Can bookshops survive the pandemic?

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Earlier this month, bestselling French author Alexandre Jardin made a rather Gallic gesture. He announced that he, along with a group of other writers, would pay the official fines imposed on bookshops that disregarded France’s lockdown regulations to remain open.

Jardin isn’t the only one raising his voice. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and former President Francois Hollande, among others, have also pleaded for bookshops to be exempt at this time. Without ignoring safety precautions, of course.

While this show of support is encouraging, it seems clear that the pandemic is just another body blow to independent bookshops the world over. Their fortunes were declining much before the spread of the virus.

In India over the years, Mumbai’s Lotus, Pune’s Manneys, and Delhi’s Fact & Fiction have all downed shutters, unable to compete with the deep discounts of online retailers as well as waning interest. More recently, Hyderabad’s Walden dropped the curtains, and the fate of Mumbai’s Wayward & Wise also looks precarious.

Some of those still surviving recently formed the Independent Bookshops Association of India to collectively raise issues and increase bargaining power. This is on the heels of the local bookshops in the US that came together to offer consumers an online platform as well as promote an anti-Amazon initiative. Independent bookshops in the UK followed suit, creating virtual shopfronts on a single site.

Such efforts are commendable, but we’re in danger of losing what makes physical bookshops special in the first place. As Henry Hitchings has written: “A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural events. A centre of dissent and radicalism. A place to disseminate notions too strange or explosive for mass circulation.”

One could claim that online platforms nowadays can perform the same functions. However, among the chief pleasures of browsing the shelves is serendipity – an aspect that Amazon’s recommendations can’t replicate. In Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s words: “A good bookshop is a place we go into looking for a book and come out of with one we didn’t know existed. That’s how the literary conversation gets widened and that’s how we push the frontiers of our experience, rebelling against its limits.”

Mark Forsyth makes the same point when he cheekily alludes to Donald Rumsfeld by saying that there are three kinds of books: “the ones you’ve read, the ones you know you haven’t read (like War and Peace), and the others, the books you don’t know you don’t know.” The best bookshops, therefore, are places where “you can find what you never knew you wanted, where your desires can be perpetually expanded.”

Further, though independent bookshops are subject to the same vagaries of profit and loss as any other business, they’re seen as less capitalistic because they promote literacy, community and taste. One aspect of this, for example, is their support for independent publishers.

In our neoliberal times, they’re an indispensable reminder that organisations don’t exist only to maximise value. For Jorge Carrión, they are businesses “on two simultaneous, inseparable levels: the economic and the symbolic, the sale of copies and the creation and destruction of reputations, the reaffirmation of dominant taste or the invention of a new one, stocks and credits.”

Some bookshops at least have the advantage of turning brick-and-mortar into as much of an attraction as their contents. A 1920s Dutch barge on London’s Regent’s Canal is home to a floating book collection called Words on Water. A fifteenth-century church in Zwolle is where you’ll find a bookshop called Waanders In de Broeren. And Venice’s Libreria Acqua Alta contends with periodic flooding by storing its titles inside bathtubs, waterproof bins, and even a full-size gondola.

Others make a virtue out of curation. At Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, every single book is signed by its author. And nestled in a corner of Tokyo’s Ginza is Morioka Shoten, which stocks multiple copies of just one title. The choice changes weekly, with book-inspired art exhibitions on the walls.

Of course, not every bookshop can go to such lengths. Some simply decide to appeal to their customers. When New York’s iconic Strand Bookstore recently revealed on social media that it was struggling to make ends meet, the response was gratifying. Lines stretched around the block as people patiently waited to enter, and the store’s website crashed for the first time ever due to an overwhelming number of online orders.

Similarly, Paris’s legendary Shakespeare and Company, which had seen a precipitous decline in sales since the lockdown, announced that it would be grateful for new website orders from those with the means and interest to do so. Here, too, the shop was inundated with orders and offers of support.

In this lies the hope of salvation for independent bookshops, if there is any to be found. The point is not for readers to wait until the situation is dire, but to recognise the worth of these literary outposts and visit as often as possible. Authors such as those in France could also offer support, and publications follow the example of the Times Literary Supplement, which is offering free advertising to independent bookstores during the Covid-19 crisis.

The answer, then, to whether bookshops can survive is rather simple: it depends upon us.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.