bookshops

R.I.P. Anglo American Book (Rome, 1953-2025)

Photo by Laura Weinstein

Anglo American Book, Rome’s oldest English-language bookshop – founded in 1953 by Dino Donati and run by the Donati family for 70 years – is shuttering for good this week. This is a profoundly sad piece of news, though not unexpected. Skyrocketing rents have buried yet another temple of culture.

I worked at the AAB for five years, from 2005 to 2011. Like the Gotham Book Mart before it, it was a unique place where I met many unforgettable people. One friendship I struck up at the AAB was with Alexander Booth. He would come in often, and we always got to talking about literature, music and Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s. (We had both gone to VCU, a year or so apart, and ended up expats in Rome.) Alex and I were (and very much still are) both poets and translators, and remain close friends to this day despite living in different countries. Alexander published a lively translation of the poetry of Sandro Penna a couple of years ago. I remember seeing it in the storefront window at AAB, not long before they moved to the windowless upstairs location removed from street traffic. Without the Anglo American, would we ever have met?

I remember the evening when we had just closed up and were turning off the lights, and two ghostly faces appeared at the door. It was poet Moira Egan and her husband, the translator Damiano Abeni. I had to tell them to come back during opening hours. We became friends over time, though, and I interviewed them for The American in 2009. When my first collection Unburial came out, Moira was gracious enough to partner with me for the book launch at AAB (photo above).

AAB storefront window – December 7, 2019

Here are the recordings of Moira and me reading on 12/7/2019 at the AAB:

Moira:

Marc:

___

It was also there that I met Mike Stocks, poet and translator of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Mike walked in one day with a handful of copies of his newly published translation. Of course, I had to interview him. We went out for pints near Piazza Trilussa while I recorded our conversation on my wife’s handheld recording device. (This was pre-smartphone.) Mike revealed to me his secrets for approaching the great Romanesco poet, notoriously forbidding both for his 19th century Roman dialect and for the volume of his output: over 2000 sonnets (the critical edition of his poems runs over 5000 pages.) That meeting with Mike influenced my approach to translating Mario dell’Arco, convincing me that one didn’t need to have academic chops in order to get the job done. It was an important lesson, and if he hadn’t fallen off the grid I’d buy him a beer and thank him.

Piazza Trilussa, Trastevere (Rome)

The list could go on, as lists do. Bookstores have played an outsized role in my adult life. It has been dawning on me for some time that I have lived at the edge of a disappearing era, a time when independent bookshops were places people went in their free time to meet other people, not unlike a neighborhood pub. They were like secular houses of worship. Relationships could be forged there. Lives could be altered. You were in the realm of curiosity, always bracing for the unexpected thrill of discovering a new book. Those born too late may never know this way of being in the world.

I spent many years working in bookshops on two continents: Strand, Gotham Book Mart, Anglo American Book. It was never a swank job with a good paycheck, but the summation of that experience was for me the equivalent of a university degree. I’ll always remember the names of people who worked at those NY bookshops before me: Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell. It seemed like it might almost be preparation for a future in the arts. Maybe it was.

It seems apropos to round out this reminiscence with a poem about another of my favorite gone bookstores, Chop Suey Books in Richmond. It was my go-to bookshop whenever I was in town visiting the old haunts in Careytown. The poem was published in the Hollins Critic, a quirky little literary journal from Virginia which – but of course – ceased publication last year. It seems like our losses are neverending. All we have is art to push back against the rising tides of oblivion.

from The Hollins Critic, Oct. 2022

On books, bookshops and Kindle babies

Edward Gorey, television junkie

I’m reminded, now more than ever, of something Arthur Miller (yes, that Arthur Miller) told me as we sat together in his kitchen on 68th St. in Manhattan. “One day in the future” — this was around 1999 or 2000 — “someone will have an idea of genius. They’ll decide to put books in a store and allow people to come in and browse them. It’ll be called a ‘bookstore.'”

You’re probably asking yourself what I was doing in Arthur Miller’s kitchen. My then-employer, Gotham Book Mart, had sent me to get five or six large boxes of rare and not-so-rare books signed by the renowned playwright. One of the ways the sinking bookshop stayed afloat was by milking its proximity to famous authors. Signed books sold like hotcakes. They were a boon in a dying market, and if they couldn’t come in to sign and schmooze, we went to them.

The most remarkable such trip was to Provincetown, Massachusetts. We drove up from New York to spend the weekend with the famously hermetic illustrator Edward Gorey at his mansion on Cape Cod. Overgrown weeds had ambushed the house on all sides. Thorn bushes crowded the walkway up to the front door. Inside, the house reeked of cat urine.

Everywhere there were books: on sagging shelves, piled on top of tables, in stacks on the floor, cluttering up every conceivable surface. Any square inch not occupied by books was occupied by an equally endless collection of trinkets: I recall a rich assortment of colored glass bottles of every size along the many windowsills of Gorey’s great home. From the stairwell the theme song of “Cheers” resounded down through the sitting room. In contrast to the spooky, ethereal persona he projected through his books, the man was a television junkie.

Both Miller and Gorey have since died, and everywhere there are signs that bookstores are about to follow them to the grave. Of course, people have been talking about the death of God for a very long time, and the old bugger is still with us. So I’m not going to get all sentimental just yet. Bookstores — and, let’s just say it, books — may yet survive the online onslaught.

There was a time when I proudly stated I’d never buy a book from Amazon. A vacuous statement, and easy to say by someone who at the time lived in the vicinity of countless English-language bookstores. This was the same mouth that had proclaimed at various points in its history that it would never a) eat onions; b) kiss girls; c) speak a language other than English. The contradictory adage “Never say never” never seemed more appropriate.

Now that I’m living in a place with no access to anything in English but bestsellers — and even those must be hunted down — Amazon has begun to makes sense. It’s all so perfect. You go online (if you’re like me, you’re there already), find the book you want, click and wait for it to arrive at your door. All you need is an Internet connection and a mailing address. So why does clicking “Add to cart” make me feel so unethical?

I’ll chalk it up to having spent most of my working life in bookstores. I’ve breathed in so much of their dust that they’re part of me. The weirdo who comes wandering in off the street with Ziploc Baggies full of pennies and complaining about his rabbi will never infiltrate the virtual walls of online commerce (which is probably a good thing.) But neither will the Arthur Millers and Edward Goreys. And neither will all those odd and interesting people I’ve met over the years who simply happened to ask the right question to the right clerk at the right moment. Some of them are — yes, thanks to the Internet — still my friends.

Sure, you can have fun writing reviews and posting them to Amazon. There are all kinds of interactive ways of sharing your passion for books online, too. For me, however, they don’t quite measure up to the serendipitous experience of stumbling upon a book that changes you forever.

My personal library is like a large-scale model of the mental world I’ve inhabited for the past 20 or so years. I pride myself on being able to remember where and when I got just about every book in my collection. Downloading an e-book to my Kindle app is exhilarating for it’s speed and simplicity, but I doubt it will leave me with much after I’ve read and digested the text. Books have always been about more than just content, haven’t they?

Maybe I lack the visionary imagination of a Steve Jobs, but books are simple things in the end. They come in all shapes and sizes and they can take abuse. I’ll never forget the first time I actually saw a Kindle. A woman came into the bookshop, pulled the broken device from her purse and explained that she needed to buy back the books she’d lost when it slipped out of her hand onto the pavement. She was crestfallen.

As I muse on the demise of bookstores and the much-prophesied disappearance of the “dead-tree book” I watch my daughter flip the pages of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” She’s enjoying the colorful pictures of fruit and the feel of the cardboard in her hands. She pokes her fingers through the tiny holes. She’s just as taken in by the physical properties of this book as she is by the content — more, actually, as she can’t yet read.

What, I wonder, would her first experience with books be if she were to fondle a Kindle “Baby” reading device?