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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Jane Eyre and the Caliph
By Pascale Ghazaleh"The Ezbekiya Fence" -- the phrase immediately brings a gleam of recognition to a passer-by's eyes. Over there, beside the German Pavilion: you can't miss it. Indeed you can't. Funny, though, since there is no fence, and no Ezbekiya, for that matter. But the rows of stalls, the sunburnt men and the piles of books are unmistakable.
From afar, a pall of dust hangs over this festival of cut-price treasures. The day is drawing to a close, and the vendors' voices are hoarse: "Any book for a pound," croaks one; his neighbour, presiding over an altogether more ragtag stall, does better: "Any book for fifty piastres, two books for a pound." This bit of arithmetic does little to attract the throngs of literati milling about.
The books are piled on makeshift trestle tables, whole stacks tumbling to the ground as eager readers flip through the stacks. The crowds move inexorably forward, between the two rows of tables, slipping into the narrow spaces between the stands to take a closer look. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, medical textbooks, Dialectical Materialism Made Easy, manuals for hydraulic engineers, dictionaries, Longman's editions of Romeo and Juliet, and thousands of abridged versions of Jane Eyre are piled metres high, or share table space with glossy booklets proffering advice on how best to deal with jinn, or recounting the lives of the Prophet's wives.
Sour Al-Ezbekiya -- the Ezbekiya Fence -- once referred to the fence around the Ezbekiya Gardens, planned by the Khedive Ismail as a homegrown Bois de Boulogne. Few of the intellectuals who populated Cairo's universities and coffee shops failed to pitch up there one fine day, and few failed to return after their first discovery. The fence was lined with booksellers' stalls, little more than minuscule huts where the vendors vied for space with the hundreds of books that lined the walls.
Max Rodenbeck, in Cairo, the City Victorious, remembers that "worlds mingled in the bookstalls...: the works of Enver Hoxha next to a score by Puccini beside an Armenian body-building manual on top of the Thousand and One Nights..." The treasures were soon weeded out, not least by the booksellers themselves: no longer could a first edition of E W Lane's Manners and Customs be had for half the price of a fuul sandwich. But many libraries were built with books purchased at the fence; and there, too, were many libraries sold.
Farouk stands fanning himself in the relative shade of his stall at the Book Fair. He is one of the lucky ones, having secured one of the standard aluminium and wood shacks put up when the Ezbekiya booksellers were allowed back into the garden after renovation work was completed. His cousin was less fortunate, but looks after the family storehouse in Al-Darrasa, behind Al-Azhar. Every year, they pack cartons full of books and head for the Fair, where lucrative deals may be made, and new customers acquired.
Farouk may not actually know how to read, but he knows books: a decent leather binding, or a delicate frontispiece, can make all the difference. He can tell a first edition from ten metres away. Farouk has bought entire libraries sold by ministries with no space, and no staff, for such luxuries as books. Just recently, he clinched a deal with the Ministry of Justice. But he has his clients, and he will keep the best items for them.
A little way off, the Sadeq brothers keep an eye on each other across the dusty lane that separates the stands. They will share customers and profits as well as a tip on a library that's going soon. One specialises in Arabic books, the other in European works. Sadeq's son claps two tomes together under my nose. When the dust clears, he is brandishing Pierre Loti's Aziyadé, smiling brightly. "You know Loti? An excellent man. He wrote all about Egypt. Or what about Flaubert? I have Flaubert's travels here somewhere." Others are more profit-oriented: Queen Nariman graces the cover of a magazine in which thanks are given for the birth of Ahmed Fouad; this bit of heritage goes for LE20.
The Sadeqs are among those who have taken advantage of a growing nostalgia for Cairo as it was in the '30s or '40s, and even the '50s, the shiny, happy phase of revolutionary rule. Magazines and newspapers, clad in shiny cellophane, are clipped to the roofs of stalls like washing hung out to dry. In the inner sanctum, vendors snip string and pry open cartons to reveal hundreds more. The issues selected for display say much of the state of the market: there is a copy of Al-Ahram dated 1949, commemorating the centenary of Mohamed Ali's death and ranging in price from LE100 to LE25, depending on one's bargaining powers and the vendor's state of mind; copies of Al-Musawwar featuring the king in full-bellied splendour; copies of Bint Al-Nil on which Dorriya Shafiq's profile, sketched in fluid white strokes, stands out against a sparkling blue-green Nile. It is royalty that is selling like hotcakes, though.
This year, too, interior decoration and fashion have made a strong showing. Heaps of glossy magazines, still bound together with strips of plastic, await customers. Art et Décoration, Elle Deco, Cosmopolitan and Vogue cover the table-tops. But these are recent issues, dated November or December 1998, selling for LE3 instead of the usual LE25 or LE30. Where have they come from? One girl turns to her gaggle of friends, poring over Wallpaper with murmurs of bemusement, and exclaims: "Fine, this is great, but I don't want to get married!"
The Ezbekiya Fence, whatever its actual physical location, is a stitch in time. It is no stranger to new fads, but history has its place here too. The living and the dead, in a sense, are present. One long-time customer acquired a collection of Chekov's works in translation. On each title page, he found an inscription in black ink: the name of a dear friend, now departed, and the words 'Moscow, 1975'.
