Literarische Welten

On a recent weekend trip to Belfast I decided to dedicate a full day to book shopping. A friendly seller at Oxfam Books on Botanic Ave. was kind enough to list a number of used bookshops around the city’s center. I followed the route marked on my map, progressing in an orderly fashion and by the early afternoon I had reached the furthest point on my tour. With a heavy bag and a single-minded will to optimize the book yielding opportunities provided by this English speaking city, I entered Keats and Chapman on North St. only to be dumbfounded by clutter. I moved deeper in, passing densely packed, overflowing shelves, boxes and piles. It seemed as if initial attempts at an organizing system had succumbed to the sheer quantity of volumes that populated every nook and cranny of the shop. By the farming and rural fiction sections, overwhelmed and disparaged, surrounded by various editions of “Tarka the Otter”, my eyes rested on numerous reiterations of the name Durrell. A closer inspection revealed a copy of “My Family and Other Animals”, a title which has unreasonably eluded me for years. Elated by the find, I realized I must abandon my preconceived notions of bookshop propriety, my fixation on alphabetization and resign to the chaos. I spent the rest of that day digging, shuffling, moving about, submitting to the lure of random titles. I learned a valuable lesson in Belfast’s Keats and Chapman, one that has left a vivid impression, one that I wish to return to.