【Editor's Note】
Nanjing Pioneer Bookstore, in 2009, won the China's Most Beautiful Bookstore Award; in 2013, it was praised as "China's Most Beautiful Bookstore" by CNN's special report; in 2014, it was named the world's top ten most beautiful bookstores by the BBC; in 2015, it was named "The World's Twelve Most Beautiful Bookstores" by the British Guardian and selected as the 17 "World's Coolest Bookstores" selected by CNN; in 2016, National Geographic selected the world's top ten bookstores, and Pioneer Bookstore was the only bookstore in Asia.
On November 26, 1996, Pioneer Bookstore was born opposite St. Paul's Church on Taiping South Road in Nanjing. "Pioneer Bookstore, born in 1996" is not only an article written in 2005 by Pioneer's owner Qian Xiaohua, but also the name of the recently launched Pioneer Bookstore's 20th anniversary commemorative anthology.
This article is excerpted from Pioneer Bookstore, born in 1996, published by The Paper with the permission of CITIC Publishing Group.
Opposite St. Paul's Church on Taiping South Road, Pioneer Bookstore was born in the late autumn of 1996.
Remember that? 9 years ago, that winter, the wind and snow have no country, Nanjing City is covered under the snow, the snow on the street is five or six inches thick, there is such a young man, the business is exhausted, the land is lost, the livelihood is nothing, looking for the streets and alleys of Nanjing, opened a 17-square-meter bookstore on Taiping South Road, named "Pioneer". From Taiping South Road, Beijing East Road, Zhongshan North Road, to the Yangtze River Delta Book Wholesale Market door to door book and newspaper stalls, every day you can see this thin young man running busy on the way; temporary white tin house, people sitting at the door to guard the shop is no different from walking in the snow and wind, the cold is raging, the cold is whizzing, the bones are trembling, the hands and feet are frozen to see the flesh and blood inside, every night, the Taiping South Road commercial street is left with the bookstore lights still shining in the snow, walking home at night, looking back at a string of footprints, Full of moonlight, the beauty of mixed feelings.
In 1999, Pioneer moved to No. 79 Guangzhou Road, next to Children's Hospital, which was the starting point of Pioneer's turning point.
Pioneer Bookstore was born in a desperate situation and welcomed guests in a snowstorm. A little farther away from the pioneers, there are "cultivation" and "new knowledge" of Chengxian Street, "Guoxue" on the corner of the Daxing Palace, "writers" on Guangzhou Road, "business" and "Sanlian" on Hunan Road, which are well-known in the readership, all of which are famous for making humanities and social science books; near the pioneer bookstore is the famous Nanjing Ancient Books Bookstore. Those bookstores in the distance have long ceased to exist in the fight of the market economy, and the ancient book bookstores in the vicinity are also fluttering in the wind and rain, struggling to support. What kind of bookstore should Pioneer open? First, the geographical location of the bookstore is relatively remote, the number of readers in Seongnam University is even less, and the level of knowledge of residents is relatively low; the second is that the area of the bookstore is too small, there are more than a dozen bookshelves, the variety of books is not complete, and the choice of readers is small; third, the first few bookstores have a relatively high status among nanjing readers, the foundation is solid, if they still operate the same kind of books as other bookstores, the pioneer bookstore cannot stand out. Only by blazing a trail can we get out of a way, and Pioneer Bookstore positions its business characteristics on the inventory books of the publishing house. I selected a number of domestic humanities and social science heavyweight publishing houses such as Guangxi Lijiang, Shanghai Translation, Chinese Film, Chinese Drama, Shanghai Ancient Books, Peking University, etc., traveled to Yunnan, Guangxi, and Shanghai in three days, organized thousands of books in stock, such as the Nobel Prize series of books of Lijiang Publishing House, the French Twentieth Century Gonggur Literature Prize Series, etc.; the Shanghai Translation of World Literary Masterpieces Collection, Writers' Memoirs Series, Western Literary Theory Translation Series, Dostoevsky Works, Dreiser Works, A large number of translated works such as The Anthology of Belinsky; Masterpieces of Foreign Film Theory, Biographies of Foreign Film Masters, And Scripts of Foreign Films of film publishing houses; Selected Works of Foreign Contemporary Plays of Drama Publishing House, Mei Lanfang on Drama, etc.; Series of Literary and Art Aesthetics of Peking University Publishing House, and Hundred Flowers Scattered Literature Department of Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House. Pioneer almost netted the inventory of good books related to humanities and social sciences in the publishing house, and there were 9 containers sent by the publishing house to Nanjing at a time, so the bookstore gradually became famous, and the bookstores in the surrounding area also rushed to buy goods. The bookstore also became a gathering center for readers and a place for humanities scholars to visit first. Among these humanistic scholars are academician Feng Duan, writers Ye Zhaoyan and Su Tong, bibliophiles Xue Bing, scholars Xu Jun, Zhou Xiaohong, Zhou Xian, and Zhang Yibing, painters Guan Ce, Mao Yan, Jin Feng, and Gu Xiaohu, and poets Zhu Zhu, Han Dong, and Chu Chen. Su Tong is one of the writers I have ever met who comes to the bookstore the most, and he loves American literature such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe, who once asked me to find Wolfe's novel Angel, Looking Home. Su Tong has a great talent in novel writing, and his works are quite popular among young people and are very popular with them. Su Tong can be said to be an idol of the literary youth of the times.
The bookstore was completely renovated in 2010.
Diagonally opposite the bookstore is St. Paul's Church, every Saturday and Sunday there are many saints come to pray, the music of the choir comes out of the church, listening to the heart is very quiet, idle time also sit in the crowd, to be honest in the heart of the natural quiet, less usual worries and troubles, just like the sound of the mountains and rivers, listening to the birds singing insects, watching the mountains and rivers, it is a lot of enjoyment. The scene of Christmas Eve that year is still vividly remembered- thousands of pilgrims poured in front of the door of St. Paul's Church, the wide road was surrounded by water, beggars also came from all directions to sit on the ground and beg; the church staff saw the crowd in front of the door, did not dare to open the iron door, until 12 o'clock in the evening, the crowd did not disperse, the saints were crowded in the bookstore, their hands kept waving in front of the bookshelves, the sight of taking books up and down moved me, and the beads of sweat on my face shone through my heart. The bookstore seems to have become another spiritual church. Many people have only come to know the bookstore because they came to church. Although the church did not open that night because of the large number of people, I think the memory left by the bookstore will not be erased.
Classic interior view of the Pioneer Bookstore
Less than a year later, the bookstore was forced to move to a residential building at No. 9 Mafu Street due to demolition, and even a dozen bookshelves at that time could not be placed, because readers could not find a place and business was depressed. Later, with the help of someone, I moved to the entrance of No. 173 Mafu Street, which is more than ten meters away from my earliest bookstore, and the area is twice as large as before, nearly 40 square meters. Less than two months after the renovation, several drunkards crashed into the bookstore drunk at night, two glass doors were smashed, the bookshelves were shattered, a mess, the books were scarred, the van was hit like a twist, and the two drunkards were carried into the hospital. That year, the bookstore as a whole was struggling to survive in the midst of upheavals and hardships.
In May 2015, the Pioneer Summer Palace opened in the Yihe Mansion District, the most Republican-style neighborhood in Nanjing. The wooden cross is used as a door number, continuing the spiritual dimension of the pioneer.
Writer Su Tong and Pioneer Bookstore owner Qian Xiaohua.
Nine years of tossing and turning, along the way, the wind and rain washed my face, experienced all kinds of hardships; drifted for half a life, with nothing, ashamed of my parents who left me and raised the readers of the bookstore. Nine years, the words seem to be blood, nine years of hard work is unusual; the whole family is in the cold wind, thousands of miles of books for the township; people who do not know me see me as a multi-millionaire, a millionaire literary merchant; some people call me a cultural merchant, a cultural poet; but in my opinion, I am neither a multi-millionaire, a million-dollar literary businessman, nor a cultural merchant, nor a cultural poet; I am just a cultural beggar wearing a laurel, a foreigner walking on the earth, on the way to spiritual poetry and thought, the book mountain is the path, the book business is angry, and I am unswerving to death. Why do I love books so deeply, why do I love them so sincerely, I often ask myself; I love books so truly, deeply, without selfishness, like my own children, like my own eyes; I often ask myself, why can I sacrifice books twice as much time, energy, and even beyond my own life than others, why do I have that persistent and noble feeling for running the cultural industry of the motherland? Because I was once displaced, desperate, tasted the bitterness of the world, and lived alone on the streets of Nanjing, in that bone-chilling, windy and snowy winter, it was books that gave me the faith and strength to survive; because books are a humanistic ideal for me to settle down and make a long-cherished wish, every book has a feeling, every book has a life, and books are part of my life. Books became my only confidant and the greatest confidant of my life. Although I am suffering and suffering, I know that the flowers that grow in humiliation and tribulation are the toughest. If my suffering can show the conscience of the people of the book industry, if it is beneficial to the readers who have always cared for and supported me, and if it is beneficial to the national culture rooted in people's hearts and deeply loves my motherland, then it seems that even if it bears all this, it is still worth paying to insist. For nine years, why my eyes are always full of tears, because I know that I shoulder the obligation and responsibility for the culture of the motherland, because my eyes always have the readers' ardent expectations for me. The reader's love for me will always shine in my heart. How I want to relive the holy splendor of 1996.
Pioneer Bookstore, born in 1996, edited by Qian Xiaohua, CITIC Publishing Group, September 2016.