A new kind of shopping in which you can enjoy stylish architecture and snazzy interior design as you buy stuff, or down cups of coffee as you read, is staving off the demise of bookshops
The streets around Chunxi Road in downtown Chengdu help make up one of the wealthiest and swankiest areas you will find in Southwest China. In the hustle and bustle of the sprawling low-rise Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li shopping center, exquisitely dressed young women pose for photos that, with the glass-clad Gucci store or the pastel blue walls of a Tiffany store as their glamorous backdrop, will no doubt shortly adorn the pages of social media or websites. It is quite likely that the car that roars by now and again will be a Ferrari or a Porsche.
In short, everything here seems to be designed to charm the eye — but you can almost guarantee that it will also tax your pocket.
Just across from the Gucci shop, on the basement floor of the SinoOcean Taikoo Li shopping complex, the cup of fruit juice that had set you back 40 yuan on the other side of Shamao Street will cost as little as 10 yuan. So here at least Chengdu lives up to its reputation for its comfortable weather, delicious food and affordability.
At 10 pm, when the commercial areas of most of China’s biggest cities empty out as people make their way home, it seems that Chengdu’s citizens simply begin another shift of their relaxed lives. On Shamao Street between 100 meters and 200 meters away from the luxury shops, long lines, made up predominantly of young people, form in front of tea shops or shops selling local delicacies such as roasted pigs’ feet or spicy dumplings.
Fashion, food and luxuries are not the only attractions here. Among the others are the 1,700-year old Daci Temple, where the Buddhist monk, traveler and translator Xuan Zang was ordained in 622 AD, and Fang Suo Commune on the basement level of Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li offers a shopping experience that is out of the ordinary in what the website architecturaldigest.com listed last December as among the 17 most beautiful bookstores in the world.
Walking into Fang Suo Commune is like entering a cavernous subterranean world that is all but in-visible from the outside. Once you are through the small, dark entrance you are struck by the airy space, which covers 5,500 square meters and is eight meters high, and a welllit, clean and cozy atmosphere that offers both intimate tranquility and a buzz of excitement.
In fact coming here is like being with Harry Potter on his first visit to Diagon Valley. The place is a repository not only for a huge range of books, but also goods such as clothing, tea pots, cups, accessories, jigsaws, aromatherapy oils and other cultural and creative products such as bags printed with quotes from well-known authors and notebooks. You can peruse these as pleasant background music and the hum of the assembled masses waft into your ears.
Tucked in the corners of the store are at least two cafes, which could be categorized as regular and large, where shoppers can grab a coffee and relax, read, meet friends, work or study. At one point a shop assistant gently reminds a reader that books can be taken to the cafes only after having been paid for. A cup of apple and kiwifruit juice costs 42 yuan, and a cup of coffee about 50 yuan.
Holding a book in their hands, some readers sit on the steps that lead to the lounge bridges, where shelves of books occupy whole walls. For others the urge to have their photos taken in one of the world’s most beautiful bookstores is irresistible.
There are about 300,000 books, or about 100,000 titles, in the store, and the owners say book sales account for half the store’s revenue, but if it is bestsellers you are looking for you will not find them in the most conspicuous spots of the store.
Books are organized according to theme, knowledge system and lines of thought: literature, arts, cookbooks, decoration and lifestyle, and so on.
At the entrance are albums of paintings by masters such as PierreAuguste Renoir and Leonardo da Vinci. Walking into the store, you can see the newly published Chinese edition of the novel the Hag-Seed, by the Canadian Margaret Atwood, and the Chinese edition of Das Buch der verbrannten Buecher, about
Nazis burning books in Hitler’s Germany, by Volker Weidermann.
The shop’s multipurpose function is alluded to in the name Fang Suo Commune. The idea is of a third space, an alternative to home and the workplace, a haven that is different to a public library or a shopping mall where people can read, drink, date, hang out with friends, attend a lecture or an exhibition, buy interesting things, or just wander about the place.
In short, it is a lifestyle, Fang Suo Commune being just one of the answers to why people still need bookstores and what kinds of bookstores they need in an age when buying books online is more convenient and cheaper.
In early September bookstore owners from 10 countries and regions gathered in Fang Suo Commune to discuss how to run a bookstore. They were from Librairie Avant-Garde, of Nanjing; Tales on Moon Lane Children’s Bookshop, London; Livraria Cultura, Sao Paolo, Brazil; La Feltrinelli, Milan; Actes Sud, Arles, France; Do You Read Me?!, Berlin; The Last Bookstore, Los Angeles; JXJ Books, Taipei; Avid Reader, Brisbane, Australia; and B & B, Tokyo.
For them, building beautiful and creative bookstores is a strategy aimed at helping them survive and a social responsibility that will bring changes in neighborhoods and cities, because books are not merely goods, they say, and generally there is little or no money to be made in selling them, especially given the influence of e-commerce.
A presentation and question and answer session given by the owner of B&B, Shintaro Uchinuma, an audience laughing, and that reaction extended to his explanation of his shop’s name, which he said stands for Book and Beer. For 500 yen (30 yuan; $4,50) you get a cup of beer, and the right to read any book in the 100 sq m shop.
The aim is to tap into a large target market, given the propensity of many Japanese for a beer after work and the fact that the shop is close to a railway station. In the store, Uchinuma and its co-founder, Koichiro Shima, also sell bookshelves and furniture, including tables and chairs. In fact any piece of furniture you see in the shop is for sale.
Another way of increasing takings is to invite writers to give lectures and charge for admission.
In addition, the shop’s owners sell food and English training, make television programs about books and publish their own books.
“But we don’t want to run a bar, a furniture store or a space specifically for hosting events,” Uchinuma says. “The shop is very small. To sell the best books we are trying to survive in other ways so we can help people find interesting books. They come to our store to read and drink beer.”
Qian Xiaohua, founder of Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, which also deserves to be called one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, says it is very important for a book to keep the spirit of a time.
“A bookstore is as equally important as clean air, sufficient sunshine and green plants for a city. The accumulation of knowledge drives the progress of human beings, and books are our best food.
“So we, as bookstore proprietors, should have the awareness and bear the social responsibility to create good bookstores and sell the best books.”
Qian now has 13 bookstores in Nanjing and other cities. While the Nanjing store bears the name Librairie Avant-Garde, the other 12 have their own names, and Qian says a 14th store will open in Nanjing this year.
Creativity is one important factor in Qian’s success. He never replicates what he is doing, all the other 12 shops having their own distinct styles, not just architecturally, but also in book categories, he says.
“A good bookstore is the fruit of all book lovers’ imagination.”
Some of the bookstores are devoted to poetry, which Qian says is his favorite literary genre.
In fact in Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, which opened 21 years ago, the best spot in the shop is reserved for poetry. Qian has strict dictates on what he will sell, reserved to humanities such as arts and literature, and in the shop you will find no bestsellers, children’s books or textbooks.
“Each book on our shelves represents the history of writers’ souls from a certain country, so that you can see the country’s soul from that book,” he says.
He predicts that mainstream bookstores will eventually be a combination of cafe and bookstore, a model similar to that of Starbucks. However, he says, there will be a lot of bestsellers in these bookstores, which “will be detrimental to the nation’s soul being nourished”.
Librairie Avant-Garde is located in what was a 4,000 sq m underground parking lot and has couch seating for 300 people. To some extent it has become a kind of public place, some customers popping in for just a few minutes, perhaps to buy a book, and others who can spend the whole day there reading.
Katherine Orphan, manager of The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, says it also opens its doors to various kinds of readers, including the homeless and the down and out.
Bookshops should not reject these people, she says, and Last Bookstore allows them to buy books at $1 apiece. She hopes that for those who are homeless or who have little money, the shop can be a haven.
The Last Bookstore started as a second-hand bookstore in 2009, was on architecturaldigest.com’s list of world’s most beautiful bookstores last year, and every year attracts thousands of visitors from around the world.
