Why?
Why?
Why?
Fill a brilliant day with questions
for five-year-old children
They surely know
that without those whys
everything would be nothing.
—Ko Un
I am in South Korea, the land of LG Electronics and Samsung, the land of the Qualcomm Mirasol, Kyobo’s e-reader, which allows you to read books in colour. I’m in the country with the highest percentage of citizens with smart cell phones in the world: over 90 percent of South Koreans are connected to social media. I am in a country that has been divided between capitalists and communists since 1948—satellites, respectively, of the US and Soviet Union—and I, too, am divided between wakefulness and sleep. Or rather I’m completely dazed, somewhere between melatonin and jetlag.
I think about all this—not very lucidly—from atop Deoksugung Lottecastle, a block of flats with its own shopping centre and ground-floor bookshop, on my first early morning in Seoul, as I look out the window at a metallic dawn. Darkness around the skyscraper recedes over the terraces in a girls’ school sports stadium, as semicircular and venerable as a Roman amphitheatre, opposite the Russian embassy, a massive block packed with parabolic aerials, both spaces surrounded by screens that are lit up night and day.
In Spain, where only 80 percent of the population is connected, it’s still yesterday, I decide before falling back to sleep: I have journeyed into the future.
What is that frontier of time actually like? An hourly gradation? Where does the present end and the future begin?
The day he received a call from promoters of Common Ground, a shopping centre made from the world’s largest shipping containers, Lee Kiseob was in the new office of his shop, Thanks Books; he’d been forced to leave a larger space, with cafeteria service, due to financial problems.
“I wasn’t interested in opening the Common Ground branch of Thanks Books with the same aesthetic and concept, because each area has an identity of its own, and each bookshop must find a way to enter into dialogue with that identity,” says this bookseller with round glasses and thick black hair, who keeps smiling in restrained but nervous fashion, “and here we had to develop a concept linked to the university area where we found ourselves and all this metal from containers.”
That’s why the sliding door is old and wooden: hanok, or traditional Korean house-style. That’s why you must climb a few steps and the entire floor is covered in parquet: to mark a transition. Once inside, you encounter metal again, in the tables and shelves.
Index Books has three levels: the top is the cafeteria, where they don’t serve espresso, just Index-brand filtered coffee; the middle is the bookshop, which is curated like an art gallery, its books ordered alphabetically with labels like “D for Design,” “U for Used,” or “W for With”; while the lower floor is devoted to posters, which are arranged in big drawers.
“My Graphic Magazine partners and I thought it was the kind of text that, in aesthetic terms, was closest to the containers,” says my guide, who is also a graphic designer. “Our posters are single-page books, written by artists, musicians, writers, and designers, and are the main marks of our identity.”
Where does a bookseller’s identity end and his bookshop’s begin? In which arena of negotiation with a building, a district, or a city does the spirit of the bookshop contract or expand?
“In recent years there has been an explosion of independent presses, print magazines, and small bookshops. Opening a small, one-person business linked to books is a good way to escape the neo-liberal pressures of the Korean professional world,” says bookseller Cha Kyoung-hee, whose business cards introduce her as “Bookshop Editor.”
Although she normally opens at midday, she has offered us her space at 10 a.m. so I can interview Han Kang there. “It’s a very literary bookshop, where we’ll have quiet,” the Korean writer had emailed me the previous night.
Even lifelong Seoul residents can’t escape the chaos of the city’s postal addresses. “Jorge?” someone had asked a few minutes earlier behind my back. Even Han Kang got lost in the alleyways surrounding this fortress-like building, constructed in the 1950s by North Korean immigrants, despite being a regular customer who’ll be back next Tuesday for a reading to mark the publication of her collected stories. We finally reached Goyo Bookshop, sat down with coffee offered by Cha Kyoung-hee, and began our conversation.
She’s wearing black jeans, a woollen jersey that’s black at the bottom and with the embroidered grey outline of a city skyline at the top. Her hair is dark and lank and she’s not wearing makeup: the only touch of colour is the red hands of her watch. She emanates a tense calm that seems to be on the verge of expiring. Everything about her is restrained except for the words that accompany the gentle movements of her hands, which hide a subtle determination. She will be forty-eight next week. She’s used to being interviewed.
The author of The Vegetarian was vegetarian for a few years, “but I was ill, and my doctor told me to eat fish, though I still don’t eat red meat.” Although she likes plants, she only has a few because she lives in an apartment and doesn’t have a garden. She thinks of herself as a feminist because “you are one if only because you oppose sexism.” She likes travel, but not hotels. “They are very lonely places. I prefer staying a long time when I travel, in friends’ houses or apartments, in places I find interesting.” Seoul is a monster of a city. “It’s too big, but I wouldn’t exchange it for anywhere quieter, I want to live here, because Korea is the country of my literature.”
How can you narrate a country that, in 1948, split permanently into two radically different parts; a country whose landscape is brutally broken? Via novels, films, exhibitions, or chronicles that are also riven and fissured?
Index was established in November 2017. In the final days of 2018, with the temperature slowly but surely descending, I visit other new bookshops. Historybooks, which has a large, iconic history wheel in its window, opened before the summer. And IANN publishers, which has published artbooks since 2007, decided to open a new bookselling space in March: The Reference.
I leaf through A Blow Up, by Seung Woo Back, a book of photographs made from fragments of the negatives North Korean censors handed to Back at the border, after cutting out unauthorized images. It took the South Korean photographer years to realize that that mutilated material made for a much more eloquent account of his two-headed country than could have been constructed from the perfect original negatives.
In Seoul Selection, a small space dedicated to books about Korea, located in a basement opposite the Gyeongbokgung Palace and close to Seoul’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, I consult the catalogue for the last Gwangu Art Biennale, where recent North Korean art was exhibited for the first time. Many of the works were collective; all were academic: one career option for young people in the world’s most hermetic country is that of artist or writer. But in Choe Chang Ho’s painting, In the International Exhibition, I find an unexpected image: four women, in a nineteenth-century artist’s studio, looking at the screen of a Mac laptop. At the centre of socialist realism, the principal emblem of digital capitalism. On the stage of the past, the design of the future.
There was a rapid unfreezing after the Olympic Games were held in PyeongChang: bookshops reflect this changing political temperature. I’m not surprised to see various tourist-themed books and postcards in Veranda Books, the most hipsterish shop I found, a delightful space with an attic ceiling that mostly sells illustrated books, in the neighbourhood with the oldest hanoks, and consequently with the most tourists. Now that its citizens have travelled the world, Korea is preparing to become a tourist destination, too. The northern border is one of its main attractions. And the bookshops and libraries, which are springing up everywhere, will soon be attractions as well.
Which surface can most exactly reflect a culture? Which surfaces can or cannot reflect it? Isn’t every journey a quest for appropriate spectacles, vantage points, and mirrors?
“Seoul bookshops have changed radically over the last ten years. They all used to be the same, now each has its own distinct identity and is worth a visit,” Lee Kiesob tells me before we say goodbye, as three girls take photos in front of a display of Index postcards. One says: “There is always another kind of game.”
Several of us cultural tourists are taking selfies in the amazing Starfield Library. Crisscrossed by escalators, this library—opened May 31, 2007—of fifty thousand volumes ranged on as many as twenty-five levels of shelves, with its imperial bookcases and reading tables, occupies the hall and some side areas of the COEX shopping centre. But most visitors are here to meet up or read, not to upload images to Instagram.
We tourists also take photos in the Kyobo bookshop, the most famous in Seoul, admired for the harmonious order of its books—several hundred square metres of them—for its sections selling the latest technology and gifts, and for its cafeterias.
Book Park, located in the Itaewon district’s vast Hannam-dong cultural complex (owned by Interpark, the “Korean Amazon”), could become a third tourist icon: there’s a sign shaped like a camera indicating the best place to take a photo of its kilometres of vertical bookshelves. A twentieth-century camera, because icons always lag behind reality.
You’ll find the same sign in Seoul’s Metropolitan Library, next to City Hall, pointing to the spectacular timbered readers’ circle that extends down to the library’s children’s section. A few metres away, in the entrance to Kyobo, now that the good weather has arrived, there are steps filled with people reading books. Book by Book and the Starfield Library also have large wooden steps where you can sit and read.
Conversely, in the huge network of connections that is the Seoul metro, you never see anyone reading a book: cell phones dominate that space, a world frozen in silence.
Where does the city end and theatre begin?
Han Kang puts three volumes of her short stories on the table. “They represent twenty years of stories, and, as you can imagine, they are very important to me.” She speaks in English, slowly, but fluently and precisely. These texts connect the adult woman with the young woman who aspired to be a writer. She comes from a poor family, from a house with hardly any furniture, but lots of books: “My father was a young novelist in the ’70s and is now a prolific author, but at that time we didn’t even have a table to eat off, although we did have a big library, where I enjoyed total freedom to read whatever I wanted: reading was my territory.”
When she was in high school, she liked to imagine that Seoul was pronounced like “soul”: “I remember buying my first book at the age of seventeen, the start of my own library, in a small bookshop in Suyu-ri, here in Seoul, where I grew up after we moved from Gwangju.” It was a book of poems by Han Yong: Your Silence.
She began writing poetry as an adolescent; stories in university. In the ’90s in Korea you had to win a prize to be considered a proper writer: “I won one organized by an important newspaper, and published some poems in a magazine, and I thus became a writer. The set up isn’t so rigid now, but it worked like that then, which might sound odd to someone from Europe.” At twenty-eight, she published her first novel—its title could be translated as Black Horns—about a woman who disappears. Her fiancé and a girlfriend search for her. I ask Han if she’s still happy with it. “It’s quite long, four times the length of The Vegetarian. I worked on it for three years, it was a profound experience for me, and yes, I do still like it.”
Can one person be the best way to approach the soul of a city, of an entire country? Or a bookshop? Or a library? Or an electronic device? Or a book?
Tongmungwan is invisible in the middle of Gwanhun-dong, a bustling street with shops selling handicrafts and souvenirs. A plaque on the façade (“Seoul Future Heritage”) and a framed certificate inside attest to its cultural value. Having opened its doors in 1934, it is the oldest bookshop in Korea. Most of the books display Chinese characters, which means that the usual customers aren’t so much ordinary Korean readers as academics and collectors from the whole of Asia, particularly from China and Japan. Newspapers, political pamphlets, and other historical documents are also for sale. A representative of the store’s third generation of booksellers is behind the counter, at the end of a central passageway formed by metal shelving, literally buried by the books piled up on large, dark, wooden bookcases. Hunched yet proud, Lee Jong-un tells me they only moved once, in 1957, from a few metres down the same street.
At the age of seventeen, Lee Gyeom-no, the bookshop’s founder, left his home in what is now North Korea, intending to study in Japan, but an earthquake on the powerful nearby islands put an end to his plans. He stayed in Seoul and started working in an antiquarian bookshop, not out of a love for books—as has so often been repeated—but because he was hungry. Hunger for food can be assuaged, but a hunger for books is insatiable, for good or ill. Over decades, he not only bought and sold books, he published scholars from around the entire country and salvaged stolen documents and books to return or give to the main national libraries. When the bombing raids started, in 1950, Lee had to choose between saving his collection of eighty old books, or his crockery, mattress, or paintings. He didn’t hesitate for a second. He died at ninety-seven, four years after paying off a long-overdue debt. In a 2000 meeting of members from the family’s two branches, separated for almost half a century by the new border, Lee Gyeom-no met Ryu Ryeol, a bibliophile like himself, but also a sage, and paid Ryu the half million in royalties he owed him for a book he published before the war. After paying his debts, Lee was able to rest in peace.
Could North Korea and South Korea really be the same country in two parallel universes?
If Johannes Gutenberg had travelled to Korea along the Silk Road in the fifteenth century—as had Marco Polo at the end of the previous one—he might have discovered that what he thought of as the future was in fact a version of the past. In July 1377, two craftsmen by the names of Seokcan and Daldam used movable metal type to print Jikji, the work in which their master, Baegun Hwasang, summed up the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Eighty years before Gutenberg printed his Bible.
Despite periodic invasions by the Chinese and Japanese, Korean culture was unified and powerful until it split, in the middle of the last century, into simultaneous realities that seemed different but were both equally dictatorial. In the North, under the control of Kim Il-sung, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea was a dictatorship of the proletariat that—like all dictatorships—had a single leader; in the South, the Republic of Korea was also the fief of dubious, neo-liberal conservatives, like President Syngman Rhee and General Park Chung-hee.
While the North sank into poverty, the South experienced an unprecedented economic miracle, leaping in a single generation from the Third to the First World. It was a fast, traumatic transition. Perhaps the day when that trauma is most acutely relived is university entrance-examination day, the famous Suneung, which has become a cruel rite of passage for Korean adolescents. Parents, remembering the hunger they experienced in their childhoods, put all their hopes and too much pressure on their children. After months of studying thirteen hours a day, with a narcotic dearth of sleep, boys and girls stake everything on eight hours of tests. One out of ten Koreans confess to having considered committing suicide in their youth. Among OECD countries, South Korea has the third-highest suicide rate for males and the highest rate for females.
South Korea’s is an unusual, lively, still-young democracy. Most of its fifty million inhabitants, half of whom live in Seoul and its metropolitan area, are survivors of war, poverty, dictatorships, and huge stress. It will be a long time before we discover whether North Korea’s twenty-five million inhabitants have also survived.
Can realism represent our realities?
If I had to make up a canon for the twenty-first-century novel, limited to ten titles, one would be The Vegetarian. This hypnotic story of a woman, who, after deciding not to eat meat, gradually renounces her humanity, to the point of identifying with trees, not only tackles one of the biggest issues of our time—empathy for other living beings, in particular in the vegetable kingdom—it does so while showing great sensitivity to contemporary art, making the most fitting narrative choices in order to relate the protagonist’s enigmatic drama. The first part is narrated from the perspective of the husband, who doesn’t love his wife; the second, by the latter’s brother-in-law, who desires her artistically and sexually; and the final section by her sister, who doesn’t know what to do with her. The vegetarian thus remains at the centre of the novel like its dark kernel, a fascinating mystery never to be resolved: “she seemed to be a sacred being, a being you couldn’t say was human or animal, or perhaps a being that was somewhere between the vegetable, the human and the animal.”
A short story provided the novel’s seed: “The Fruit of My Woman,” from 1997, was the first version of what would later become the first part of The Vegetarian. The story—which can be read on the Granta website—tells the story of a man who comes back from a business trip to find his wife in the process of becoming a vegetable. He helps and supports her in her farewell to the human species: “It was the result of a vision, the image of a woman changing into a tree suddenly appeared to me, and although it has moments of light, it is a deeply sad tale.”
It is like a contemporary version of the story of Daphne and Apollo: “I didn’t think of that until later, when The Vegetarian was published in other countries, and people began to speak about the influence of Ovid and Kafka on my work. I read both when I was an adolescent, and I suppose they are still inside me. It’s curious,” she continues, “how different cultures have found different reference points and asked me very different questions: readers and journalists in Italy were interested in Ovid and the lack of communication; in Germany, in Kafka, and in the sense of what is human, and in violence; in the Anglo-Saxon world, on the other hand, the obsession was feminism; in Spain and Argentina, sacrifice and martyrdom.”
“So now I must ask you about Borges,” I interject.
“I love Borges,” she replies, “he is one of my favourite authors, one of my indispensable reads.”
Between story and novel, I note, there is a double twist: the husband’s love disappears and the story abandons its fantastic vein and turns realist. “I think that genre is very important if we are to understand those issues, those decisions; poetry is very personal, is closely conditioned by language; as is the short story, but less so, and it’s more visual, but I think that the novel is the most important genre because it allows me to ask the most elemental questions.” When Han was writing The Vegetarian, a question came up that wasn’t in “The Fruit of My Woman”: the meaning of humanity. “Although I’ve wondered ever since I was a child about what it means to be a human being, because I don’t find it at all natural, I find it hard to accept that I belong to the human species, that I belong to the same kind of animal that built Auschwitz or perpetrated the Gwangju Massacre.” Her intention was to emphasize that the protagonist’s decision, to cease to be human, is understood by no one, but that she won’t give up on what she has decided. “And the fact is I don’t think I opted for realism, or that The Vegetarian is a realist novel exactly.”
Is this chronicle only realist in the fragments between the question marks?
In the Book by Book bookshop they give you a cup of American coffee if you write a review of a book you liked on one of the big cards they’ve set aside, the ancient bartering practice contrasting with that of the banking offices that occupy 50 percent of the space.
Near City Hall, around the bar at the Café Comma, a giant bookcase packed with books reaches to the ceiling and is reflected in the window opposite, where poetry collections with colourful covers are on display. A girl in a school uniform says hello while I leaf through one; for a second I assume she’s a student, but her name is on a badge on her chest: she’s an assistant in the clothing store where the café-bookshop is located—her colleagues all wear the same uniform.
Back atop of Deoksugung Lottecastle, on my last day in Seoul, I wake to a city I don’t recognize. The girls’ school amphitheatre, the Russian embassy’s parabolic aerials, and the skyscraper screens are about to disappear under a thick layer of white. Although snow in November is unusual, on my way to the airport I note how quickly the municipal machinery has gone into action: concierges from the blocks of flats are clearing pathways and plows are removing ice from the motorways along which we cross the megalopolis before reaching Incheon. After checking in and going through security, I’m not surprised to end up breakfasting in a delightful café-bookshop that shares a space with tax-refund counter: Sky Book Cafe versus Tax Refund, while a white robot with two pink hearts instead of eyes slides between them on wheels with a message on the screen: “I love you.”
The crises all bookshops face are similar, but each city confronts its crisis in its own way. Seoul has imposed an unexpected hybridity: a bookshop selling posters in a shopping centre made from shipping containers; a bookshop and a bank branch; a bookshop and a clothing store; a bookshop and an airport. Four responses to the same question, in a city that seems to exist in humanity’s next decade.
How can we guarantee the survival of future bookshops?
Andrés Felipe Solano, a Colombian writer who has been exploring Seoul passionately and meticulously for the last ten years, gives me the latest issue of the magazine of Korea’s Literary Translation Institute, where he works cheek by jowl with Spanish-to-Korean translators. Its editorial makes it clear that the prestigious International Man Booker Prize won by Han Kang and her translator, Deborah Smith, for The Vegetarian, represents a watershed in the history of the country’s literature. Here there is no consensus that it is a masterpiece, but it has certainly been recognized as an important work of fiction in its various versions in other languages. The publication also confirms that, for South Korea, English is as key a language as Chinese or Japanese.
That same truth is repeated on the five storeys of Still Books, the capital’s most refined, postmodern bookshop, the ground floor of which currently stocks all English issues of Brand magazine. On the top floor you can taste the best Japanese whiskies. Walking between themed tables where books coexist with designer items; going backwards or forwards downstairs or across brown parquet floors with tiny displays of maps, pictures, and photographs at intersections, you realize that the bookshop’s centre of gravity is the city of Seoul itself; that the Korean language and Korean culture are arrayed around this protagonist, but that Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, and Japanese culture interest booksellers as much as customers. Their readers.
I buy the issue of Brand dedicated to Tsutaya, the bookshop chain that defines itself as the main “Japanese platform for pop culture.” Like Amazon or Fnac, it was born primarily as a bookstore, but unlike those companies it hasn’t relegated books to the background. In its television and computer departments, so I read, you will find thousands of books on technology; and in the kitchenware department, gastronomic books. Each year, dozens of new franchises open, but the structure grows from its bookish base. Even its most iconic architecture, like the T-Site headquarters (designed by Klein Dytham architecture), is inspired by that icon, that symbol, that minimal unit of cultural meaning from recent centuries; and, who knows, perhaps also of future centuries: the book.
Tsutaya’s closest equivalent in Korea might be the Kyobo bookshop chain, which was born in the 1980s as a gamble on cultural industries wagered by the insurance company of the same name. “People create books, books create people” is written in huge letters across a wall in one of its branches. Although Kyobo’s ten branches offer thousands of books and items, arranged in themed sections, the shop’s most emblematic space is its library, where, from 9:30 a.m., huge wooden tables are filled with people reading newspapers and students of all ages leaning over their open books. Tsutaya’s T-Site, similarly, features the Anjin Library, which has one hundred and twenty seats and an impressive collection of magazines. Even the walkway that connects the bookshop’s three buildings is called Magazine Street.
Still Books sells a guide to Seoul’s bookshops in the original Korean and in Japanese translation, as well as three guides to Japanese bookshops with titles in English: New Standard of Japanese Bookstores, Tokyo Bookstore Guide, and Tokyo Book Scene. I look carefully at the photos in the four volumes: it’s obvious that Tokyo’s bookshops are similar to the ones I’ve visited in Seoul over the last few days. I jot down the names of some I will surely add to my collection in the future: Isseido, Beyer, Shibuya Publishing & Booksellers, Los Papelotes, Orion Papyrus, Sunday Issue, Book and Bed, Sanyodo Book Store, Kitazawa, Book and Sons. There are always one or several books in the run-up to a journey. And a list.
Even Bunkitsu, the Tokyo bookshop that opened its doors in 2018 and became the first in history to charge for entry from day one, has an unexpected twin soul in Seoul. Because that exhaustive collection of magazines and art, architecture, and design books—which share space with tables for both group and individual use (no doubt inspired by the New York Public Library or National Library in Buenos Aires, with their renowned green lamps)—doesn’t resemble Index as much as the Hyundai Car Design Library. In effect: it’s more a library than a bookshop.
Seoul and Tokyo look at each other across the mirror of the Sea of Japan. The burden of the history of violence between the two countries remains, Japan’s past abuses still palpitate and bleed, but the bookshops seem to be meeting places, areas of peace—at least in illustrations and photos and on the maps.
Where does a chronicle finish and an essay begin? Where does a chronicle that’s an essay or an essay that narrates end, and where does fiction begin?
The image of the metamorphosis of the protagonist in “The Fruit of My Woman” was so powerful that Han Kang wanted to continue working on it, but she wasn’t ready for that project and another came her way: her second novel, which could be translated as Cold Hands. It was only then that she felt ready to tackle the writing of the third, The Vegetarian, a story that would be read throughout the world. It was published in 2007 and the prize was given to the English translation in 2016: “It was strange to have to talk about it again, because I’d already disconnected from that book, though then I ended up re-thinking it a lot as a result of my conversations with translators, publishers, and journalists, who taught me a lot.”
Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is currently exhibiting work by Yun Hyong-keun dedicated to the memory of the Gwangju Massacre, in which over a thousand citizens died at the hands of dictator Park Chung-hee’s army: canvasses where large, dark patches are fractured by streaks of white. The massacre is central to Human Acts, Han Kang’s fourth novel, also translated into English by Deborah Smith. “In my opinion, the two novels are very connected, because the theme of violence is central to both, but I am sure Human Acts is a more personal novel, the most personal I have written.”
I say its complex structure made me think of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and a film that is in some way its heir, Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, as well as the great writers on the memory of genocide, like Paul Celan. “I’m very interested in The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, and his other books that show it is possible to write about Auschwitz. I’ve also read Paul Celan’s work, an extraordinary writer, but my essential reading for Human Acts was a Korean book of eyewitness accounts by survivors of Gwangju. I read it in one month, in nine-hour daily sessions, and cried over every page, but before experiencing that, I was lost, I didn’t know how to tackle the novel, and after a month of reading and weeping, the structure came to me and I was able to start writing.”
In its mother tongue, a book has a different rhythm than in translation. While she was launching those novels in various countries, Han enacted performances here related to her latest book, entitled The White Book, where, through fragments that draw on poetry, narrative, and essays, she speaks about her sister, who died a few hours before she was born. An eighteen-minute video was made from the four performances she did in 2016, in which other performers also participate: “although they are independent of the book, there is a clear metaphorical relationship, I am trying to understand how mourning works.”
Could all these new bookshops and libraries in Seoul be a symptom, a reaction, a form of mourning?
In an era when libraries tend to be huge spaces crisscrossed with multimedia outlets, I am surprised to find four small, specialized laboratories in Seoul’s Hyundai Card libraries. In an era when libraries have filled up with people looking for a bookish atmosphere in which to immerse themselves in their screens, these four libraries allow people to consult books in relation to objects that give them meaning: the texts lead to physical acts rather than to technology. In the Design, Cookery, Music, and Travel libraries, books continue to be the protagonists.
The Design Library is like a small contemporary art museum, with a central garden that articulates the building’s three floors. Its three areas are arranged according to the classical criteria of library science: the first has contemporary art books, museum catalogues, periodical publications, and volumes on industrial design; these are also present in the third area, together with architecture, public and organic interior design and photography books; while in the second we find bibliographies on book design, marketing, visual communication, user design, and assorted other titles. For example, in a tiny corner on the second floor, next to a small room with views over the roofs of neighbourhood hanoks, is a selection of some twenty books on smallness: sinks, miniatures, minimalism, and micro-apartments.
In order for a book to be selected for the Design Library, it must be inspiring, useful, communicative, influential, a bridge between different media, an actual or potential classic, and beautiful. The rest of these libraries have also made public the guidelines their respective curators follow when selecting their catalogue titles. What makes the project unique isn’t any sort of new concept of the library as a repository for books, but rather the curating and mise en scène that generate a completely different atmosphere to what we’d find in a design faculty library. Architecture and small details have been used to create an experience that is at once different, sensuous, artisanal, and pleasant. Next to reading tables and armchairs you find a coffee-maker and a fridge full of bottled water. On every surface where you might place your book you find wooden boxes of Faber Castell pencils and blank sheets of paper. Everything has been conceived and chosen so the reader feels like a privileged being who will enjoy the possibility of translating his or her reading into notes, drawings, or future projects.
Each of the four libraries offers different bookmarks, with an undeniable value placed on the tactile and designer qualities of the paper used. The pamphlet explaining the Hyundai Card libraries is exquisite, the print book being at the centre of each experience: art, crafts, and design bibliographies in the Design Library; recipe books, books on raw materials or gastronomy in the Cookery Library: travel literature, maps, guide books, or National Geographic’s entire run in the Travel Library: biographies of singers, musicological essays, scores, and musical titles in the Music Library.
Interfaces that allow reading to be transformed into experience and memory are located nearby. Those Design Library pencils. Those records and gramophones in the Music Library (on sale in the next-door shop, Vinyl & Plastic). Those interactive maps in the Travel Library. Those trays and pans, stoves and cookers in the Cooking Library. The reader becomes a maker. In that stimulating context, knowledge doesn’t derive from YouTube or Wikipedia, but from a book, generally chosen with a partner or friends. Thanks to the map, gramophone, café or restaurant table, reading becomes collective, a group experience, an experiment with the five senses.
The four libraries have inner structures that suggest mobile homes. In Design, the suggestion is of a wood cabin; in Travel, it’s a ceiling in the form of a crooked hive, recalling a bed-and-breakfast attic room; in Music there are modules that evoke the privacy of a bedroom where adolescents can create their own soundtrack (and a concert hall or discotheque), and in Cooking there’s a kind of outdoor greenhouse that acts as both a dining room and interior greenhouse, which classifies and displays all manner of ingredients.
It’s about offering secure, silent spaces where skills and knowledge can be developed that are not one’s own, the company’s or the academy’s. That are practical but linked to domestic life, to leisure, to reading for pleasure in the warmth of a semi-public, shared hearth, and not to a professional career or the direct conversion of work into money. Although access is via credit card.
Where does paper end and screen begin?
Before saying goodbye, I ask Han Kang for her favourite bookshops: “I love visiting small bookshops, like this one, Goyo; like Thanks Books, like wit n cynical, which specializes in poetry, or The Book Society.”
And that’s where I go. The Book Society was launched in the Sangsu-dong district in 2010 by Helen Ku and Lim Kyung Yong, who had run a small art-book imprint, mediabus, for two years. Located on the first floor above a Jongno-gu garage, the shop has an art gallery atmosphere. “Right from the start,” Lim tells me, “we have focused on events that create a sense of community, concerts, artistic events, launches, and conversations.”
It was here, the Spanish writer Lourdes Iglesias tells me, that she and her husband, Bartomeu Marí, who directed Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for three years, first made contact with the local scene. “We want to find bridges,” continues Lim Kyung Yong, “between the world of print, artifacts, and human and digital networks, and that’s why we are translating and making available the most important works of critical theory in English in Korean.”
Irasun Books, in a nearby passageway, can be defined with two key words: Photobook and Booktalk. The shop’s warm interior displays photography books from the world’s best publishers; half a dozen people are reading or conversing quietly.
These small bookshops aren’t easy to find. Like many in Seoul, they’re in alleyways, side-streets, or nowhere at all, because they can’t afford the rents paid by the ever-present cosmetics or electronic-goods shops.
You reach Alibaba, a second-hand bookshop with a post-apocalyptic-bunker aesthetic similar to Kyobo’s in Gangnam, from a lift that descends to the basement of a commercial building. Opposite the lift are large tables where readers consult books or take notes. Genuine Gangnam style is underground.
Where does a reply end and the next question begin? Which border unites and separates on each journey? Isn’t every text a layering of strata, a succession of questions and answers?
The publisher Seung-hwan Lee—whose professional patter emanates from the face of an adolescent—tells me paper sales account for about 80 percent of the Korean market, digital 20 percent, but that some books are print-only “because the Korean reader likes to touch and feel”; which is why sophisticated cover and interior book design was the common denominator in all the bookshops I visited.
In this polluted city, where many people wear masks as they move around, the paths and parks that are continually being built are absolutely vital. For the same reason, in this digital city, where so many buildings have huge screens and ten million cell phones are in perpetual movement, it makes total sense that bookshops and reading spaces are multiplying. But those readers are a minority: South Korea isn’t just the country with the most web surfers in the world, it’s also the country with the lowest number of readers on the planet. While Indians read an average of ten hours a week, and the Spanish almost six, Koreans don’t get beyond three.
All the innovative libraries and hybrid bookshops that have opened in Seoul in recent years might just be a fashion or fad with a best-before date. Or possibly they’re an attempt to make South Korea more appealing for tourists. But they can also be interpreted as an attempt to put things right.
In twenty years, an economic miracle changed a poor country into a very rich country; an economy without an entrepreneurial base became a leading economy in electronic goods, cosmetics, and automobiles. Antiquated schools and universities transformed into an educational system that is as successful as it is dangerously competitive. The future arrived so quickly it didn’t take account of the absence of a past. Around the world, public and private book collections comprised a physical and mental, critical and democratic structure, which was then gradually digitized. Here it’s happening in reverse. I didn’t really travel to the future, but to the past that should have preceded it, and that South Korea is now forging. Or inventing.
North South East West: making no distinction
covering everywhere alike,
in white, no one can keep back
the snowstorm.
—Kim Kwang-kyu
(Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kim Young-moo)