Lost Treasure

Jaroslav Michalik walks with a stick. He has 17 stitches in his hip from a recent operation to fix an old climbing injury. Though his face is a mask of discomfort he manages to mutter something to himself that brings a faint laugh. It’s just before eleven and he is opening the two brass padlocks that secure the big iron barred gate to the door of his bookshop. As we step from the cold frosted street into the gloom a new combination of smells fill my nose. Of old dust and paper and the sickly sweet cure of stale sweat and cigarette smoke on wet clothes. Jaro locates the light switch with timed precision in the near dark and after a couple of sputters the room is washed in fluorescent light. Adjusting to the light you see a thirty square metre room with about eight square metres of space left usable. Everywhere the eye can see books. Books of all description known piled up from floor to ceiling, half in bookshelves the room bisected by a wall of books to create a small corridor, piles of books almost obscuring the windows where the desk and chair at which Jaro spends his working day until six in the evening sit. The desk too is a patchwork of piled books, old playing cards, ashtrays, photographs and scraps of paper with names and numbers scrawled on them.
The used bookshop is known as an antikvariat in Slovakia and of the handful in the city of Bratislava Jaro’s has to be the smallest. Sitting at the foot of a row of panel flats on a quiet side street almost obscured by the cars in the car park a small brown metal door with Antik and Variat stencilled in two lines with white tape are the only visible clues. Inside the bookshop Jaro is small, strong and straight faced sitting at his desk greeting all with a “Good day” and sometimes a calculating look. Somewhat like an ice berg only one third of the books seem visible at any one time and if you know what you are looking for Jaro can usually tell you within a few seconds whether he has it and can bring it to hand in anything between two minutes and half an hour depending on how many walls of books it is necessary to move. From classics to comic’s, old vinyl to chipped plates, autographs to photo albums from the late 1800’s among the necessary ballast there are gems: A first edition Somerset Maugham, hand drawn German maps from the thirties, a rare Russian edition of Bob Dylan's Slow Train A Comin’ and the odd daguerreotype of families in their Sunday best staring out with frozen silvery eyes into the now ghost world of a Budapest photo studio.
“ Interesting things “ Jaro says. And you know by the break in his expression, the crows feet fanning out from his eyes that a few words are his way of conveying a deep interest and connection to these mementos of crumbling history. The bookshop is two years old the space was previously home to an internet café and a communal cellar for the dwellers of the nine floor flat. He built up his collection over a period of years before the realisation of the bookshop, travelling to villages and towns to buy from people’s houses sifting through the rubbish in basements and attics for treasure, thousands of conversations and amateur history lessons later the shop stands as a living tomb, as fragile and somehow temporary as memories themselves.
“ Little people “ Another of his English phrases though not meaning children or dwarfs but few customers, both a sad reminder of the decreasing literacy of a generation addicted to disposable entertainment and the reality of a business quite literally faced with a shelf life. “ People do not buy old books, they give new things as presents “ The majority of buyers tend to be of the older generation with little money to spare. There are artists, philosophers, professors and collectors that routinely visit exchanging books and opinions. One day I was introduced to Julius Koller a famous Slovak artist, slightly built and hawk eyed with wild unkempt silver hair and a beard from the bible, he suggested I make a portrait of him orchestrating a scene where he was outside behind the barred gate of the bookshop as if incarcerated, frustration on his face from as he said “ Not being able to get to my favourite bookshop “. There is Tony in his sixties who travels from a nearby flea market on Fridays pushing an old bicycle laden down with plastic bags full of books his thick tinted glasses reflecting a perfect inverted amber version of the interior. Guidos an ex- gymnast from the 1940s Czechoslovak Olympic team smartly dressed in shirt and tie back from a seminar in Chicago where he was a guest speaker on the development of gymnastic technique. A glass of wine and a piece of his sisters cake along with the usual inquisition albeit in flawless English on why I am here in Slovakia. Guidos as sharp and strong as many a man half his age.
“ If you’ve seen the smallest then you have to see the biggest “ And so one Saturday we took the car a hundred kilometres to Leopoldov the home of Central Europe’s largest old book shop. Though Leopoldov is more famously known for its prison and the town has a reputation for alcohol and crime. It’s a one street town with enough elements to quicken your pulse. And arriving outside the bookshop you see it shares part of a building with a pub full of mean drunks, the smell of beer and urine sharp in the air. Ring a bell and from behind a door a well built bearded man with a sport coat and some type of captains hat appears at the kind of barred gate usually seen in old prison films. Inside in a room the size of half a football pitch are 250 thousand old books lined up in tall shelves that give the appearance of book monuments towering over small patches of threadbare carpet. In fact when viewed from above on the second floor the carpet appears like small brown valleys dwarfed by the steep cliffs made by the books. A solid silent mass of words.

“Coffee” Says the man in the captain’s hat. The man in the hat happens to be called Tibor and as well as being the owner of the bookshop he is also a keen fisherman and an excellent accordion player. As well as 250 thousand books, dozens of typewriters, electrical goods and crockery he also has a collection of around 100 accordions and some very nice homemade apple brandy so let the entertainment begin. Tibor sits behind his desk and holds court with whoever is in front of him listening. He sends out for beer and soon after picks up a beautiful old Italian harmonica and starts to play “We’ll meet again” the Vera Lynne classic apparently for me, he follows this with some folk and gypsy standards all tunes played with great gusto and comedy asides. Tibor is a born entertainer and clearly appreciates being the centre of attention. He shows me his visitor’s book with signatures and comments from the various domestic and foreign dignitaries, politicians, professors and public that have visited his bookshop. Photographs of him with old Russian and Slovak presidents. Tibor always in a sport coat and hat of some description. He too is suffering from loss of business due to “little people” though with his location and size it is more understandable. He has some gems but a lot more ballast and I can’t help thinking that through time the good stuff will be picked off leaving behind a paperback carcass of books that are all but redundant. Still the experience is worth the trip and though a couple of T.V and newspaper articles give Tibor a reason to brush down a sport coat and don a different hat it’s the support of “Little people” meaning people in general, for them to renew an interest in things old and lend some support to these musty old bookshops and maybe find themselves some lost treasure or at the least a piece of plain and simple history.