Reflections on high-street booksellers in South Korea:
I only had half a day's work today, so I met my wife and daughter and we drove back to Seoul together.
I'd watched Mark Kermode's review of Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of Dune the night before and had decided to finally rectify the fact that despite being a big fan of David Lynch's 1984 version, I have never read Frank Herbert's novel.
Most bookshops of even modest size in South Korea have an English-language section, but, frankly, most of them are pathetic, stocking at best a comparable selection to an airport newsagent in Bogota. Now that I have become one of Seoul's 9.8 million residents, however, I no longer have to suffer such indignities: we headed straight for Kyobo's flagship bookshop on Gwanghwamun, the capital's most famous thoroughfare. Kyobo is the Korean equivalent of Waterstones, and this place is a veritable Mecca for readers (video below).
With the political protests constantly humming outside (I love a good lunatic: mostly rabid right-wingers in attendance today, but they were all smiles), and an autumn nip in the air, I confess that I was in a chirpy mood; autumn has always been my favourite season and it's been a long old week that I was glad to see the back of.
Notes
- The video above is overlit; in reality, the place has the luminosity of a brasserie at dusk, and in the quieter corners it would not seem out of place to image the steam from coffee cups, especially now that the temperature outside has dropped. The reason: lamps and side-lighting everywhere. The kind of overhead 'white-light' that permeates South Korea (I hate it) has here been abandoned in favour of warmer hues from recessed bulbs. This militates against the impersonal cold that normally hangs over such large premises--this place is more like a homely Labyrinth!
- Samples: all of the most popular titles are wrapped in a cellophane envelope; this included all of the mainstream paperbacks that are presented lying flat on tables. They're stacked high with an unwrapped and invariably dog-eared sample copy for everybody to browse on top. This means that the copy you take home is almost always crisp and unmarked. And as to browsing, it's absolutely the norm, possibly for hours. People sit down at the tables and chairs provided and read a chapter or more before buying, and nobody minds; in fact, the staff like it. People who come and read books invariably buy books and selling books is the goal!
- Displays: some of these are wholly surprising. For example, there was a large corner given over to a brand-new translation of Plutarch's Lives. There's a giant cardboard cutout of the professor responsible, with several paragraphs explaining what he (and perhaps you) can get out of reading Plutarch. There are a variety of vintage English language editions of the same texts in a cabinet (selling you a ticket to the great academic adventure) as well as replicas of Greek statues. The point that I found surprising is that there's no tie-in TV series to promote and no vacuous celebrity enlisted, it's just so naïve that it might work: a businessman, a secretary and an art student might just pass through and go home with some Greek literature!
- Discount: imported books were very similarly prices to the UK and the U.S., only a bit of a mark-up on the hardbacks. While I was busy making selections with my daughter, however, my wife has signed up for the Kyobo membership card, which no doubt means we'll be spammed with advertising and events, but was free and offered a 25% discount on the day's purchases! That's really quite a bit considering we spent about ₩,80,000 ($67/£49).
- 'Book concierge': they have information desks manned by staff without cash registers. Their job is to advise you on your purchases, take orders for books not in stock and help you find what you want. Those in a hurry or with specific needs can be in and out (and out of the way much quicker, which keeps the considerable number of customers in store at any time down a little.
Returning to the point, I wanted a copy of
Dune and was expecting to find an American paperback (there are many more U.S. editions imported than U.K.). The problem is, and I say this with no sense of chauvinism, many U.S. paperbacks are of poor quality manufacture--cheap paper (doubly so for children's books), weakly glued bindings, and (though I acknowledge this is a matter of taste) ugly cover designs. I'd braced myself for having to settle for a movie tie-in edition with a hideous shot from the film on the front, so you can imagine my relief when this met my eyes:
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I think that's rather nice. It reminds me of the stylishly airbrushed artwork they had on the old JG Ballard paperbacks.
That relief, alas, was short-lived.
Dune isn't a short book, and they've printed it in a very odd format that I don't think I've ever seen before: it was notably narrower than a standard paperback and, hence, much thicker than you would imagine. Now, you'd think that this would make the whole thing quite hefty and brick-like, but the paper it is printed on is
horribly thin--not far off the stuff they used to use for Bibles. The result is that if you hold it (closed) at one side between thumb and forefinger, the other side droops down under its own weight and lack of rigidity, like the Yellow Pages...
Relief returns: I found this on the other side of the desk for W40,000.
The UK Golancz hardback edition: published last month and it's lovely.
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Details:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dune-major-director-Blade-Runner/dp/147323395X/ref=sr_1_13?crid=20GFY1YB8F4R5&dchild=1&keywords=frank+herbert+dune&qid=1634989332&sprefix=frank+herbert+d,aps,258&sr=8-13
It's lighter (and hence more modern feeling) than it looks (page weight has been reduced to keep the size of those 624 pages down), but at that Amazon price it's still an absolute steal. I love the cover art, the decorated boards and (possibly most of all) the slightly absurd spine inscription, and all of that plus the quotes has got me more excited about reading the story; Gollancz should be congratulated on knowing their business and producing such a nice edition at a fair price.