Bookworms of Istanbul are being treated for the fifth year in a row to an immense collection of second-hand books in what is the 2011 edition of the Beyoglu Municipality’s Sahaf (Bibliopole) Festival, currently under way in the Tepebasi quarter.
Some 70 booksellers taking part in this year’s fair — including a small number from Ankara — were busy with preparations that included erecting tents and organizing stands and bookcases a few days ahead of the event’s Sept. 6 launch, when bookworms started to flock to the venue to flip and browse through the foxed pages of thousands of old books on the shelves.
The fair, which used to be held in Taksim’s Gezi Park during its first four editions, is this year taking place in front of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) building in Tepebasi, where it is running through Sept. 18.
This bookworms’ haven offers not only old, out-of-print or second-hand books, but also a diverse collection of ephemera such as postcards, black and white photographs, old movie posters, stock certificates, notary books and old comic books. Handwritten manuscripts from the Ottoman period, letters and other correspondence between famous literary figures are also in the mix.
Those strolling among festival stands on the first day ranged from a man looking for an Ottoman publication of Tevfik Fikret’s book of poems “Haluk’un Defteri” (Haluk’s Notebook), to another searching for a copy of Italian author Cesare Pavese’s novella “La casa in collina” (The House on the Hill). The crowd remained in the festival area until late in the evening, searching each and every shelf in every stand for the pieces they were looking for. For booksellers, sales were more than satisfying.
Bibliopoles from Kadikoy, Eroglu and Beyazit – Istanbul’s three districts that are home to bazaars where second-hand bookstores are located — have been coming together on the same platform for five years now for this annual event. However, they are not all very happy with the occasion, for there is serious competition among them.
The festival’s participants from these three areas normally try to avoid coming together on the same scene in other times, so much so that even in this festival, they are reluctant to appear together in the same snapshot. The competition between the bibliopoles of Kadikoy and Beyoglu is even tougher, with Beyoglu booksellers taking no account of those in Kadikoy, while in return their peers across the Bosporus brand those in Beyoglu as “mere second-hand booksellers.” The rivalry among them is so fierce that it has even prevented them from uniting under the roof of a single professional guild to date. So the bibliopoles of Beyazit and those of Beyoglu have separate professional associations of their own. Their Kadikoy-based peers, on the other hand, are currently working to found their own union.
The most important fact that feeds this competition is the difficulty bibliopoles have been facing in getting their hands on old, out-of-print and rare books to add to their collections for the past few years. Bibliopoles who used to buy old books by the truckload in the past now feel themselves lucky if they can find old prints that can barely fill one grocery bag. The reason behind this scarcity is that long-standing private book collections are being sold (or sometimes donated) to new owners in their entirety now. And of course, the increase in the number of second-hand sales via the Internet adds to their plight.
Lutfi Seymen has been running a bookstore in Kadikoy for 30 years. He has taken part in all five Beyoglu Bibliopole Festivals to date and says sales have been particularly good in the past two years. Seymen thinks the competition between Istanbul’s bibliopoles is natural. According to him, Beyoglu’s bibliopoles billing themselves “genuine traders” and accusing others of not being so shows the direness of the situation. “People who cannot read a single word of Ottoman [Turkish] call themselves bibliopoles. Why would I be jealous of bibliopoles in Beyoglu? What’s there to be jealous if that person has no relation with books, if he doesn’t understand old [Ottoman] script? In my opinion, there are only a handful of real bibliopoles in Beyoglu. The rest are merely second-hand book sellers,” he says.
Another trader from Kadikoy, Ufuk Korkmaz, who has been in the business for 20 years, says Kadikoy and Beyoglu are two different worlds in the same city. Praising the Beyoglu Bibliopole Festival, Korkmaz says the event has helped break prejudices and lessen the rivalry among them while feeding fellowship.
Reha Ulku from across the strait, a Beyoglu bibliopole, brags about the books he recently bought from a retiree in Kadikoy. “I learned that there was a very valuable collection in Kadikoy. It included books of high market value. I went there and selected ones I knew would be good for my business. Getting your hands on a book from Kadikoy is a sensational achievement for us [in Beyoglu]. And the reverse is true for Kadikoy’s bibliopoles,” he says.
Emin Nedret Isli, the organizer of the Beyoglu festival who also owns a bookstore in Beyoglu, says the idea of launching a festival that will gather all of them on the same platform was rejected by all of his peers at first. Isli, who has been in the business since 1978, says he turned a deaf ear to those comments and went ahead with the event. And he turned out to be right, for the festival catered to all bibliopoles of the city as it helped them reduce their stocks. Seeing the outcome of the first year, more booksellers took part in each new edition, marking a record 70 in the fifth year.
Isli says their next goal is to unite all bibliopole associations in Istanbul under one roof. “Thanks to this festival, bibliopoles get to know each other, preconceptions are overcome. … Let bygones be bygones. Among bibliopoles here, there are those who did not even want to be in the same snapshot in the past, but now they have become friends,” he says, adding that there is still more to be done. “If we can found a union that will unite all bibliopole associations and later launch a journal, these would really help us bring down the walls between us,” he says.
