WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?

REFLECTIONS ON RETAIL.

            A new art gallery has just opened across the road, in a shop which, for as long as I’ve lived on rue de l’Odéon, sold only cast-iron Chinese teapots. Shelves of these knobbly objects filled the always dusty front window but nobody ever seemed to enter or leave, let alone buy one, which fuelled speculation that the shop was a front for some inscrutable Asian activity - conceivably a fumerie or opium den. It never occurred to us to enter and ask, and now it’s too late.            

Adrienne Monnier in front of La Maison des Amis des Livres.

The gallery is just the latest development in a process of gentrification – or, rather, the substitution of one kind of transformation for another. Given the proximity of the Sorbonne and the Odéon theatre, this was always going to be a book street. Half the shops sold them and their writers lived in rented rooms above. Tom Paine wrote The Rights of Man a few doors down the street. Sylvia Beach ran the original Shakespeare and Company bookshop at No.12 and published Ulysses, while, at No. 10, Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in 1923 printed three hundred copies of a flimsy booklet called Three Stories and Ten Poems by a promising young writer named Ernest Hemingway. Most were given away but if you want one today there’s a nice copy going for US$55,000.

            With rents in the area these days running well over $1500 a month, neither Paine nor McAlmon could afford the space they used to occupy. As for the former Shakespeare and Company, it’s a dress shop, while La Maison des Amis des Livres, the establishment of Sylvia Beach’s companion, Adrienne Monnier, houses a hairdresser. A few surviving bookshops sell high-priced rarities.  Of the rest, one of the oldest and longest established,  Le Coupe Papier,  specializing in theatre, seems likely to go the way of another that, until recently, sold only books about the French regions. It will shortly reopen as an Italian traiteur, providing pre-cooked lasagne and Chicken Cacciatore for weary wage slaves. Another has become an outlet for French caviar. Its clientele is, if possible, more meagre than than that of the teapot shop, though perhaps they’re just too ashamed to be seen entering any place with so ostentatiously over-priced a stock, and do their buying at the back door, sneaking away with 500g of Beluga wrapped in newspaper.

One can see the reasoning behind selling food: few people read much any more, but they love to eat. This doesn’t explain, however, why a shop dealing in antique dolls just opened, and another that stocks only hand-blown glass.  Did their proprietors, having spent years collecting and restoring dolls or blowing bottles in their basements, splurge their retirement money on that little shop they’ve longed all their lives to own? Similar motives inspire home cooks to open restaurants, the sure route to a ruined appetite and an even more blighted bank balance. Traditionally, artists have no sense of business but going into the doll, glass or restaurant trade looks as ill-advised  as…well, composing a hip-hop musical on the life of Alexander Hamilton.

My father in his shop with one of the “tools of his trade”, a cash register, late nineteen-forties.

My father was a baker and pastrycook, so I grew up behind or over shops. The experience should have instilled a sense of commercial responsibility, the rigor represented by that cri de coeur of all retailers “Who’s minding the store?” Instead it made me determined to work at something that needed no premises, required no upkeep, insulated me from the company of landlords, and from having to hire, fire or otherwise deal with staff.

            …yet I rise each morning before dawn, as my father did, he to start kneading the day’s bread, me to put words to the page. The necessities of my trade – books, pens, paper - surround me, as flour and fat and sugar did him. No staff, of course – unless, that is, you count agents and editors and those who supply my raw material; incentive and ideas.  

            And there have been times, passing a shop for rent, that I’ve paused to shade my eyes and peer through the dusty glass at the empty space, the floor littered with  yellowed junk mail, and seen myself there, behind a desk, enclosed by walls of first editions……waiting for customers… …minding the store.