Assoline

Sylvie told me about a bookshop in Manhattan that she visited years ago. It was in an uptown neighbourhood on the east side. You entered through a pair of heavy glass doors set into carved art nouveau panels on the outside wall of the building. If you photographed it from a certain angle it would look like a bookshop in Paris, one that had been in business since the time of the second Empire, the kind of place that might have had Zola and Proust as customers. At least, that’s what she said.
Inside was a vast and almost empty space, in muted tones of red and black, with lighting that emerged from you-knew-not-where. Around the walls of this space at about chest height was a single shelf on which the books were displayed, cover out, and if you wanted to examine one you approached the bookseller, who sat at a black desk in the middle of the shop, and the bookseller gave you a pair of white cotton gloves to put on, and took the book you wanted down from the shelf and brought it to the desk in the middle of the room. Sylvie believed the desk was fitted with special lights that would not cause the ink to fade or the pages of a book to become too hot, no matter how long it lay open under them, and the bookshop undoubtedly had some kind of precisely-calibrated climate-control system to preserve the books, too. When you had finished with one book you could ask for another until you found something you wanted, or until you’d seen every book in the shop. More than once, she had done just that, staying for several hours until she thought she had looked at every book. Somehow, she was unable to decide which she wanted to buy, and so she had never bought any. But she went back to look again, and the bookseller, a woman somewhere in her forties who wore her hair in a short, dark bob, dark-framed spectacles and dark clothes, never tired of bringing books to her, of taking them away, and never said more than a few murmured words, possibly not always in English, Sylvie thought – it was hard to tell.
The books were not, as you might think, of the antiquarian kind, but exquisite new editions of titles Sylvie had never even imagined might be published. Many were about artists Sylvie had never heard of, others showed the work of architects who until then had remained unknown to her, showing almost fantastical buildings The books’ design and production was of an almost unimaginably high standard, even for Sylvie, who once worked for a small Swiss publisher that specialised in lavish architectural monographs. But she had never seen anything like the books in that shop.
Sylvie almost never saw another person browsing in the shop during the numerous times she went there: it was as if she was the bookshop’s only customer.
I went to Manhattan once, and Sylvie gave me instructions about finding the bookshop, that I should take such-and-such a train from a particular station, get off at another particular station, leave the station through one exit rather than any other, walk so many bocks in north or east (I can’t remember now) then turn East or North or whatever it was, until I got to a corner that she named, and from there if I looked across the intersection I would see the building that housed the bookshop. She told me this because that was how she always found the bookshop, and she said that any time she had tried to go there by any other route – say, coming on a different subway line from another part of Manhattan – she had not been able to find it. That had happened to her several times, until she realised that the only way to find the bookshop was to follow the precise route she had taken the first time …
To tell the truth, I wasn’t that keen on finding the bookshop – it sounded like a lot of trouble and I certainly didn’t have the kind of money that I imagined I would need to buy the books that Sylvie had described to me. I had been in Manhattan for several weeks and only had a few days to go before I left when I realised that I would have to go to the bookshop, that Sylvie would be terribly disappointed if I didn’t, it was the one thing she said that I absolutely had to do while I was there, and that if I didn’t visit this shop she might never speak to me again. So I set of on the second-last day of my time in Manhattan, going first to the subway station Sylvie had told me to start from, taking the train she had suggested, and getting off at what I thought was the right stop. Then I tried to follow her directions, as I had written them down in a little Moleskine notebook I had with me, full of advice and addresses that people had thrust on me before I left on my journey. The bookshop was called Assoline. But I never managed to find it.