Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Booksellers rank high on my personal list of superheroes: the best of them have supported and nurtured generations of readers and authors. Many, like the legendary Lucknow bookseller Ram Advani (whose beloved bookshop housed his superb material on old teak shelves and counted the late Jawaharlal Nehru and the academic Rosie Llewellyn-Jones among its grateful customers until its closure in 2016), have also functioned as parallel archives and libraries.
Along with torrential downpours, this monsoon season has brought a bumper crop of books, both fiction and nonfiction, about booksellers and bookshops. I sought solace in this time-tested subgenre as the rains lashed my Delhi home, ripping apart the roof but leaving our cherished bookshelves undamaged.
Some of these titles are already cult favorites among younger readers, such as the one by Japanese author Satoshi Yagisawa. Days at Morisaki Bookstore, published in Eric Ozawa’s English translation in 2023 and followed last month by More days at Morisaki bookstoreSet in a secondhand bookstore in Tokyo’s Jimbocho district, this pair of novels offers a comforting dose of optimism, with a young girl named Takako finding a new community and balm for a broken heart when she helps her uncle run his bookstore.
This summer, Evan Friss, professor of urban history at James Madison University in Virginia, published The bookstorea brilliant overview of American bookselling from the 18th century to the present day. American author James Patterson co-edited the book with Matt Eversmann. The secret lives of booksellers and librariansa volume of memories from people with knowledge in the world of books.
In his introduction, Patterson pays tribute to booksellers and librarians. “They take care of the confused, the fearful, the frustrated, and help them have a sharper vision, a keener ear, and a greater sensitivity to justice. What they do is crucial to this country, especially at this moment.” But the book doesn’t shy away from the less romantic side of bookselling.
“People always say they would love to open a bookshop or work in one because they have this romantic idea of sitting in a big, overstuffed chair drinking tea and talking about Dickens,” writes Susan Kehoe, owner of Explore books in Delaware. But some of his work, Kehoe explains, is mundane: unclogging toilets, sweeping sand from the beach and dealing with a dozen other small disasters. Still, he adds, “knowing that we can literally change someone’s life is great. And it never gets old.”
Several recent novels romanticize bookstores as transformative spaces and booksellers as pioneers who can change the lives of others. In Nanako Hanada’s lightly fictionalized memoir The woman from the bookstoreIn this book, translated by Catriona Anderson and published in June, the author is going through a thirty-five-year crisis in her marriage and career. She joins a social networking site called PerfectStrangers, which offers to connect strangers for a thirty-minute chat. Her profile makes an unusual offer: “I am the manager of a very unusual bookstore. I have access to a huge database of over ten thousand books. I will recommend one that is perfect for you.”
As they talk, their world expands. They discover that recommending books to strangers is a delicate process, “like telling the future or designing a custom cocktail.” Their true story ends happily: Hanada used his royalties to open a bookstore of his own called Kani Books in Tokyo.
We know that when a community embraces its local booksellers, the bonds are strengthened both ways. Alba Donati Diary from a Tuscan bookstore (2023), the memoir of a former poet and editor who opens a bookstore in Lucignana, an Italian town of just 180 inhabitants, is a real gem. In 2020, a year after the shop opened in a small hut, it suffered an unexpected fire. Donati’s dream seems to be over; but in an instant, the townspeople come together to help with the rescue and rebuilding. “The bookstore was… a catalyst for this group of people to become a true community,” she writes.
When India gained independence in 1947, it suffered large-scale social upheaval as a result of Partition. Refugees from what is now Pakistan flocked to Delhi; among them was the family of Balraj Bahri Malhotra. He and his family started out in refugee camps and restarted their lives with hard work, using borrowed funds to set up a small stationery shop in 1953 that eventually grew into a Bahrisons — one of the most famous bookstores in Delhi.
The municipal bookseller Anuj Bahri, the current owner and son of Balraj Bahri, and the historian and novelist Aanchal Malhotra write in their slim memoirs Bahrisons: CChronicle of a bookstore (The latest edition was published this year): “Over time, the original customers became parents, then grandparents, and sometimes even great-grandparents, who furnished their family home libraries with books they purchased from the small Khan Market bookstore.” This is the core of the business; perhaps that is why the bookstore continues to inspire so many 21st-century dreams, fictional and real.
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Book Cafeteria and subscribe to our podcast Life and art wherever you listen