What inspired me to open a bookshop in Italy

A bookshop in Paris, my childhood library, a hint of fantasy and disaster

On some unconscious level, I think I’ve always wanted to open a bookshop. Haven’t you? Doesn’t everyone?

Unaccountably, my husband insists that no, not everyone does; he claims even to have personal experience with this. And I guess I’ll have to take him at his word.

There may also be others who live their lives untroubled by visions of labyrinthine shelves, leather covers, marbled endpapers, the inimitable smell of books. But for those of us in thrall to the enchantment of the written word, nothing is quite so alluring as the idea of spending whole days reading behind an antique desk, presiding over a small kingdom of books.

In this fantasy, my main job is to read, with occasional moments of rearranging the bookshelves according to my latest fancy, or dispensing recommendations to customers who hang on my every word. But mostly what draws me is the way it looks and feels, a hypothetical space somewhere between Jose Luis Borges’ Library of Babel and Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop.

I’m well aware, by the way, that this is a vastly idealized image of the actual day-to-day of being a bookseller. And I’ll certainly cross that bridge when I come to it, along with the gargantuan task of starting a business in Italy. But we’re talking about inspiration here. The stuff of dreams.

Shakespeare and Company

I believe I owe this ideal of a bookshop at least partially to my first trip to Paris in 2017. In the course of less than a week, I visited Shakespeare and Company not once, not twice, but three times. It was on the third and final visit that I dragged my husband along with me, and he snapped this photo.

What is it about this bookshop? The location, of course, must play a role. What more romantic spot than the banks of the Seine, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame?

There’s also the whiff of literary history; Sylvia Beach herself christened Shakespeare and Company the “spiritual successor” of her own eponymous bookshop, which hosted the likes of Baldwin, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Pound, published Joyce’s Ulysses when every other publisher considered it too obscene, and served as a gathering place for the “lost generation” of Anglophone writers in 1930s Paris.

But it’s not just the history. The physical space is perfect too. If there were a Platonic form of bookshops it would be Shakespeare and Company, with its worn floors, crooked doorways, painted quotations on the stairs.

Every room seems composed entirely of odd nooks, secret corners, remnants of decades past. It feels like a world unto itself, a thing that has grown organically from stories and dreams and ink-stained nights.

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

Long before I dreamed of owning a bookshop, I was collecting books. I inherited this obsession from my mother, who homeschooled us and would take all five children to the library each week.

We each had a sturdy plastic crate that could fit more or less the twenty-five books the library allowed you to check out at once. We had our own library cards, and I often maxed out mine.

Our house was full of other books too. My mother taught me to shop for books at thrift stores and library book sales. She filled the house with bookshelves, and those shelves with everything from Shakespeare to my dad’s old medical textbooks.

And yes, I was one of those kids who read the dictionary and the encyclopedia for fun. It was an old set of World Book encyclopedias from the 1960s I think, with mostly black and white illustrations and a few colored plates.

We also had a huge, crumbling volume of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which I would pore over for hours, writing my favorites on index cards I kept in a little blue recipe box with horse stickers on the top. Pretty sure I’ve still got that box somewhere.

Everything you need to know about my psyche (and our relationship) can be expressed in the fact that a few years ago, my husband bought me my very own (ex-library) copy of the 125th anniversary edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and it was the most thoughtful gift I could imagine.

One thing I love about this compendium is that it contains not only excerpts of published works, but also things like private letters, Parliamentary speeches, jokes people are said to have made at dinner parties. I remember reading it as a teenager and having a strong sense that it gave me access to the essential humanity of people long dead—not only their writings, but quirks, personalities, moments from a life.

Of course it was always heavily biased toward the type of white, male, privileged people who have tended to end up in history books. But I think it was that same hunger for intimacy with the lives of humans from the past that led me to write my master’s thesis using cookbooks as sources. What better way to glimpse the everyday lives of women than through the lens of the kitchens to which they have too often been confined?

So much of such work involves reading between the lines, extrapolating from little clues, wondering how much we’ve gotten right, and how much of the past remains forever hidden from us.

I have a melancholic temperament, I guess. I think a lot about the things we’ve lost along the way. I used to work at an archive, which would seem like the ideal job for a person with my psychological makeup. But I was dismayed to find that a large part of the work of archivists and librarians involves sifting through to decide what deserves to be kept forever, and throwing the rest away.

Left to my own devices, I keep everything. Books most of all. They’re also a thing I compulsively collect. When my children were little, I homeschooled them too, and like my mother before me, I collected books. I’d go to the library book sale on the last day when books were $3 a bag, and fill two or three bags worth.

They weren’t just any books, mind you. These were books I felt were useful, or at least delicious to have on hand. Old cloth-bound classics. Novels I’d checked out from the library and loved. Children’s encyclopedias, guides to crafts I might take up, anything I might ever regret not purchasing.

Originally I thought I was doing all this collecting because eventually I’d be living abroad, and it would be hard to get ahold of English-language books. That was true to some degree twenty years ago. Back then, if you can believe it, I had a friend who took the extreme step of cutting the bindings off all her books and scanning them in preparation for a move abroad.

I didn’t go that far, though I did eventually break down and buy a Kindle. But it didn’t stop me from collecting books: real, physical books. Fifteen years ago we moved to Florence, Italy with two toddlers and only suitcases, and one of those suitcases was at least half full of books.

Station Eleven

When we moved to Amsterdam nine years ago, I left most of my books in storage in the United States. It was a big deal when a year later we bought our first house and shipped everything we owned across the Atlantic Ocean, including over a dozen boxes of my books.

Since then, I continue to collect, even though these days I do a lot of my reading on ebooks borrowed with my American library card. There’s something about ebooks that feels, well, intangible. One day I started thinking, what if something happened, and the internet went down? What if the only knowledge and literature I had access to was contained in my home library?

The world changes so fast these days. Isn’t it strange, for instance, that 8-track cassettes or floppy disks from a few decades ago are unreadable without specialized equipment, yet you can pick up a book that’s centuries old and read it with just your eyes? So I kept collecting books, even though they were filling up my little Amsterdam apartment.

It wasn’t until I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (for the first time, long before the pandemic) that I realized this was my way of preparing for the Apocalypse. If the worst happened—whatever disaster spelled the end of civilization—my home library could very well end up safeguarding the only books left in the world.

Delusions of grandeur, I know. I can’t explain why I imagined my own books uniquely likely to survive a global cataclysm. I think it was largely a response to my constant simmering unease about climate change, war, political instability—all the things that trouble us in our times.

Looking around at my full bookshelves, I felt safe. Somehow, knowing I had at my fingertips more books than I could finish in a lifetime gave me a feeling of control, a sense that even if the world fell apart, I had everything I needed right here. And not only control, but meaning. ”Because,” as Mandel puts it, “survival is insufficient.”

The risk of a world without books—however unlikely—was too awful to contemplate. Keeping it from happening was something I could take steps toward right now, with every book I welcomed home. And in the worst case scenario, who knew? Maybe others would need my library too. I could be a guardian of things that truly matter, a bulwark against the dark.

Which was what brought me to the idea of a bookshop. Because why wait for the ultimate catastrophe? Why not be a bookish bulwark now? “The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another,” Paul Lynch tells us in Prophet Song; “The end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

We live in trying times, times that make us seek refuge for our souls even if we are lucky enough not to need it for our bodies. When will we need books more than we do now? Or places we can go where books are cherished, where these small objects that bring us together and teach us empathy for each other find their rightful place and importance in the world?

It’s a grand vision for a little bookshop, but it’s a dream I’m not afraid to dream. Books are the most powerful things I know. We read and find ourselves in the mind of another human. We read and learn to see the world in a different way. We read and know we are not alone.

And when we walk in a certain bookshop—imagine yourself there now, wherever that bookshop is for you—there’s a thing that makes us want to catch our breath.

I think it’s our sense that the space feels sacred, like a temple to everything we know a book can be. And that’s the kind of space I want to make. I knew it as soon as I opened that weathered metal door in the stone wall beneath my new house in Italy to find an unfinished cellar with a soaring ceiling and a sense of home.

Meet me there when the world ends, or perhaps even before.