Finding furniture for the bookshop

And why I adore secondhand shops in Italy

I shouldn’t really be buying furniture yet for my bookshop in Italy. As of the moment, The Wardrobe Bookshop resides almost entirely in my mind.

It’s true that the physical space of the bookshop technically exists at a specific and real location on the planet. However, even I have to acknowledge that it doesn’t look much like a bookshop yet. But it has good bones! And a very solid metal front door.

Walk through that door and turn to the left, and you’ll find yourself in a sort of short hallway, at the end of which is this inspiring view.

At least, I find it inspiring. I hope you do too? All it takes is a sprinkle of fairy dust to see that this arch is the entrance to a magical future bookshop.

I have it on the good authority of my husband that the unsightly metal framing isn’t structural, and can go. So I’m thinking of putting in a stained-glass window up at the top of the entrance there, or some other kind of decorative glass that will let in light. What do you think?

By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered an expert in renovations or shop design. But my idea for the perfect way of embellishing this doorway is to buy an antique wardrobe, remove the back, and let it become the entrance to the bookshop.

Is not The Wardrobe Bookshop simply begging for such an entrance?

I have a lot of ideas like this. And sometimes it’s hard for me to distinguish between what works well in my head and what is actually practical in the world. For instance, how easy would it be to even find such a wardrobe? And how prohibitive the cost if I did? These are the kinds of questions that are hard to answer from a different country.

So during our September trip to Narni, I was delighted when we decided to take a peek in an Italian secondhand shop near our new house. And of course, I became immediately and hopelessly distracted by all manner of treasures and their potential uses.

We weren’t actually in the market for bookshop furniture yet. Rather, we needed basic things like dishes, pots and pans, maybe a light fixture for the kitchen to replace this monstrosity in the shape of an ugly wooden flower, which is so oversized the kitchen cabinets send it reeling every time you open them.

I certainly did not imagine needing the delightful little piece of furniture pictured below. But sometimes it’s love at first sight, and you wonder where this delicious chair has been hiding all your life.

I’m talking about the telephone chair on the right, not the little upholstered stool next to it, which I also love. Bless his heart, my husband agreed to buying these frivolities (essentials!!) even though we had no sofa or dining table yet. For most of our time in Italy in September, these two pieces were the only furniture (at least furniture meant for sitting on) that we possessed. Hence our breakfast laid out on the checkered cloth.

I had never even heard of a telephone chair before I saw this one in the secondhand shop in Terni, Italy. Fortunately, it was labeled as such, or I truly never would have guessed its function. There’s a lot of inexplicable furniture floating around Italian thrift stores and antique markets. Sometimes it takes quite some googling to figure out what purpose something used to serve.

Apparently these chairs with a little tabletop attached came into usage after the invention of the telephone in the nineteenth century, and reached peak popularity between 1930 and 1960. They’re also known as “gossip benches,” because what else would one be doing on a telephone in a stylish foyer in the early to mid-twentieth century?

Based on the style (Downton Abbey over Mad Men) mine looks like it’s toward the older end of that range; but it’s also true that Italians love a good old-fashioned look, so it could well be younger. It’s in quite good shape, though it tends in the direction of delicate over sturdy. My husband was a bit nervous about sitting in it himself. It seems more designed for someone of my height and build than his.

You’d think this was a one-of-a-kind find, wouldn’t you? That’s certainly what I thought when I scooped it up and claimed it, half expecting to be forced to fight off a gang of other shoppers. Strangely (at least to me), the tag indicated it had languished in the shop for months. And for every month an item remains unbought, the price goes down. This delightful little chair had been at the lowest price on the tag since June.

I still don’t get why someone didn’t snatch it up. Or at least I didn’t get it at the time. After we visited a couple of other secondhand shops and saw a similar piece in each one, I realised there might be more vintage telephone chairs floating around Italy than I had imagined.

Evidence (if we needed more) that the world is full of wonders, and all we have to do is open our eyes. And buy the chair, of course. Which we did, and carried it straight out to the car.

Fortunately, rather than our usual tiny rental car perfect for squeezing into Italian-sized parking spaces, we’d rented one slightly bigger. Because we were already premeditating the idea of buying secondhand furniture and hauling it home ourselves.

The size of the car was only the first—and simplest—hurdle. I should point out here that there is no shortcut to moving furniture into the “historic centre” of an Italian hill-town. This is Via del Monte in Narni, the street where I optimistically say I live, although what I mean is that I visit as often as I can. The street where someday you’ll be able to find The Wardrobe. In fact, the (future) bookshop is just out of sight beyond that scenic arch.

I use “street” here in the very loosest sense. This is a walking street, although an enterprising Vespa (or even conceivably a tiny car driven by an intrepid Italian) could possibly go up it. A furniture van decidedly could not. Nor could a rental car driven by Americans, even if they had furniture from the secondhand shop to carry.

And carry the furniture we did, me the upholstered stool and my husband the telephone chair. First we carried them from the car to the parking lot elevator. The public parking for Narni is below the city, which one then reaches either by means of several flights of stairs or by one of a few elevators that come out in different quarters of the city.

It’s a very clever system, since it results in plenty of parking for both locals and tourists, while keeping the noise and smell and general modern unsightliness of cars to an absolute minimum in the Medieval centre. But it means a decent little hike every time you go anywhere by car.

I’m convinced, by the way, that this very inconvenience is one factor in the longevity of Italians, not to mention their continuing mobility as they age. So many of the bugs in Italian life are actually features if you look at them from another angle. My forty-something-year-old back loves the endless stairs in Narni. Though my knees, it’s true, are not so sure.

After we emerged from the elevator at city level, we carried the furniture right through Narni’s main square. I felt uncomfortably conspicuous, but we’d been through that main square with so many things that week already (a mop and bucket, wet clothes washed at our AirBnB because we didn’t have a washing machine yet, obscene amounts of garbage, etc.) that nobody blinked an eye.

Once through the main square, we carried our furniture up many, many more picturesque steps than pictured in the photo.

The bookshop, alas, is not yet a hospitable place for furniture. And we had nothing to sit on yet upstairs. So the choice of where to put the telephone chair for the moment was an easy one. All we had left to navigate was this final, steeper staircase to the front door.

OK, and then the final, FINAL staircase inside the house. This is not me, but the secondhand shop delivery person, carrying up a later, much heavier piece of furniture (kitchen cabinet) we wisely determined we could not manage on our own.

You get the idea.

It was while staring at my beautiful new telephone chair in my otherwise empty living room that I hit suddenly on the reason I so desperately needed a telephone chair in the first place.

Can you guess?? Let’s see.

A few days later, we were wandering through a nearby antique shop, which held many of the same sorts of items as the secondhand shop, but at higher prices. They had their own telephone chair, of course. Slightly inferior to mine, to which I had in the intervening two days conceived a fierce loyalty. And also a good deal more expensive.

But here’s the clincher: several aisles over, they also had a phone! A delectable old-fashioned wooden telephone, complete with that handle you turn frantically as you yell into empty static when there’s an emergency in a period drama. I’m not super clear on what that handle is supposed to do, but this one was still turnable.

Reader, I was sorely tempted! Despite the fact that we were at an actual antique store rather than a secondhand shop, so the thing cost a whopping €140, more than I’d spent on the telephone chair itself.

We went home without the telephone. My husband relieved, me with many a piteous backward glance. He pointed out that if we returned in a week or a month having changed our minds, odds were very good it would still be there. Which I had to admit was likely true.

Imagine my delight when we went back to the original secondhand shop where we’d bought the chair, and I discovered something I’d unaccountably missed the first several times we were there. I’m going to say I missed it on account of always feeling rushed. No matter how many times we go back, I never seem to have enough of the uncounted aeons of time I’d love to spend in this shop.

You’re not going to believe this, but yes.

Yes!!!

I’ll just pause for a moment so you can take it in.

I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect telephone into being if I’d tried, even with my certifiably overdramatic imagination. This telephone weighs an actual ton. It appears to be made mostly of brass and quartz. And the old-timey twisted cloth cord ends in a strange three-pronged plug that actually fits a couple of outdated outlets I’ve been idly wondering about in my Italian house.

(Why didn’t I try plugging it in to see if it would somehow still make the static noise??? Why? This is just the sort of thing that would open up an idiosyncratic portal in time. But now we’ll just have to imagine it. This is the torture of being three countries away most of the time. So many things I forgot to do, so many camera angles I forgot to take, so many weird little nooks I forgot to measure.)

Time portals aside, this telephone chair setup would be amazing enough on its own, just to look at and sit in and perhaps browse through a book you’ve found while perusing The Wardrobe’s shelves. But I have bigger plans! I’m going to rig up the telephone so that when you lift the receiver it starts reciting T.S. Eliot poetry.

Doesn’t that seem like this telephone’s destiny?

Why no, I have zero idea how to even start researching what kinds of electrical hijinks this operation will require. I’m guessing it could maybe start with an old ipod? What’s inside these antique telephones anyway? Could you fit a tiny speaker in the receiver? Is bluetooth the answer? Do I need to modify that amazing cord?

So many questions.

If you have answers, ideas or any clue where to start, I am ALL EARS.