To be an independent bookseller is to be a member of a shrinking but proud breed of people who uphold a long bookselling tradition under unremitting economic pressure from the growth of chain bookstores and mass distributors. They are a fiercely tenacious lot who have long fought to maintain the loyalty of their clients and the freedom to lovingly hand-pick their own stock.
The champion of the privately-owned bookshop on Bali is Anita Scheeres who has run Ganesha Bookshop in Ubud for the past 17 years. Rigorously selective about the titles she stocks, Anita has built up over the years perhaps the best Indonesian Studies section on the whole island. As she says succinctly. “We know who our readers are and we don’t have to have piles and piles of books to be a credible bookshop”.
Anita’s independent streak first manifested itself in 1986 when she opened Ubud’s first bookshop on Monkey Forest Road. For three years she and her husband Ketut had accumulated hundreds of books, lugging them all the way from Australia each time she would visit her family. The books were initially horded simply because there was such a critical shortage of good reading material on Bali.
The tiny bookstore, previously a woodcarving shop, literally grew out of these cardboard boxes full of books taken finally out of storage from her husband’s home in Denpasar. These were the days when Ubud was visited by such Aquarius-age characters as Barbara Laughing Water and long-haul world travel legend Six Finger Eddy. She remembers an old slightly mad Balinese farmer conversing with his cow while he walked her down the footpath in front of the shop.
Monkey Forest Road was then only negotiable by people, pushbikes and motorbikes. Anita can recall the day the workers and machinery arrived, flattening and widening the path into a tarred road. The old farmer still walked past singing to his cow. During this time they bought land at the bottom the road and built a house which they live in to this day with still no additions or refurbishments.
Anita put her father-in-law, Nyoman Bawa, in charge of the shop. A gentlemanly academic, he became popular with the many expats living in and around Ubud. Even though the store kept irregular hours, travelers seemed to sense when Pak Bawa was there and they would drop in to chat and peruse the shelves.
By 1991 Anita had outgrown the little store and moved up to Ubud’s main street. The shop kept on growing; they added musical instruments, incense, cards, gift items and, as she puts it, “bookish things” like bamboo bookmarks, journals and maps. In 2001 they moved yet again to a corner location opposite the post office just down from the Bali Buddha.
From the initial stock hand-carried from Australia, Anita and Ketut have built over the years a thriving book business that sells new and quality secondhand books from subjects ranging from gardening through astrology, plus everything in between. There’s even a glassed-in cabinet of rare/antiquarian books, mostly Indonesiana and Baliana imported fresh from Australia.
The first thing that strikes you about the shop is how personalized and how much variety there is. The shortage of good books that Anita observed in the 1980s persists to this day. This is the reason that she goes out of her way to stock quality literature, religion, philosophy, psychology, travel, literature, as well as hard to get Indonesian and Bali Studies titles the pride of the store.
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What amazes me most is that my clientele still read the classics. I mean real classics as well as modern classics like Dickens, Orwell, Hesse, as well as V.S. Naipal, Patrick White, Milan Kundera. These books are difficult reading, yet are really popular. My customers also like biographies and even poetry. It seems that while people are on the road, they give themselves over to reading more”.
Anita buys her used books from travelers, expats, and constantly supplements her stock with new titles she buys overseas. Ganesha also operates a trading system whereby the books that are purchased can be returned for a 50% refund. “Occasionally we get the diehard traveler who tries to sell us a free Hare Krishna book or a 20-year-old out of print travel guide”.
A compulsive reader herself, I asked Anita what she was reading. “A murder mystery by Elizabeth George called A Traitor to Memory. Not many women commit murder but I think they spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. This is why they make excellent mystery writers”.
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I’m also reading Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald, a funny story of a journalist traveling in India who immerses herself so much in the culture that I am able see many social and cultural parallels to Hindu Bali”.
Obviously, the best thing she likes about her job are the strange bibliophiles who wander in. “Besides the flamboyant local artist who regularly cleans out the art and humor sections, we also have a guy who comes in once a year to just buy books on the Dayaks of Borneo. We search high and low for him and always put aside specific titles for him. Oh, and there’s the crime book reader who will only read Sue Grafton books in alphabetical order starting with A is for Alibi.
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What is Grafton’s next book?” I ask her.
Without hesitation, Anita shoots back B is for Burglar. I’ll pick it up it on my next trip to Australia.
Al Hickey
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Ganesha Bookshop, Jalan Raya, Ubud, Bali
tel/fax: 62-0361-973359, shop: 62-0361-970320
Website: www.ganeshabooksbali.com
Email: info@ganeshabooksbali.com
