“A Man’s Guide to a Civilized Divorce” sits in the same short pile as the “Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie. In most bookstores, titles are arranged according to genre or theme, but this shop’s titles don’t have any apparent order. The shop’s owner says they are delivered by a firm that specializes in gathering and distributing books. The spines of some books are worn from repeated reading, others are still pristine, appearing to have never been opened. Up the street from Jin’s shop is an unkempt assemblage of English books.
Bookshop memories george orwell how to#
“I read this because I want to learn how to live a long time,” she said. With the predominance of western medicine in Korea, books on eastern methods no longer have a large audience and Jin’s book had been dropped off by another reader who no longer had any use for it. To pass the time on days with little customer traffic, Jin reads an illustrated oriental guide to healthy living. These numbers include self-help and language-learning books, so spending on books for recreational reading is even lower. A Statistics Korea report on household expenditures showed the average household spent 20,570 won (approximately $17) on books in 2011. Online booksellers operate with low overhead costs and can sell books cheaper than independent sellers like Jin and her contemporaries along the Cheonggye.īesides, reading is at a low in South Korea where the demands of employment and education leave little time for leisure reading. The availability of books and information online has led to a general drop in demand for the printed word. In explaining their decline, the area’s used booksellers all pointed to the Internet, a culprit familiar to anyone in intellectual property industries. Jin’s only customer for the day was a young fashion design student who said she came to the store to buy magazines with photos of the latest runway fashion shows in Europe. “Nothing sells particularly well anymore,” Jin said.
Other retailers focus on religious books or books for children. Many merchants in the area stay afloat by filling niches left vacant by major retailers: Jin specializes in fashion magazines that are bought by design students for their photos. Her husband inherited a bookshop from his father in the large southern port city of Busan, and they moved the operation next to the Cheonggye stream 13 years ago. Jin Hye-sook, 76, sits smiling and neatly made up in a bright, thin shop filled with glossy magazines. The merchants who remain still spend each day among stacks of books in a variety of languages, some of which will never be read again. Many stores closed around the time of the Cheonggye stream’s reconstruction in 2007 when rent in the area went up. At its peak, the street had well over 100 stores. But with the rise of large bookstores and online retailers, it now attracts very few customers. The area was once a popular spot for students looking for discount textbooks. Nowadays not many people hang around here for long, and even fewer spend money. The once busy street is lined with narrow shops that overflow with passed-on books and have barely enough room to stand comfortably in. That would be awkward on Seoul’s “Used Book Street,” a procession of cavernous stores along the Cheongye stream that flows through downtown Seoul. “These four volumes might be the perfect tonic for what ails our society.In his essay “Bookshop Memories,” George Orwell describes bookstores as “one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.”
This first volume of the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, spanning two decade of nonfiction writing and letters, contains some of the most remarkable writing of Orwell’s entire career. It was also during this period that Orwell wrote and published Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier (originally published for the Left Book Club), and the memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Witnessing two kinds of executions in Burma (“A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”) and firing salvos at British colonialism (“How a Nation is Exploited”), being down and out in Paris (“A Day in the Life of a Tramp”) and bookselling in Hampstead (“Bookshop Memories”), Orwell’s breadth of experience, compassion, and political insight make his early essays among his best. For our complete collection at $58.95 of the four-volume George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, click here.
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