Book Review-The Bookseller’s Tale By Martin Latham

I love serendipity. I happened upon The Bookseller’s Tale by chance. At first the title did not elicit great interest, even though I fancied myself a bookstore junkie. The first chapter, Comfort Books, drew me into its seductive orbit.  By the time I finished reading all thirteen chapters, and I took my time enjoying the prose as well as marvel at all the gossipy details and informative anecdotes, I was fully and happily enthralled by the book. This is a book that I will keep around in my box of already read books to consult occasionally renew the feelings of adventure and history.

Martin Latham is an actual bookseller, he manages Waterstone’s Canterbury store.  He writes as someone who has the solid and unique knowledge of his trade, while also having the curiosity to assiduously dig deeply into the history of books, book selling, libraries, book sellers, the famous and infamous bookstores, book collections, book collectors, and everything that is peripherally related to books. Indeed, this could be a bookselling encyclopedia, except that the prose is much too good to be a sterile accounting of books and bookselling.

The salient chapters — at least to me — are the ones covering both ends of the spectrum of book ownership and the book trade. Starting with small: the book peddlers in history, the bouquinistes from the left bank of Paris, and the numerous stores from around the world. While ranging to the very large: the massive libraries, unimaginably diverse book collections, and the imaginative and resourceful people who built these collections book by book. Ultimately, it is the stories from each of the subjects that nourished my imagination and curiosity. We humans are, after all, suckers for a great story, and Latham has a backlog of great book stories that fits into each of the subjects of his chapters.

A chapter that I did not expect to draw my intense interest is the chapter on medieval marginalia. The stories of the marginalia of ancient books and the scholars who study marginalia to gauge reader’s feelings and thought as they read the material was surprisingly inspirational. It also selfishly assuaged my own guilt at making margin notes in my own books. I am not Pierre Fermat by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope that my notes may someday inspire others. Or not. Either way, I feel much better about my own scribblings in my books.

Even though books are a ubiquitous part of my life, I have never stopped to question how books came into being, how the book trade became what it is.  Latham gave me a history that elicited forehead pounding moments followed by my own excited: “So THAT is how that happened.” The things that I learned from just reading one book about books and booksellers is astounding.

I have, however, thought about independent booksellers around the world, their lot in society and the ebb and flow of their fortunes. I had assumed that there would always be used book stalls because there had always been used book stalls. It is a part of my DNA as my father was an inveterate used book peruser and buyer. He would bring me, when I was knee high to a bug, with him to rummage through the book stalls surrounding the universities and market stalls in Taipei searching for books, all kinds of books. These were my first happy memories of time spent with my father, so I have a very romantic notion of used books, tiny used book stalls, the smells of the pages permeating the air in those stalls, and everything goes along with the used book browsing experience. Latham nicely and comfortably recreated that experience on paper for me; he took me to places around the world that I had never been and placed me into an unknown happy place, firmly ensconced in a place that I had never been before. It is amazing what abundant memories, a vivid imagination, a well-honed curiosity,  and reading well crafted writing can take one on a sensory experience that seems so real.

When the large online purveyors of books started to dominate the book selling market, even though I was one of the first to dip my toes into the eCommerce bookseller’s sites, I became alarmed by the prospects of buying all my books from the nameless and faceless websites because I live in a city that does not have a large independent bookstore presence. The alarm became pangs of pain when I read of the failures of many of the brick-and-mortar independents; thankfully those pangs have become cautious optimism as I learned of the revival of the brick-and-mortar independents and I learned about people like James Daunt, who Latham refers to, who had stepped in as the CEO of Barnes and Nobles to hopefully revive the fortunes of one of my beloved independents: The Tattered Cover in Denver.

Which brings me to the last and probably my favorite chapter. It is aptly titled Bookshops. This is where Latham write his own narrative, how his fate and happenstance brought him to this point in his life and career, as well as the wisdom and lessons that he had accrued throughout his life as a bookseller. It was a scintillating read, and it made me optimistic about the independent bookstores, actually about all brick-and-mortar bookstores in general, as long as there are people like Latham who are operating these bookstores.

I had learned that there are two other books that delve into book selling and the bookseller calling. Since I read Latham’s book first, the other two books will need to be exceptional in order to meet the standards set by The Bookseller’s Tale.

This book made me very happy.

Book Review-Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China By Fuchsia Dunlop

I bought this book right around the time of its publication in 2008. I then schlepped it around in moving boxes as I moved over the years. This became one of the happy moments in my bibliophilic life when I rediscovered this book in one of those boxes in my basement and complimented myself on just how good my taste in potential reading material was sixteen years ago.

What had possessed me to first, buy this book; and second, to not read it for such a long time? The answer to the first question is that it was rare for Chinese cuisine, let alone Sichuan cuisine, to be the focus of an English language book. As I delved into reading the book, I realized that the book had multiple layers, which made my decision to buy it all the more fortuitous. The book interleaves a travelogue of China during the initial broader opening of the country to western visitors, a cultural exploration of China at that time coming from the point of view of a young English woman’s perspective, and a heart felt memoir of her own adventures in life in addition to the food lore, recipes, and recipes. The second question is harder to answer as I had come across the book amongst my boxes many times in the intervening years. I believe there is a certain hubris involved in my thought process to avoid diving wholeheartedly into the book. Hubris stemming from my pride in my Chinese cultural heritage intertwined with  my chauvinist feelings against learning about China and its food from a big-nose, or a foreign devil. There was a certain shame in that because even though I was culturally Chinese, I also spent most of my life being acculturated to the west, I had always felt inadequate about the depth and breadth of my understanding of my culture, particularly since I fancied myself a foodie. I had started reading about the Chinese diaspora throughout the world and their contributions in spreading and evolving the Chinese cuisine a few years ago, mainly Cheouk Kwan’s Have You Eaten Yet? (Kwan, 2023) (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/07/book-review-have-you-eaten-yet-by-cheuk.html).   I decided to jump in with both feet after reading Kwan’s book as his book showed the influence of Chinese cuisine on wherever the cuisine to have landed, as well as how those lands had influenced Chinese cuisine.

So here is my apology to Fuchsia Dunlop, for not having read this enjoyable and thoroughly captivating memoir, Chinese cuisine resource, travelogue, and personal exploration until now. I allowed my own prejudices to get in the way.

Even though the book’s layout is relatively simple, each chapter has multiple layers of nuances. First and foremost is the cultural accounting of Chinese cuisine, how it came to be the way it is, the folklore surrounding each region’s cuisine, and the reasons for each regions’ cuisine to be unique and differentiated from the other regions. As with all good anthropologists, Dunlop dove bravely into the China of the 1990’s, an exciting and turbulent time to be in China. Her being a woman and foreigner where foreign women were a rare sight made her travels around the country that much more impressive. Her forays into the countryside and places where she is often the first foreigner to visit in many years were not only bold but also be termed personally courageous.

The core of the book is her description of the food, but not only the description but how the food is prepared and how her experience in overcoming the language difference, the unfamiliar cooking techniques, utensils, and the massive mismatch of food traditions between her cultural background and China’s helped her telling the story. She tells a nuanced story of how she set her mind to overcome the differences and accomplish the feat of making the Chinese cuisine that she is documenting  approachable for the western reader.

As I followed her narrative, my previous hubris gave way to happy acceptance that she knew much more than I did and more importantly, that her knowledge of being Chinese is in many cases, far deeper than my own knowledge. Even though my cultural pride took a beating from this acceptance, I was happily learning about my cultural heritage and the food traditions that I had taken for granted as a part of my cultural identity.

As with any sensitive and sharp-eyed writer, she also observed the cultural changes that was happening at that time, as China began to open herself up to welcome the west, she identified the potential fractures within the well-preserved façade of China as a communist society versus what she knew was to come. Her observations of her Chinese friends in China also opened a window into what those friends were experiencing and feeling.

Finally, she bravely exposed her own vulnerabilities by examining her own feeling about being a brave eater in China and what that meant and how her intrepidness conflicted with her personal value systems and how she was able to deal with the juxtaposition of conflicting values.

Each chapter ends with a recipe culled from her notes that were collected during her travels and research. Even though I was quite familiar with most of these dishes, I still learned from them: about how to prepare the ingredients and how to actually make the dishes.

The overlaying of the different parts of Dunlop’s tales made the reading experience multifaceted and variegated, as the narrative kept me deeply interested.  My mind was kept busy while absorbing all the different layers and threads.

After having thoroughly enjoyed my trek into my own food culture through the eyes and voice of Fuchsia Dunlop, I can truthfully state that I have been happily educated by this English woman.

As a show of how much I enjoyed the book, I just started Fuchsia Dunlop latest book Invitation to a Banquet, which came out in 2023. I won’t be waiting 16 years to finish this book