A village called Narberth Bookshop ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 238th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

‘There are lots of bookstores in Harvard Square. There’s Wordsworth which has a sign saying “dedicated to the noble art of browsing.”’

This is what my Aunty Lakshmi, that is, Mrs Lakshmi Jeganathan, told me when I informed her that I was going to study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her son and my dear friend Pradeep had already graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located a couple of miles away on Mass Avenue. Aunty Lakshmi must have visited Pradeep, perhaps for his graduation.

I discovered Wordsworth as well as many bookstores in and around Harvard Square, many of them selling used books. I browsed and understood what was meant in the saying ‘bookstores and libraries are where you don’t feel the time pass.’

Aunty Lakshmi, ever the teacher, was essentially telling me, ‘browse!’ I have been doing that since. Wherever I go.

This evening, I had the opportunity to visit a small and enchanting bookstore in a small town called Narberth, close to Philadelphia. Narberth Bookshop was set up in 2016 by Ellen Trachtenberg, who is at once owner, part-time cashier and organiser of events such as the book reader I was attending.

I later learned that she had spent 26 years in the publishing industry. Apparently, she had been inspired in part by the long years working in the Greenwich Village bookstore ‘Three Lives & Company.’ In an interview given to Billy Penn at WHYY, a local news team, around the time the store was launched, Ellen acknowledged that ‘no bookstore’s going to compete with Amazon’ and that she doesn’t pretend to be either.

‘We’re trying to evoke this memory — sensory memory may be — of what it feels like to be a bookstore where people love books,’ she said, remarking also that Narberth is ‘a very close-knit community where people walk, they bike, there’s a train.’ In other words, ’it has all these qualities of a village.’

According to Ellen, as she said in the same interview, her idea of a good bookstore is a small facility ‘filled only with books that are recommendable, with no fillers.’ That’s probably the best response to something written in a piece titled ‘6 new bookstores to check out around Philly,’ published in Phillymag: ‘It’s hard to comprehend how so many great reads fit into this compact space.’ Simply, ‘no fillers.’

Glancing through the pages of a few books whose titles or blurbs intrigued me, I felt surrounded by a multitude of peoples, cultures and geographies of all kinds. That’s not unusual in bookstores. Writers pour their hearts and minds onto the pages we eventually get to read. They draw from their lives, the lives they encountered and mix these with the insights they’ve collected and detail for us the nuances pertaining to human interaction and the human condition. They teach us new ways of looking at ourselves, each other and the worlds around us.

I hadn’t yet read the articles mentioned above, but I noticed a sign: ‘a community of readers, writers and lifelong learners.’ It was a warm sign. It spelled ‘village’ to me. It was a literary event, so there was conversation, some debate and lots of smiles and laughter. Narberth Bookshop seems to have been made for such moments. I was in good company, good people who, like me, did not feel out of place in the company of the larger community present in the form of ‘recommendable books.’

The event finished, Ellen went about her usual shop-closing routine even as those present continued conversations. A word or two. A ready smile. She had her village. She had her fellow-villagers. I felt they had, in their own way, re-imagined Narberth and were re-peopling its architecture. With books.

Wordsworth was closed down in October 2004 after Donna Friedman and Hillel Stavis who had founded it in 1975 had failed to find an investor to keep the by then loss-making store afloat. Harvard Square had by that time lost most of its quaintness anyway. Maybe if it had retained some of its ‘villageness’ Wordsworth may have survived.

There’s still Narberth Bookshop though, and hopefully, also, other such places where communities of readers, writers and lifelong learners exist, and are kept warm in villageness by their very own Ellen Trachtenbergs.

Meanwhile, let us browse!

08 October 2023

A village called Narberth Bookshop

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