BOOKED OUT
Jozi’s new leaf
Books compete for space with handbags, coats and high heels in a fashion store in Joburg’s CBD. On the bottom shelves are religious texts like Sex Terrorism and Immorality. Or was
that Immortality?
In a nearby shop, FJ Nappies and Fashion, herbal supplements bracket business books and the latest political memoirs.
Felix Nwigwe, the manager of FJ’s, says: “We sell mostly Christian books and we sell winter things when it is cold. Politics books used to sell but no more lately. They are old game. Now it is business because people want to improve.”
Books are wildly popular in Jozi’s inner city. There are about a dozen booksellers in the space of two blocks. Griffin Shea, who guides literary day-trippers on the Underground Booksellers Tour, has mapped about 70 in the wider CBD.
The books are not always visible at first glance, but many are stacked inside the impromptu shops that line the corridor from Park Station to Gandhi Square.
“Official sales stats are a sliver of the number of books that are selling,” says Shea, owner of Bridge Books in Commissioner Street and a big supporter of the informal book trade. “We have more than 1,000 book sellers in Johannesburg. According to numbers in the World Cities Cultural Report, that’s more than they have in Paris or London. But in SA we sell mostly second-hand books.”
Cash sales for used books go unreported, so the statistics are not available to publishing houses.
At street level, however, book culture is widely celebrated. The City of Johannesburg has plans, still in the design phase, to develop this as a literary district.
“The city wants to have street libraries with free books in street carts and dedicate each library to a South African writer,” says Shea.
Many vendors store their books in the spaces beneath Park Station, where they are vulnerable to fires and damp. The municipality’s literary district plans include safer storage options.
Shea says Jozi’s book trade has a unique energy. “Here we have every combination of books and something else: a spaza shop and books; a hair salon and books; nappies and books.”
Shea’s store, Bridge Books, shares space with two artists’ studios and a coffee bar.
As noted by Nwigwe, religious books do a roaring trade and they tend to be the ones most translated into African languages.
“Not much is documented about local and mixedlanguage publications in SA, but there are hundreds in the Christian market,” says Shea.
De Strong Tower Christian Bookshop is a veteran among these stores. Then there is the Christian Fellowship Services shop, which has scores of vernacular religious books among its hymnals. It also sells pulpits and black robes.
Religious books range from mainstream church topics to admonitions about salvation or hellfire by US and Nigerian preachers.
Tracts by Nollywood preachers have a particularly fiery slant, with advice on everything from expelling maritime demons (AKA mermaids) to titles like O God, Terminate the Joy of My Enemy.
But much of the demand downtown is for business, self-improvement and educational books. At Blessing Taskatsa’s stall at the Joubert Street market, Think Yourself Rich, How to Win Friends and The President’s Keepers are displayed side by side on his narrow table, wedged between a bead stall and a food vendor selling chips and nuts.
Taskatsa sells about 60 books a month. Most of his
titles are business-focused. If it rains, he covers them with a plastic sheet.
A few stalls away, next to a seamstress, is a display that includes parenting books such as Baby Names Day by Day.
Present Zorwa is known as an expert collector in the book-selling fraternity. There is a loose sense of camaraderie among these retailers of recycled literature, but Zorwa once got into a fist-fight with a rival over a book they both wanted to buy.
He travels all over Johannesburg, from Florida to Benoni, to buy his stock, visiting sales held by the SPCA and other charity organisations and going to community events and church jumble sales.
He has a mental calendar of all these events, says Shea. “He once found a vintage copy of Winnie the
Pooh, bought it for R5 and sold it for a lot more. He finds antiquarian books, like on the Selous Scouts, which he sells to ‘ex-Rhodesians’.”
Not all the booksellers in this neck of the woods are informal. James Findlay Collectable Books and Antique Maps, in the basement of the Rand Club in Loveday Street, is an Aladdin’s cave of rare books and maps.
Findlay is carrying on the legacy of collectors like Robin Fryde, the world authority on Africana who for 50 years ran Frank R Thorold’s, one of SA’s most distinguished bookshops.
A Victorian sewing machine, which is still used to repair the bindings of books being restored, rests behind the counter where Findlay holds sway.
Vintage books and maps, celestial charts, antiapartheid posters and propaganda, paintings, lithographs and botanical illustrations are on display.
“Some of the maps are 400 years old, with sea monsters on them. I also have apartheid-era maps showing the ‘homelands’,” says Findlay.
“In the last six months I sold a book signed by Einstein for R80,000 and a signed copy of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger for R90,000.”
The Rand Club above Findlay’s shop has its own book collections: one in a members’ library and another in the Cecil Rhodes Library, which houses Rhodes’s own collection.
Private clubs often used to have their own libraries and many of them donated books to the city library.
Shea says: “The first ‘black’ library was in the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, where famous writers like Herbert Dhlomo and Peter Abrahams would socialise. But the club was shut down by the Group Areas Act and turned into government offices.”
People still found a way to read. Banned books were passed around secretly and many organisations produced their own publications. These were not confined to politics, as a copy of the Township
Women’s Club Cookbook shows.
Another venerable purveyor of fine antiques and books is Collectors Treasury, which takes up seven floors of a building in Doornfontein. Founded in 1974, it claims to be “the largest used and rare book shop in Africa and in the southern hemisphere”.
Shea says the brothers who own the store have a remarkable recall of their enormous stock. “I asked for a book about Mapungubwe and they said: ‘Go downstairs, sharp right, three stacks over, towards the bottom’, and there it was.”
Armstrong’s, which stocks university textbooks — those on display in the window are jazzed up with fairy lights — is another bastion of the city.
Pointing at faded advertisements on the building that housed the original CNA until the 1920s, Shea observes that books have been a priority in this city since it was founded.
“Eleven book stores were listed in the first business directory in 1890,” says Shea, who has become so enthralled by Johannesburg’s literary history that he is researching it for a PhD at Wits University.
Strolling past Dicky’s Cakes to his shop, Shea is at home in this bookish city that bucks the techno trend.