Thursday, September 07, 2006
junk bookstore, kl
Went to ‘junk bookstore’ in kl today . haven’t been here for a long while but the lady remembers me well and still quite sore for selling me a whole stack of back issues of ‘the new yorker’ with what she considered an excessive discount several years ago…
this is the kind of bookstore I like… small, personal and quite specialized and they have stacks of dusty old second hand books faded into sepia colored pages emitting that lovely old book smell and hardly touched by anybody for years. They even have some volumes of Apollo art magazines from 1960s and I may buy these one of these days if she lowers the price a bit…they have been sitting there for years without anybody giving a second glance…skoobs at jalan othman is similar in ambience and crappiness and another one of my favorites …
and yes, we used to have rows of bookstalls mostly owned by Indian booksellers along mcAlister road in Penang in the 1980s, selling mainly second hand fictions imported from India and I guess some coming from those Aussie soldiers stationed in butterworth…but they are now gone of course… but penang city council made what I considered one of the stupidest decisions imaginable… sometimes in early 90s they decided to rid of this street of the rows of book stalls and housed the booksellers in the second floor of the dirty chowrastra market among the cloth merchants and shops selling cheap clothing , hand bags shoes and other leather goods and trinkets…and now we have durian sellers, Chinese hawkers selling yong tau foo and the like instead of book stalls along mcalister road…what stupidity, what tragedy…
If I have one complain about the junk bookstore , it’s the price… even the old and crappy paperbacks are sold at a rather high price and I fear that one day they will be pushed out of business by the new secondhand upstarts like PAYLESS… but the lady don’t feel payless would be any threat for ‘they mostly stock American books’ as she put it…and perhaps that’s quite true… for junk bookstore have much better selections of good fictions , a mix of british, american , european & latin american translations and others… I ended buying a couple of books (1) Penguin Classics “Fourteen Byzantine Rulers” an 11th century book by Micheal Psellus and (2) “Belle du Seigneur” by albert cohen. A penguin 20th century classic series and winner of 1996 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation ( from French to English)
I don’t know anything about this jewish writer but what caught my attention was the blurb ….set in Geneva in the 1930s, albert cohen’s endlessly inventive satire of middle-class manners and ambitions revolves around Solal, a man of remarkable gifts and disappointed ideals….
And the distinctive lempicka’s painting on the cover is very attractive… if you go to ho chi minh city… you’ll see many art studios selling copies of famous and not so famous paintings…and lempickas are some of the most copied paintings on sales….i wonder who buy these…I did buy some copies but I steer away from the really well known impressionists and all those van goghs… I chose 17th century dutch/Flemish still lifes and vanitas…and I have one copy of chardin…
this is the kind of bookstore I like… small, personal and quite specialized and they have stacks of dusty old second hand books faded into sepia colored pages emitting that lovely old book smell and hardly touched by anybody for years. They even have some volumes of Apollo art magazines from 1960s and I may buy these one of these days if she lowers the price a bit…they have been sitting there for years without anybody giving a second glance…skoobs at jalan othman is similar in ambience and crappiness and another one of my favorites …
and yes, we used to have rows of bookstalls mostly owned by Indian booksellers along mcAlister road in Penang in the 1980s, selling mainly second hand fictions imported from India and I guess some coming from those Aussie soldiers stationed in butterworth…but they are now gone of course… but penang city council made what I considered one of the stupidest decisions imaginable… sometimes in early 90s they decided to rid of this street of the rows of book stalls and housed the booksellers in the second floor of the dirty chowrastra market among the cloth merchants and shops selling cheap clothing , hand bags shoes and other leather goods and trinkets…and now we have durian sellers, Chinese hawkers selling yong tau foo and the like instead of book stalls along mcalister road…what stupidity, what tragedy…
If I have one complain about the junk bookstore , it’s the price… even the old and crappy paperbacks are sold at a rather high price and I fear that one day they will be pushed out of business by the new secondhand upstarts like PAYLESS… but the lady don’t feel payless would be any threat for ‘they mostly stock American books’ as she put it…and perhaps that’s quite true… for junk bookstore have much better selections of good fictions , a mix of british, american , european & latin american translations and others… I ended buying a couple of books (1) Penguin Classics “Fourteen Byzantine Rulers” an 11th century book by Micheal Psellus and (2) “Belle du Seigneur” by albert cohen. A penguin 20th century classic series and winner of 1996 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation ( from French to English)
I don’t know anything about this jewish writer but what caught my attention was the blurb ….set in Geneva in the 1930s, albert cohen’s endlessly inventive satire of middle-class manners and ambitions revolves around Solal, a man of remarkable gifts and disappointed ideals….
And the distinctive lempicka’s painting on the cover is very attractive… if you go to ho chi minh city… you’ll see many art studios selling copies of famous and not so famous paintings…and lempickas are some of the most copied paintings on sales….i wonder who buy these…I did buy some copies but I steer away from the really well known impressionists and all those van goghs… I chose 17th century dutch/Flemish still lifes and vanitas…and I have one copy of chardin…
