Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Open house for readers, authors and kids
Mervyn Sloman took a risk when he set up the Book Lounge in 2007
WHEN the Book Lounge was merely a gleam in his eye, Mervyn Sloman followed his wife Anneke’s bidding and paid a visit to a building on the corner of Roeland and Buitenkant streets.
Anneke had seen the “to let” sign and had sensed it was just the spot for the independent bookshop Sloman dreamed of.
But Sloman wasn’t so sure. It was all a little dispiriting; charming though the Victorian façade was, the interior, replete with “manky” carpet, was just too small. It was no match for his vision.
Then he spotted a hole in the floor.
“I stuck my head through the hole,” he recalled this week, “and saw this dank, dingy unused basement, and I thought, ‘ Hang on a minute, this could be cool.’”
The letting agent thought he was “a nutter”. And there were times in those mad months of late 2007 when Sloman thought as much himself.
When he eventually signed the lease agreement in October, he had just two months to set up shop, buy stock, recruit likeminded staff and get the show on the road by his own December 1 deadline.
“It was a Saturday morning and we were all there – along with workmen still finishing the floor – when someone opened the door and asked: ‘Are you open?’, and we said, ‘Okay, yes, we are now.’”
And that was it. The Book Lounge had arrived. In the eight years since, it has grown to become what the leading global travel guide, Lonely Planet, describes as “the hub of Cape Town’s literary scene”.
Authors clamour to launch their works at the shop, and readers pack the – on average – three events or launches there every week.
And the opening in a little more than a week from today of the fifth Open Book festival, a Sloman/Book Lounge venture, testifies to the impact of the shop and its progenitor not just on Cape Town’s books scene, but on a precinct of the city left torn and all but lifeless by the destruction of District Six and the forced removal of the people who once worked and shopped in these streets.
It was so unprepossessing even in 2007 when Sloman started out that people he knew in the publishing trade thought he was making a “tremendous mistake”.
“They were very supportive, but very worried, too, and most thought there was no way a bookshop could work in this area.”
He conceded that had he looked at the same location 18 months earlier he’d have ruled it out.
Even today, the recovery is incomplete and patchy, but the regeneration is palpable – the Book Lounge, the Fugard Theatre, the District Six Museum, along with coffee shops and other outlets, are succeeding in bringing life back into this long, overlooked quarter.
“It has a rich history,” Sloman pointed out, “but a painful one. There’s District Six, the old Roeland Street jail up the road, and Parliament a stone’s throw away… there’s a whole history that’s part of the fabric, and much of a history of pain and division.”
It was evident, Sloman noted, in a still common perception of the east city as blighted or hostile and semiout-of-bounds.
“That reluctance to come to this part of town is a token of the dividedness of the city.”
It’s a dividedness that the Book Lounge, among other initiatives, is helping to repair.
Sloman, born in 1970, grew up in Cape Town, and studied here, too – his first three years at university, before dropping out, were “spent registering for just about every course in social science, and doing nothing besides being a student activist”, but, after a stint overseas, he returned wiser and did a degree in political science.
Part-time work as a student at Exclusive Books had a lingering effect. “I realised eventually that working in bookshops was the only thing I actually enjoyed. I discussed it with my ever-loving and longsuffering wife (who is an editor and translator) and she said, ‘Go and do it, I understand you will never earn any money for the rest of our lives.’”
After five years at Exclusives, he decided to go it alone in 2007.
“There was a madness about that time,” he said, “but an incredible commitment to the project from everyone from day one.”
While aware that “if you take your foot off the pedal for a moment, you’re in trouble very quickly”, he also knew being an independent bookseller gave him the liberty to try new things.
And that came down to Sloman’s idea of what a bookshop is.
“It’s not simply a physical space where we sell products that happen to be books, but a space – a space for the free exchange of ideas. There aren’t many spaces where people feel comfortable expressing their opinions and engaging in a semi-public way.
“This space is public – there’s no barrier to entry – but not in sense of being in the street or at Newlands rugby stadium.
There’s sense of commonality which makes it safer, and I think it’s an important function of a bookshop to make a contribution in that way.”
Devising this function was tentative to start with. “I remember, early on, talking to one of the staff about holding an event at least once a week, a Wednesday maybe. And we were uncertain… if we committed to that we’d end up having events for the sake of it. Would we find something interesting to do every week?
“Well, three or four months later we were doing three or four events every week, and that’s been the pace ever since.”
Every Saturday morning is storytime for kids (in the early days, the Slomans’ twin daughters, Ansela and Ilse, now 13, would offer insistent breakfasttable advice on must-reads), which is one of a number of initiatives – the Book Lounge helps stock school libraries and supports other young-reader programmes.
All these things are bound up with the prosaic but unavoidable economics of independent bookselling. It’s not always easy, or predictable.
“A big part of what we have tried to do is to stock books we believe should be in a good bookshop. It’s difficult, because you have to sell books to pay your way, and keep a close eye on that.”
To start with, the shop stocked at least some books “we knew would fly… and quickly found that the stuff we thought would pay our salaries we could not sell. That, of course, becomes a good thing, reinforcing what you are trying to do. And that hasn’t changed. We sold a few copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, and there were some on the shelf that just got stolen. It’s not our thing.”
Along with discerning stock buying is the Book Lounge’s deliberate engagement with writers themselves.
“Authors, particularly Cape Town ones, very quickly understood this was a space in which they were respected and appreciated for what they do.”
Some booksellers, he said, tend to regard authors as a “pain in the butt”.
“I do try to be genuine. I don’t praise things I think are crap – which is difficult sometimes – but our approach is that without the authors there ain’t no books, so they need to be respected.”
Sloman is an avid reader himself (mostly fiction, and South African non- fiction). Right now his reading list is focused on the works of participants in the Open Book festival, which runs from September 9 to 13.
The event, co-ordinated by festival partner Frankie Murrey, was “quite a slog”, Sloman admitted, and every year “I swear I’ll never do it again. And then it’s just great”.
● For more information on the Open Book festival, see http:// openbookfestival. co. za and Fun Finder on page 18.