collector.

Privately, I scoffed at the Hetzel fanatics.  But all collectors are, to some extent, scorned by those who don’t share their enthusism. Stamp collectors never understand what numismatists see in coins, while comic-book collectors who, at the sight of an early Batman,  reach for their cheque books,  will scoff at the bibliophile who pays the same price for a first edition  T.S. Eliot.

That I was no more immune than anyone else was dramatised when, glancing one morning in the window of Elise’s shop,  I stopped short.        

Could it be? Surely not!  But sitting in the centre of the crowded display was what appeared to be the 1945 first edition from Obelisk Press of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.

Bolting through the door, I pointed to the window, began to frame in my mind a request in French – and was astonished when Elise dropped her pencil, slapped both hands, palms down, on the table, and gave a triumphant “Ha!”

Swiveling her chair, she removed the book from the window and placed it in my hands with a half-bow.

 “Je t’ai eu!”  she grinned – meaning,  roughly, “Gotcha!” 

My cabbage patch had produced a truffle. But, better still, someone who understand its importance. In a very real sense, I was home.