Endangered portals of mystery
PHIL BAKER mourns the recent passing of an extraordinary Parisian bookshop and its gentle proprietor
One evening some years ago I was walking down a narrow street in Paris when I saw an extraordinary shop window. It was across the road from the former Beat Hotel and it was completely crammed, like a packed stamp album, with a combination of the most lurid and recherché books. Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant was next to something called Dripping Kiki, and a book of George Grosz was perched above a guide to collecting vintage ray guns. There were the American “pop surreal” or “lowbrow” artists Tod Schorr and Robert Williams, and a mysterious Japanese book entitled Familial Rapture, with a cover photo of a bride and groom. There was a copy of Latin est Artificiel by the eccentric theorist of language Jean-Pierre Briset (who, I later discovered, also thought human beings were descended from frogs) together with the erotic photography of Gilles Berquet, and a cruder, less glossy sprinkling of fanzines and comic books. The French have an expression for window shopping, leche vitrine, window licking, and this was a window you could lick for a long time.
The door, totally opaque with stuck-on ephemera rather than merchandise, was even more of an artwork than the window. Old invitations for shows of cartoons by Roland Topor and punky woodcuts by Sophie Dutertre, with a host of other flyers and cards, were all densely tiled together above a disturbing graphic, partly obscured, of a man in a black hood holding up a child, captioned “Mange ton Bonbongle”. Higher up was an entity by the artist Jephan deVilliers, on a card from the Galerie Oeuf Sauvage, looking like some kind of primitive fetish.
On venturing through the door, you encountered a grey-haired, modestly smiling man of indeterminate age, Jacques Noel. Monsieur Noel was one of those shopkeepers who is really a curator. He had all the obvious things – the Situationists, William Burroughs, Robert Crumb – but his taste also went down darker alleys into less visited regions of outsider art, manga, and the occasionally queasy further fringes of bandes dessinées and the French BD underground: I believe the shop had old links to the post-punk comics collective Bazooka, originally gathered around the newspaper Libération. He seemed to have “everything”, or at least everything marginal, deviant and resistant to censorship, all miraculously gathered into his cavern.
Over the two decades I visited he went from relatively normal shelving to dense stacking (but he knew where things were, and he was handy with a ladder) and then to great piled heaps. Finally it was like a Kurt Schwitters merzbild, and M Noel appeared to be spending more time outside his grotto on a pavement chair, perhaps because there was no space left inside. Like the arcades, the cafés and the tribal art dealers, this bookshop, Un Regard Moderne on rue Git-le-Coeur (“Here-Lies-the-Heart”), was one of the wonders of Paris, but a couple of weeks ago a friend in the Latin Quarter called with end-of-an-era news: Jacques Noel had suddenly died.
It is hardly news that the small bookshop is increasingly a thing of the past. I can account for at least 20 shops I’ve outlived even in London, including a sort of shed in Paddington where the owner could only take cash; the Oriental bookseller Hosains, which had an exquisite display but could never be found open; a now demolished basement in Upper Tachbrook Street, where the owner urbanely presented a friend of mine with an ashtray, saying “Madam, smoking is encouraged in this shop”; and a normally mundane and disobliging shop in Highgate, where one day the antediluvian owner invited me to go through a discreet door into a massive, cavernous, half-lit shop space behind the usual one, completely dwarfing it, like somewhere a secret society might gather in a horror film.
I often dream of secondhand bookshops, and I’ve always liked the way small shops feature as portals of mystery, menace and transformation in supernatural fiction, but for me the most magical of them, in the here and now, was Un Regard Moderne.
Jacques Noel presided over his emporium with a kindly, slightly melancholy air, and he had endless patience with browsers. He never seemed to be in any hurry to sell anything, but was really more like an uncle quietly encouraging you to admire the carnivorous plants in his greenhouse. His tacit, unassertive manner was compounded by the fact that as far as I could tell he didn’t speak very much English.
Un Regard Moderne was a wonderful place not just to buy things but to discover them. The last time I was there, I bought a hand-made book of collage by an artist called Marie Noel Doby, and with a gesture along the lines of “If you like that, you might like this”, he almost shyly brought my attention to a special number of an illustrated journal, devoted to her work. I did like it, and it is only reading it now, since his death, that I discover she was his wife.
A night-time crowd gathered outside the shop after the bad news broke, as if keeping a vigil. Some people brought flowers and stuck them to the door, reminiscent of the impromptu shrines we see in London where cyclists have been killed. Of course, they were for Jacques Noel, but they were also for his creation, the shop. I’ve never seen a bookshop mourned with flowers before, but if I’d been in town I’d have put some there myself.