Masqueraders: Anthony V. Capildeo
An excerpt from Anthony V. Capildeo's new selection of essays
This week’s article is an excerpt from the prologue of Anthony V. Capildeo’s Masqueraders, which is published this month.
Get 15% off Masqueraders using code JULYBOOKS15 here.
Letter from Trinidad: Christmas in Joan’s Bookshop
London. A plush hall. Tiers of poets and other businesspersons. A voice from on high: ‘A book can be marketed exactly like a smoothie’. Oxford. ‘Meet me in the bookshop’s secondhand department. We can grab a coffee. I’ve already done my shopping, in the children’s section.’ Consider the winter of bookshops in Britain? Well, for now, here is a different story. I fly...
Christmastime transforms Trinidad, my other island, where Hanukkah remains cryptic, the solstice alternative is little known, and Catholics and Hindus unite in their love of twinkly lights and lavish giftwrap. The wet-bright December sky thickens alcoholically, like ponche de crême.
Christmas Eve in Joan Dayal’s Paper Based Bookshop at the Hotel Normandie in Port of Spain: how does this work?
Everything has its language; and O Reader conversant with Planograms, Reader aware that Footfall (people) may increase where the Shop Floor exploits the Pinball Effect (sidetracking customers into a maze of undreamt purchases), Reader innocent of the Bum-Brush Effect (can an unsmall person, carrying an unsmall bag, browse the aisles without fear of contact?), Reader with Retail Awareness, how to account for the liveliness, the ease, in Joan’s tiny, overcrowded bookstore?
Miraculously, everyone who enters wants to buy new books, preferably hardcover. Nobody leaves empty-handed. In fact, these customers, or visitors, make demands and declarations, lamenting that their desires exceed their means. An architect’s wife, in a minatory tone, asks Joan whether the book on the Carib wars that was reviewed is still in print. Joan knows it is, and where copies are shelved; she has probably read it. The distinguished writer Earl Lovelace (my generation ‘did him for O levels’) manifests, typically white-clad, with a young relative who is looking for the Divine Comedy, specifically not an e-text but a book she can hold. Joan doesn’t have this. The pair exit, promising to return for other books; Joan will wait for them and keep the shop open. ‘Trinidadians read a lot more now’, says Joan; her customers usually arrive wanting ‘something special’.
Perhaps the magic resides in the theatricality of the Paper Based Bookshop’s setting: visitors are transformed, threshold-crossers. You drive past the armed guard, park your car and stroll up wide stairs. Ahead, a hardwood staircase to the upper galleries shelters a piano and bears a dahlia-filled terracotta vase ample enough for an emperor. To the right: a restaurant and some artisan boutiques. To the left: a tiled awning overhanging the bookshop’s showcase, which angles round to the doorway; stands of bright wrapping paper and newspapers. You step in gingerly. The real purchasers, men, women and children, surge. A lady shouts gleefully, ‘There are two kinds of people in shops this hour: last minute, and fellas for their outside woman’. She greets the world: ‘Bye everybody. Hi everyone.’
Perhaps the magic results from the determination to make things work. Twenty-five years ago, Joan Dayal was a housewife, a former teacher, with two children and a broken marriage. The Hotel Normandie was being redesigned by a few individuals; with little beyond her alimony, Joan took on its bookshop. In those days, her rolls of bright wrapping paper helped make the shop look full. Joan started negotiating with the representatives of Caribbean-interest foreign publishers of the time: Longman, Heinemann, Macmillan. Trinidad’s Paria Publishing concentrated on high-quality non-fiction, so Joan also took a chance on self-published local authors of fiction and poetry…
This week’s article is an excerpt from Anthony V. Capildeo’s Masqueraders, which is published this month.
Get 15% off Masqueraders using code JULYBOOKS15 here.