The Bookseller Who Sells Paris by the Shelf
Twenty-two years of hand-selling the moderns at Fennel Street Books. June Okafor on which Hemingway to give a skeptic, the customers who whisper when they ask for Miller, and the one question that sorts every reader.
June Okafor has run the fiction floor at Fennel Street Books for twenty-two years, and her modernist shelf — she calls it 'the Paris shelf,' though it holds Brooklyn and the Italian front too — turns over faster than the new releases three tables away. Her handwritten shelf cards never summarize; they sort. The one under The Sun Also Rises reads, in full: 'For the reader who suspects their friends are having more fun than they are. (They aren't. Read this.)' We talked on a Tuesday while she unpacked a delivery. (This conversation has been edited and condensed.)
Her sorting question for the whole era is characteristically blunt. "I ask: do you want the party or the hangover? The party people get A Moveable Feast — cafés, hunger, being twenty-five and talented. The hangover people get Céline, straight, no garnish. It's the same city and the same war underneath, but a reader who wants one will bounce clean off the other. The mistake every syllabus makes is assuming there's one door into the twenties. There are at least four, and they're labeled by temperament."
"Do you want the party or the hangover?"
The whisper customers
"People still lower their voices asking for Tropic of Cancer, which delights me — it's been legal since before I was born. I tell them the true story: this book went to the Supreme Court so that every other book on my tables could be honest, and the scandalous parts are the least interesting thing in it. Read the first forty pages, I say. If the prose doesn't pick you up by the collar, no refunds on the scandal. About half come back for Black Spring, and those are my people."
The harder conversations, she says, are Céline and Pound. "I don't soften it. I say: this novelist later wrote vile antisemitic pamphlets; this poet broadcast for the fascists. Then I say: and the books on this shelf are among the great books of the century, and both things stay true at once. Customers respect the eyes-open version. What they can smell instantly is a seller pretending the problem isn't there — or pretending the books aren't great. Either pretense kills the sale, and worse, it kills the reading."
The reliable doors
"The Old Man and the Sea is my mercy door — an afternoon, no homework, and suddenly they're not afraid of Hemingway. Mauberley is the same trick for Pound: eighteen pages, and the war stanzas do the rest. For Céline there is no mercy door, there's just Journey, and I've learned to spot the reader it's for: a certain kind of funny, a certain kind of angry, usually recently disappointed by something institutional. I've never once had that reader bring it back unfinished. The moderns aren't hard. They're just badly introduced."
