Home for drifting souls
Self-styled ‘poetic idealist’ creates havens for lovers of literature
If there is a term that can best describe Qian Xiaohua, owner of the Librairie Avant-Garde bookstore in Nanjing’s Wutaishan region, Jiangsu province, it might be “poetic idealist”.
Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a black shirt, Qian, 53, looks like a teacher, serious yet amiable, humble yet lighthearted.
In his many articles and poems, he often describes himself as a lonely soul drifting across a strange land. And at one point in his life, the loneliness and sleepless nights he faced was so tremendous it threatened to devour him. This was when his dream of running a purely intellectual bookstore as a haven from the outside world came crashing down around him.
After opening his first 17-squaremeter bookstore in Nanjing in 1996, Qian had encountered consecutive failures by the early 2000s, after investing heavily in two more bookstores, one near the Confucius Temple, and the other in Nanjing’s central business district, Xinjiekou. Hearing of the failure of the Confucius Temple bookstore, many publishing houses urged Qian to repay debts of up to 2.5 million yuan ($376,300).
“This chilled my heart. I couldn’t believe that fellow humanists could do this to another humanist,” Qian said in a previous interview.
In 2005, after negotiating with the landlord to close his bookstore that had failed after just two years, Qian took a taxi back to Guangzhou Road, the location of his other bookstore.
In the run-up to this, Qian’s father had died and he had broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He had originally planned to fulfill his dream of building a 160-meter-long reading corridor in the avant-gardedecorated bookstore in the basement of a shopping mall, to create “a room for people to rest their souls.”
It was a stormy afternoon. As he climbed into a taxi, tears started running down his face as he set off for Guangzhou Road.
“It was the most difficult time in my life. I sold my house and had to sleep on the desk of the bookstore,” he says.
He quoted the line “The soul is a strange shape on Earth” from Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s poem Springtime of the Soul as the slogan for the Librairie Avant-Garde, a line that taps into feelings of displacement and homesickness.
“In Nanjing, I’m a stranger from another city. Staff working at the Librairie Avant-Garde are all strangers from other cities, many of our readers are strangers from other cities, and the books on our shelves are also strange souls from other cities. The bookstore itself is a strange shape on Earth, a home for drifting souls,” he says.
Qian, unmarried and childless, treated his bookstores like children. So far he has had 13 bookstores, all different from each other with their own designs, names, and types of books.
“I don’t repeat myself or bore customers with the same atmosphere. Each of my children is brand-new, has their own personality and can blend in with their location,” he says.
The Yongfeng Poets’ Society near the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum among his 13 bookstores is devoted to poetry, the literary genre that Qian prefers above all the others.
In the flagship store Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, regarded as one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, poetry collections are always given pride of place, “to show my respect for poets,” he says.
“Poets are a special group of people. They are the torchbearers of our times. Poems are the desperate songs from their hearts,” says the Jintan, Jiangsu province, native.
Sometimes when he talks, Qian appears to enter a different space from the here and now, before lapsing into a stream-of-consciousness: “Poets are lonely people, unique. I think only lonely people can fight with wolves. Poets are wolves in the wasteland, howling with despair. They compose poems from no other place than their lonely hearts.”
It might be said that one of the worst disappointments in life might be the gap between one’s words and deeds. But Qian has somehow managed to stick to his ideals in both his personal and professional lives.
Librairie Avant-Garde is a kingdom of poetry, says Qian, adding that he will often pay very high prices to obtain the right collections of poetry for his bookstores.
In September 2016, Qian visited Charing Cross Road in London, a street famous for its secondhand and antique bookstores, where he bought poetry collections by a 100 poets published in the 1820s, including William Wordsworth and George Gordon Byron.
“They were all fine little books. With these and the other works of poetry I have, I want to build a poetry corner at the Librairie AvantGarde, and let readers absorb the brilliance of these poets in a dark corner, another world, within the bookstore,” he says.
Qian has been at pains to create an air of academic solemnity at his flagship bookstore. Two large black crosses hang above the entrance and exit of Librairie Avant-Garde, while huge black-and-white portraits of literary giants such as Albert Camus and Franz Kafka adorn the walls, joined by a statue of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. For him, a bookstore, like a church, is a space for people to take a spiritual breakaway from their daily business.
The quality and range of titles at the bookstore attracts many lovers of poetry. One-fifth of the more than 100 employees at Librairie Avant-Garde write poems, including Qian himself.
In the article “My Bookstore Is a River” written for the 20th anniversary of the store’s opening, Qian includes one of his poems In the Street of Peking, which ends: “In the street of Peking/Watching the children, fathers, and grandfathers, who are lighting firecrackers/ Reminds me of being alone, tears running down my face/ … into the whole long night.”
This year, Librairie Avant-Garde will help a staff member publish a poetry collection using crowdfunding. Next year, Qian will publish a book about his mother, which will include his poems.
Besides poetry, Qian has persisted with another principle he has stuck to over the past 21 years, even during the hard times: to sell only books about philosophy and the arts — but never best-sellers, which he claims “harm the soul of a nation.”
Nowadays, in the face of major competition from online retailers, many bookstores are forced to mostly stock best-sellers as sell coffee and fruit juice to help them turn a profit.
“I don’t think it makes much sense for those kinds of bookstores to exist. A good bookstore should become a symbol of a city’s spirit. It can help to improve the quality of people’s lives, and allow the nation to develop and prosper,” he says.
But Qian is aware that like any other any business, a bookstore still needs to survive financially. Librairie Avant-Garde has tried a variety of new business models over the past two decades in an attempt to realize its founder’s ambitions.
In May 2008, many bookstores in China were forced to close down as e-commerce boomed and e-books grew in popularity. But Qian started his own company making culturally creative products, including bags, postcards, notebooks and posters. He also opened a cafe.
In the first year that Qian started the new business model at Librairie Avant-Garde, revenue generated by the cafe and product sales accounted for 30 percent of the bookstore’s total sales, and 40 percent of its profits. Now these two sections make up 60 percent of annual sales and 50 percent of annual profit for the bookstore.
“China’s bookstores are now going through a phase of creative transformation, from traditional to multifunctional. For us, we sell coffee and more than 3,000 kinds of cultural products. They diversify our products and services, attract more fashionable people, and promote the sales of books,” Qian says.
However, at Librairie AvantGarde, Qian keeps 300 free seats for readers, and the bookstore, closed to Nanjing University, is called the second library for students.
Qian stresses that the essence of a good bookstore still lies in the quality of its books. In this age of consumerism, publishing houses in China are producing less books about literature and the arts, than comparatively less serious academic books, which Qian says is not conducive to the country’s development.
“I truly admire Liu Suli, the founder of Wansheng Bookstore in Beijing. He has been persisting in his humanist ideals, promoting academic literature and the fighting for soul of the nation.”