Books give us depth and dignity
Benjamin Trisk is the CEO of Exclusive Books. This column is an edited extract from a speech he gave at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. The “realness” of books is what we sell: the spines on our shelves that tell people who we are; the smell of bindings, old and new; notes in marginalia that reflect conversations with ourselves as surely as with authors living and dead — all of this is the heady mix that ensures that books bind us together and keep us apart. All the technology in the world cannot enable one person to speak to many, in private and in silence. We are given dignity by the book in our hand. Whoever we are, the book gives us comfort, it provides a parallel world in which we are, for the time that we hold it and it holds us, the equal of the author, his confidant and foil.
Books are not data. They live and breathe once we have touched them, and when we consign them to place, to physical space, they touch our lives because they are conversations writ large and ever present. They decorate our houses, they cross our paths, they call out to us time and again.
Imagine, if you will, reading any of the books of Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli author whose family was ripped apart by the Nazis in 1940, when he was eight, and who
Books cross our paths, they call out to us time and again
then wandered the Galician countryside, alone, forsaken, bereft and invisible, until almost the end of the war. Imagine these works of memory, half-real, half-fiction, all art — and then tell me that the book in your hand, the one that occupies space in your sorrowing heart and beside your bed or on a shelf, tell me that book is no more significant a player in this theatre we all call life than a tablet or smartphone.
We are summoned by all books to a moveable feast. It was this reason, above all, that drew my shareholders, my directors and I, to the purchase of Exclusive Books. We were told that the book represented an old technology, that sales of the physical were in decline (which they were), that the digital world offered immediacy, mobility, pricing benefits, convenience, storage, technical conversion and text-interaction. All true.
We were told that linear modes of absorbing information were outdated; that the book no longer appealed to a digital generation; that mobility and choice of platform supplanted place. We differed. We were confident we could rise to the challenges.
Now, book sales have stabilised and are improving. At the heart of our vision is a conviction that selling books is more than a job: it is a complex, nuanced enterprise at the intersection of many seemingly unconnected events. We have to bring together these strands as they are mirrored in the written word, both old and new, to anticipate the prompt that brings the customer into our stores.
As booksellers we need to understand trends. Our stores must become theatre. — @exclusivescoza •