Chapter 155: Street of Obscure Booksellers
Memory, no matter how precise, is indebted to concrete places that anchor it, places where moments now gone lived, places where all the old yarns spun there unwind.
Whenever I wish to remember an old writer I knew, there’s an address where a myriad of reminders outweigh his absence. It’s a secondhand bookshop called Rue des bouquinistes obscurs (Street of Obscure Booksellers), or RDBO for short, found on 16 rue Matheron, in downtown Aix-en-Provence. Those square meters and many pages shape the meaning of returning.
It was the old writer, of course, who first took me there a couple of decades ago. Going together was a tradition, which he referred to as “visiting the friend,” almost as an euphemism for a purveyor of addiction, which, in a sense, is precisely what books were to him. Still today, “the friend” is how I think of the man behind the counter – he does not know this – and never by his other name, Jean-Paul Marino..
Marino set up shop in 1987, with no vocation to recommend him to the trade. It was an unlikely decision at the crossroads of dismissal from a job as a programmer analyst by a “crafty boss” and a conversation with a knowledgeable friend and would-be-associate “highlighting the financial benefits” of secondhand bookselling. By the time RDBO opened, though, the association was over, leaving behind only the name of the store, an homage to the novel of postwar amnesia and loss by writer Patrick Modiano.
“I found myself alone in the store on my first day,” Marino says, “Not knowing much about books, literature, or business, and zero francs in the bank account, that was it. No vocation, but certainly an adventure. I don't remember the first book sold. I remember a very intense first day. The store was packed with people, looking around without really seeing me, exclaiming and, of course, buying books I'd been collecting for months.”
He cannot recall if the old writer stopped by at the time. “Maybe he was there, among the customers, but in those days I couldn't remember people's faces, attitudes, habits, literary tastes,” he says. “In any case, we hadn't yet established the friendly familiarity that characterized our relationship in the store.”
That familiarity holds true with books themselves. If growing up in their midst can make one feel at home with them, then finding a place books themselves call home gives the peculiar sensation of a room full of beloved heirlooms, rearranged in unexpected fashion.
I can’t say for certain if that’s what the old writer felt whenever he visited the bookshop; yet perusing the bookshelves now brings back the sight of him speaking to the books he found there. So it was when, by chance, he got his hand on the crime novels of a man he had loved dearly, novels that told of the survival in Auschwitz and the long-suppressed violence that found an outlet in his work. Or when inspecting another old dust jacket, he reminisced about a time and place of his youth, a time that has turned into a forgotten historical event.
On any given day, a volume of memoirs by a mentor could be cracked open to find a description of the writer as “The young man from Marseilles who presented himself to me as a classic misfit.” Stray volumes brought varied snorts, grunts, or guffaws such as this novel by the editor who once scorned him or that paperback by the lover who spurned him – “despite gifting her the idea for the title!” From one shelf to another lies a life made of words, whispering back long after it’s all said and done.
This all happened over many years, yet while a whole period faded the bookshop remained. To stay open for so long required that it survived even as a generation passed, continuing to maintain the thread of things read and shared. RDBO is now the last of its kind in the city after all the other secondhand booksellers gave up and even many glossy bookstores shuttered.
Part of the reason for its survival is the love put by Marino into the objects in his care. He will clean each one of them, as part of a routine that has meant working ten hours a day, six days a week, to collect and make books available. Then, there are the guiding principles he has upheld: “Above all, we didn't want any elitism when it came to reading. No negative reviews of books or authors. All readers and all reading styles were to be represented. All customers were to be considered on the same level. No scholarly stance on customers buying books considered by some to be sub-literature.”
The other reasons for the extinction of his peers were the usual market forces, the real estate pressure, and rental prices. And a tradition that found no buyers to follow in the owners footsteps. In this Marino has been fortunate to find a partner and heir in Antonin, his son. Though the latter worked with him for three years in his early twenties, he moved to another city and was to become a tattoo artist. Then came news that his father had lost the lease to his original shop in 2013.
“Although I had shunned books throughout my adolescence, I guess genetics got the better of me,” Antonin says. He decided to forego his plans in favor of a father-and-son partnership to work together in a new location, some fifty meters away. Maybe, he adds, in “addition to my father's dismay,” it was reading novelist Boris Vian's work that motivated him: “It was a revelation. I thought ‘okay, there are some really crazy books out there.’” Together, the pair was able to acquire a new premises, to ensure that the trade has a future.
It is in this last shop that I can best evoke Marino and the old writer together. Whenever an old book written by the old writer turned up among the flotsam, Marino would keep it to gift it on his next visit. So it was that the old writer, having long lost most of what he’d published, slowly got reacquainted with his own work. In his presence, Marino would talk him up to other shoppers, citing the long-disappeared prize he’d received, and the time he’d almost won another. It was the old writer’s eccentricities that had caught his attention.
“All men and women have faults, but some customers leave more of an impression on you than others”, he says. “And he, of course, was one of them. You watch the customers lingering in the store, you watch their gestures, you watch them move more or less unconsciously. And you listen to them talk, sometimes just a few words, about their lives, or a book, or current events. I don't remember his first visit, but we got to know each other pretty quickly. He liked to make a few jokes and puns and annoy customers at the checkout. But it was all in good spirit, and he always managed to make people around him laugh or smile. I must have known who he was pretty quickly, and I read one of his books, which I really enjoyed.”
Antonin, for his part, recalls another visit, when the old writer, nearing eighty, “discreetly asked if I could get my hands on some LSD. He wanted, and I quote, ‘to try it again,’ because ‘the last time he took it, he found himself half-naked with monsters chasing him around Paris for over six hours’, and ‘he didn't like it.’”
Though LSD was not to be found on the premises, vast arrays of treasures always were. There are the personal ones, the mementos whose names evoke both the memory of how we found them, the place and time they were read as well as the stories contained within the pages. For me, two books from RDBO were the seeds of later reporting trips. Then there are the real treasures for bibliophiles making their unlikely way into the shop. A letter from Jean-Paul Sartre, an inscription by Camus, and a book with the seal of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, brother to the “Sun King.”
For Marino Senior, the anecdote that sticks in his memory is “the story of a very thin, slightly damaged book that I was about to tear up and throw away, only to be intrigued by a stamp. It was Toulouse-Lautrec's signature stamp. Toulouse-Lautrec had held the book in his hand, stamped it, and added a small drawing to the illustrated front cover. It came from a large lot of interesting books that a bibliophile had given me before he died. His children wanted to throw it all away.”
A bookseller’s life is predicated on the ability to parse, salvage, and pass on, to see value in the disregarded and hope that someone else will do so too. At RDBO, more books seem to come in than go out. Most days there’s a constant trickle of book peddlers, neighbors carrying disappointing birthday gifts, or childhood favorites past the due date of nostalgia. Jean-Paul Marino looks on warily but continues to purchase them. He knows he is the last in town that will do so. “It would be a shame to stop taking them,” he says, though the cellar is getting full, and “a decision will have to be made.”
Antonin holds similar views on the profession. For him, it’s about “making books last, giving them a second life, facilitating access to reading.” And then there’s the duty to give advice. Hence his favorite question from clients: “My partner hasn't read a book in ten years, I'd like to get him/her to rediscover the taste for reading, do you have a title to recommend?”
In doing so, the booksellers maintain what writer Gérard Macé called “A community other than that of soil or meaning - the community of people who remember the same stories.”
That’s the community the old writer sought and found in RDBO when he’d forsaken most others. It was only the pandemic that made it impossible for him to ever return. Yet, at a time when books were considered “essential goods” in France, the booksellers at RDBO were true to the necessity of their trade, especially to one who could read at a rhythm of close to a book a day. They made hefty reading packages for him, curated with the unique knowledge derived from the hundreds – if not more – of purchases he had made from them. In so doing Jean-Paul Marino gave away dozens of books, sent off to break the writer’s isolation. “Money becomes an issue in a friendly relationship with a customer,” Marino says simply. “If the customer needs a favor from me, I try to oblige.”
Those books no longer travel to the old writer, nor does the stack of his old novels await his return behind “the friend’s” desk. No regular, however faithful, is eternal, and Marino notices these absences.
“I naturally get attached to these particular customers and their disappearance, sometimes their departure for another region, is always difficult. He used to come to the store regularly, and each time was a small event in itself. Now that he's gone, something strikes me…” It takes a moment for his voice to steady itself. “What more can I say, except that over the years, I've come to realize how rewarding my work is.”
In his last interview, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said his homeland was his children and “some moments, some streets, some faces or scenes or books that are inside me.” Where once visiting was a shared tradition, there is now an inheritance of always returning to The Street of Obscure Booksellers. On the first visit after the old writer’s death, one of his earliest books from the ‘70s had made its way to the shelves. Impractical as people who lived through books may be during their lifetime, you can, afterward, always rely on where to find them.
Likewise, with every return, Jean-Paul and Antonin are there, and the books that come and go are in their ongoing conversation. At one stopover or another, friends and lovers, rivals and mentors, places known and those imagined converge on the bookshelf, like a phrase that the bookseller constantly rearranges, or the stories of old, constantly retold, and therefore not forgotten.
* * *
If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.
Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.
* * *
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.