BEIRUT: Lebanon has its fair share of annual book fairs, with three international platforms each catering to audiences literate in Arabic, English and French. These events tend to be cloistered affairs, however, enclosed within high-end enclaves – BIEL, for instance.
For those put off by such venues there’s Montmartre at Monot, organized by the art library/bookshop RectoVerso. The most-recent edition of this monthly street-level book market convened Saturday at St. Joseph Street, just off Monnot Street.
Professional antiquarians and second-hand book vendors met up to display their literary treasures.
“Undoubtedly, Montmartre at Monot is the first street book market in Lebanon,” Gabriela Schaub, who with art historian Cesar Nammour co-founded RectoVerso, told The Daily Star. “We aim to encourage acquiring books and reading. We organize the market on the first Saturday of each month.”
Schaub and Nammour are major promoters of art in Lebanon. Besides the street book market and RectoVerso, they are also the co-founders of the Beirut Art Book Fair and the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum (MACAM) in Alita, Jbeil, along with directing Fine Arts Publishing, the only publishing house in Lebanon specialized in art books.
The street market offers a huge variety of bargain books of different genres: history and geography, psychology, art and design, cooking, children’s novels, magazines, biographies and more. One could find books in various languages, mainly English, Arabic, French, German and Italian.
Most of the books are secondhand, while some are new tomes by Lebanese and Arab artists and authors such as Jamil Molaeb, Mazen Rifai, Chawky Frenn, Gebran Tarazi, Samia Halaby and Nammour. Book prices vary between $1 and $20, with some being given away for free.
On the cobbled St. Joseph Street, cars could still pass alongside the bookstands. Some books were lined by genre on plastic tables, some randomly arranged in plastic baskets, while others were piled in cardboard boxes placed on the sidewalk. Yellow umbrellas were fixed center-table to protect from the sun so people could enjoy a book hunt in a congenial open-air atmosphere.
“Anyone can set up a stand at the market,” Schaub said. “Booksellers are offered a table with tablecloth, chairs and an umbrella for which they are charged LL20,000 for the day, with all revenue from book sales going solely to them.”
The market draws many booksellers. A young interior designer said that the reason she exhibits is to declutter her library at home, joking that “it’s a good source of side-money.” Naturally, she packed her stand with interior design magazines like the famed Frame magazine.
Book stands were not only minded by young booksellers. Writer Faysal Farhat, a regular exhibitor at the market, sells his personal collection of books as well as his published own, that go for lower prices at the street market than sold at local stores.
Alongside books, one could find other riches. A mother and her daughter were selling their old DVDs beside their books. Farhat was also selling old cassette tapes of Marcel Khalife, Fairuz and Ziad Rahbani. Painter Olga Safa booked a stand to exhibit her latest tango themed collection of mixed-media paintings.
People were seen to be enjoying their time treasure hunting. Two young foreign girls, excitedly checking one bookstand, said that they stumbled upon the street book market by mere coincidence when they were taking a stroll down Monnot. A young man rejoiced when he found his Arabic history schoolbook tucked in one of the yellow plastic baskets, delightfully flipping through its still intact pages, and said that it could be an interesting reread.
Checking out the bookstands were people from different age groups, mainly young locals and foreigners, “where the latter oftentimes exceed the Lebanese attendants, who seem to be less interested in old books,” Schaub noted.
The market, Schaub said, strives to continue despite the relative decline in recreational literacy.
“One of our faithful participants has now taken the initiative and is holding a book market in the garden of the old souk of Byblos,” the organizer added as she arranged loud speakers, emitting gentle Latin music on the sidewalk.
Though Monnot Street has become a less dense social hub (aka bar souq) in recent years, with much of eastern Beirut’s nightlife migrating to Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael, Schaub is satisfied with the current location of the book market, saying St. Joseph Street is rich in cultural institutions.
In addition to the RectoVerso public library, the neighbourhood streets also host Assabil public library, the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music, Theatre Monnot, the Municipal Public Library of Monnot, the Museum of Lebanese Prehistory, Universite St. Joseph and the St. Joseph Church, where the concerts of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra are held on a weekly basis.
“Without books,” Schaub said, “there is no history.”
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