What starts off as a fairly regular interview — me seated in a comfortable armchair facing Richard Welch, my notebook at the ready, soon shifts shape. It’s as if the four walls beneath the double-volume ceiling of Kalahari Books contain within them some mysterious force that makes a joke of time and exerts a competing gravitational pull.
Surrounded by thousands (about 70 000 in all, Welch estimates) of books spanning more than a century, we flit from shelf to shelf like magpies. We move from titles by JG Ballard to George Bernard Shaw — picking the books out, then discarding them for the next attraction. There is poetry and playwriting, Greek epics and tomes on trains, collectables and curiosities, and fiction, heaps and heaps of fiction.
“I am interested in popular fiction of the past,” says Welch, making me feel at home. I am a fan of fiction. While my reading tastes run to literary nonfiction and biography, I believe fiction is the highest form of writing art, and great fiction makes meaning of everything. CS Lewis wrote: “We read to know that we are not alone.”
Through fiction we are allowed to inhabit the lives of others and to learn empathy, without which we would be trapped by our own reflection, and some have even suggested our own psychopathy. But it’s also how we learn to be alone. Jonathan Franzen remarked on the “solitary attentiveness” that a novel requires.
Back at Kalahari Books, I am between shelves when I tell Welch I have lost my cup of coffee, having rested it somewhere between the distractions that are Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, an Edwidge Danticat and a first edition of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana. The shop’s staff is marshalled into locating the cup. I am told it happens often, and it does, twice more. “Lucky it wasn’t your car keys,” says Welch.
A book castle
Welch owns Kalahari Books, which specialises in used, hard-to-find and out-of-print editions. Ask, and he shall find. Before the local internet mega-book brand kalahari.com, there was Kalahari Books, a name, he says, that came to him in a dream. He says he was the first to register the name. The business is now 23 years old. It moved two years ago from premises in Houghton — a double garage — to Orange Grove.
All that’s visible from the street is a hand-painted sign saying Kalahari Books, with a large painted black arrow pointing to a path up a concrete ramp. I had seen the sign a few weeks earlier from across the street, while eating lunch at the neighbourhood bar, Tonino’s.
The “shop” is part of what was a series of storage rooms on top of a car mechanic’s workshop. The occasional engine roar punctuates the conversation over what sounds like Louis Armstrong playing in the background. Sunlight streams in through the small windows along the length of one wall. There are books on top of one another, shelves running to the ceiling, with narrow wooden platforms creating a second floor. I climb the ladder to the top and, once there, it’s like walking the ramparts of a book castle.
Welch blends in among the coloured spines, with his striped shirt and flamboyantly patchworked waistcoat.
“When I first went into the book business everyone said you’ve got to have a focus. Our focus is that we don’t really have a focus,” he laughs. “I am interested in building up collections,” he says, pulling out a selection of books on the Wild West.
He offered me coffee the first time I visited, when I was just browsing. It’s how he treats his customers, who mostly arrive with a specific title in mind and leave with a large pile of books. Welch likes to collect an author’s oeuvre so you won’t be disappointed after, say, discovering Kurt Vonnegut and wanting to read all he has written. We talk about the move to digital books, and he says: “While they must have a profound impact … when instant coffee was discovered it didn’t mean the end of the coffee shop. Like coffee, books have a strong social element.”
A cozy space
It’s the social element that seems most attractive to him. He mentions that people come around on Saturdays to chat. Two armchairs and many places to lean make for a cozy space in what should be a cavernous room. But, as he points out: “Books do furnish a room [referencing the novel by Anthony Powell]. They warm it.”
For 20 years he kept a stall at Rosebank’s rooftop Sunday market — now closed as the mall undergoes renovation. He says it was always hard work to set up and take down each week, but “it was like having a dinner party every week”.
We talk about the provenance of used books. “I don’t know what will happen to the new-book trade, but second-hand and old books have an ethos that no one wants to give up.”
I ask him about a series of black-and-white photographs of a suave-looking man posing with his 1950s-style car, tacked up along a bookshelf near his desk. He says the photos were recovered from a lot that he bought. They touch him.
“When you buy books you are buying the shadow of a person and that brings very powerful emotions. It takes time to work through something like that.
‘When people die, their books get dispersed. I hate that; so even if it’s just a core of books kept to reflect their personality … I still think I have to go light a candle for him. It’s creating respect for somebody’s life- collection of books.”
We discuss the price of a Graham Greene first edition (it’s R250), and he says: “I always ask what would someone be willing to pay. None of my prices go over the top. I am keener to get many different people into my shop. The book business is not much fun if it’s about a spider in the web waiting for someone to get closer … ”
Over the years he has sold some high-value collectibles, but he says: “Generally if I get them in I sell them quickly.”
The highest price he received was for a science fiction book held in high regard by CS Lewis and others of his circle: R30 000, sold through Swann, a family-owned auction house in New York. He seems most proud that he received a letter from Swann, saying: “Thank you very much for livening up our auction.”
While we are chatting a customer arrives looking for works by Homer. I had spotted The Odyssey and The Iliad earlier and point them out, while Welch disappears and reappears with some curiously named academic essay titles on classical civilisation — among them Goddesses, whores, wives and slaves, a feminist treatment of women in the ancient world.
The man takes all of them and Welch tells him he doesn’t want cash. He says he will SMS the customer his banking details instead. It’s a business based on trust, and Welch says it has always worked well for him.
It’s such a different world from the shopping-centre bookstore, with its clinical transactions, staff who barely know the shelves and loyalty bought with a plastic card. I think Borges, who “imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”, would be happy here. And that makes me happy too.
Kalahari Books is at 2 Dunottar Street, Orange Grove, Johannesburg, and open Tuesdays to Saturdays. Visit kalaharibooks.co.za