When Quixote’s Cove, the bookshop this magazine is affiliated with, was established, it always wanted to wear more than a retailer’s garb. It drew its inspiration from the romanticization of ideas that felt as though they were in demand and had retail space. Strangely similar but proportionately as big as the US is to Nepal, the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle is perhaps closer to D’Artagnan than Don Quixote.
Established over 40 years ago, Elliott Bay is an institution within Seattle’s cultural landscape. It is one of the biggest independent bookshops in the city and certainly the most active. The bookshop organizes almost an event a day, sometimes even two a day. It partners with a wide range of public and private institutes, including the Seattle Public Library and the Town Hall.
The bookshop space is gorgeous. It is located in the Capitol Hill area of the city, where it moved three years ago. The aesthetics of the older store have been retained, with wooden pine floors and shelves that give the bookshop an inviting warmth. The sprawling floor and mezzanine give browsers ample space to roam around, sit and read. The shift was financially driven, but their Capitol Hill property developer, who was back then trying to populate his block, understood the inherent value the bookshop brought to the neighbourhood. “This place was dead before the bookshop moved in, now everyone wants a piece of the pie, the whole neighbourhood is suddenly chic and fancy,” relates a Seattlite.
The shop has its own cafe and an event space that can accommodate over 100 people. It produces its own newsletter, organizes book clubs and has a staff body of over 30 book lovers, whose book recommendations are scrawled on small paper slips on the racks. Specially highlighted are Seattle’s own authors, reflective of how the city takes pride in its creative and innovative culture.
Seattle is also home to the online sensation and biggest threat to publishing and the book business in the world – Amazon.com. The massive online retailer originally started as a bookselling platform but quickly morphed into the consumer behemoth it is today. It continues to sell books at massive discounts, so cheap that the company actually makes a loss on book sales. This has hit bookshops big and small; the collapse of book retail chain Borders combined with the rise of e-books prompted many in American publishing and media to write obituaries for the paper book, with the music industry and the newspaper cited as precedents.
Lunch with five Seattle bookshop owners quickly dispelled these dire predictions. The industry was going through major changes, they concurred, but the book itself was nowhere close to dying. The newest bookshop owner told us how on opening day, her shelves emptied out so fast that she had to borrow stock for the next day from Elliott Bay.
The smaller bookshops survive because they know their customers and are invested in their community. They are communal spaces for people. “The good bookshops, the ones that survived amazon, are the ones that knew their books, knew their customers, and were invested in their community,” shared a Penguin Books representative who joined the lunch. “The industry is changing and not all for the better,” he continued, “back in the day, I used to meet the bookshop people, talk books and we’d make an informed selection based on the bookshop. This is not always the case now, it’s like we have willingly forgotten how interconnected the whole literary ecosystem is. Pushing books on to a bookshop doesn’t work – if they can’t sell it we’re both in trouble.”
Later that day, at an event organized at the bookshop, Asian American novelist and writer Gish Jen introduced her new book, Tiger Writing, and talked about how Elliott Bay has featured in each of her book tours. As she recalled her past visits, one could get a sense of how important a space the bookshop has been. Jen talked about the individualistic versus the interdependent forces that drive us as people. She suggested that Western civilization emphasized the individualistic while Eastern civilizations were biased towards the interdependent. As a result, the Novel as individual experience holds more sway in the West than what it means as a statement of relationships in the East. The bookshop perhaps treads both worlds, working both along highly individualized tastes while emphasizing collective interdependence for our communities.
Kathmandu used to be a city of interdependence – its massive public festivals and its willingness to celebrate every occasion created a strong sense of community. But it is also a city that has grown so rapidly that these structures of community could never cope or adjust. The old city is lost to but a few now. Rapidly emerging are new forms of communal structure born from a deeper set of our individual needs – the bookshop is one of them. However, intellectualism or its pursuit have never featured as one of the city’s communal hubs; religion and politics (and a strange blend of the two) have always dominated. In keeping true to tradition, it is not surprising that more religious institutions like Christian churches and Hindu gurus along with political cronyism have come to fill his communal need. Perhaps the bookshop too shall have its day.
