Book-Buying in Cape Town

It’s our fifth day in Cape Town and we’ve been taking it slow. A museum, a walking tour, a trip up Table Mountain, yes. But also midday naps, movie nights, and lots of wandering on foot. And like the bloodhound for bookstores that I am, that wandering has taken me to several book sellers here.

First up was The Book Lounge in the city center. It’s gorgeous and airy upstairs, with (true to its name) a lounge and coffee shop downstairs. It also seems to be the hub of literary Cape Town – flyers for openings and readings studded the stairwell, the store was filled with chatter even on a weekday afternoon, and it runs a program called the Open Box Library Project which puts mini-libraries in underserved schools. Really lovely.

The next day, someone at the table next to me at Superette in the Woodstock Exchange recommended I check out Bibliophilia, just down the street from my AirBnB. The shop was filled with art books and old magazines and was quiet, manned only by its British owner. Feeling a bit awkward about snooping and snapping away in an empty shop, I finally broke the ‘talk to the owner about what I’m doing’ barrier, to huge reward. She told me the store’s story – that it’s a labor of love between her and her partner, who also works as a distributor for local authors. On her recommendation, I bought a signed first edition (maybe the only edition?) of Slim Foot on the Neck of the Dead Lion, a disturbingly-named but beautifully bound collection of stories and poems written by Cape-born author Dominique Cheminais. Then, at the owner’s urging, I also bought The Initiation, a graphic novel by Mogorosi Motshumi. I haven’t read a graphic novel since Fun Home – they really aren’t my thing – but this one is significant. It’s the first graphic autobiography ever written by a black South African, and this book – the first of three volumes of his life story – recounts his experiences growing up in Bloemfontein’s Batho township. I feel like I learned more about South Africa in a half-hour in Bibliophilia than I had in the previous three days – what a fantastic place.

Finally, about 15 minutes down the road, I hit Blank Books, a sleepy used book store in an unassuming mini-mall that feels out of sorts in trendy Woodstock. There, people read amidst the stacks of books and chatted amiably with the shopkeeper about special orders and hard-to-find titles. That shopkeeper, upon spotting me staring dumbly at the wall of South African fiction, recommended J.M. Coetzee, a Nobel prizewinner who he called a “good gateway author for South African writing.” I bought Waiting for the Barbarians – an allegory on oppression – though surely by the time I read it I will have long passed the gateway and be deep in the heart of South African writing.