GREECE: Book shopping in Hellas
by David Loftus
Until recently in the United States, retailers tended to stake out territory that was not close to anyone else in the same business.
A kind of assumption of individuality and autonomy underlay this approach: You don't want to see your competition in action every day, and you want to stand out from the neighboring businesses as a specialist in whatever it is you do.
The same logic operates in most malls: tenants make a compact with the mall owner that there will be no other retailer in their line of business in their wing of the mall, if not throughout the entire facility.
Although it has begun to dawn on American businesses in recent years that similar retail operations can realize a kind of snowball effect in sales if they locate in the same area, the only instance in the past where I can recall this happening is in fast food, where a Wendy's and a Burger King and a DQ and a KFC might accrete along a strip.
The Greeks have known differently a long time. Similar businesses cluster together at the same parts of town, as if for comfort and warmth.
In Athens, for example, jewelers lined up one after another along Adrianou in the Plaka, and around the corner on Benizelou where Carole brought a bracelet.
I noticed a string of bead shops, so to speak, along Miltiadou, northeast of the Monastiraki district. And on Solonos and neighboring side streets like Asklipiou, I could walk pretty much door to door for bookstores.
Within a six or eight block area, I entered or at least saw 20 to 25.
You have to think about it to see what good sense this approach makes. A shopper in search of a particular article, or class of goods, is more likely to wander into your business if you put it next to or close to your direct competition.
You're going to attract a lot more browsers and chance walk-ins that way than if you depend on customer loyalty or advertising which most individual businesses can't afford.
It certainly is convenient for the comparison shopper. (Carole has told me she knows of marketing studies in the U.S. that suggest retailers indeed generate more volume when they locate near similar operations.)
Since books are one of my passions, and I think bookstores offer an interesting window into a culture, I spent many hours in them.
Although a few were designed on the Waldenbooks or Barnes & Noble model of wide-open, squarish spaces with display tables in the center, most of the Athens bookstores were of a "shotgun" variety: fairly deep and narrow, with perhaps a breadth of only 15 to 20 feet and a depth of 60 or 80, and lined with shelves from front to rear.
Often a spiral staircase at the back led up (and sometimes down) to more books, or private office (or maybe even living) space.
Translations from English had been incredibly spotty three years before in Estonia, where I saw Poe and Doyle next to biographies of Pat Boone and Joan Collins.
In Greece there was a wider and more sensible selection: a lot of mysteries and detective stories, from Chandler and Agatha Christie to P.D. James and Elizabeth George, as well as Jules Verne.
In most of these cases, fairly simple language with highly compelling plots probably explains the appeal (to translators if not readers!).
I noticed that Greek translations of The English Patient and Snow Falling on Cedars were on sale fairly hot off the press in 1997.
Searching for something I might want to buy was a fascinating process, like feeling my way in almost pitch darkness.
I started out not really looking for anything in particular, it was difficult to recognize anything I might want, and I didn't know how to find something I knew I'd want if I thought of it. It was like being on a treasure hunt with only half the map.
Sounding out names in Greek -- few were reproduced in English -- was like trying to crack a code, and I experienced repeated mini epiphanies as the titles and authors slowly rose out of the script.
For example, what would you make of this?
I knew from the little bit of Greek I had studied before the trip (as well as regular checking of pocket references) that the I, A, and Z were fairly close to English, and that what looks like a P in the second word is actually pronounced R in Greek, but I'm afraid I would not have figured this one out had not the book's title been reproduced in English: Junky. It was William Burroughs.
Having cracked that odd first name made it easier to recognize this one: the author of The Sound and Fury:
With increasing glee I copied down in my travel journal (from which these graphic reproductions have been scanned) the following:
The first is the name, rendered in the Greek alphabet, of a brooding, German-speaking fabulist from Prague, while the second (for something completely different) is an American folksinger who was closely identified with Bob Dylan and had a hit called "Diamonds and Rust." I think the book may have been her autobiography.
Here are two book titles I don't think I would have deciphered if their authors had not been anglicized:
The first one begins with "Tom," obviously, but what could the second word be? Here's the hint: the author's name is Henry Fielding. As for the second, don't even try. It's a sprawling adventure and philosophical narrative by Herman Melville.
It was a stroke of luck to discover a book with the picture of John Fowles on the cover because I'm not sure I would have easily recognized his name rendered in Greek. (You can see the cover reproduced in my essay on on buying books overseas.)
Much of the time, I guessed titles by the cover art, some of which was startlingly original. Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, which had a very flat drawing of a clown face in its American edition, had a compelling and creepy photograph of an old-fashioned ceramic doll with half its mouth melted away, revealing sharp teeth, and some newspaper comics on its lap.
I ended up bringing home two books by Fowles, a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to go with my Estonian version, and T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the inspiration for the hit musical "Cats," with reproductions of its original artwork. (Again, see the cover art for these in my foreign books essay.)
All in Greek, all never to be read by me.