Are There Any Decent Bookstores Situated In Your Area?

Usually I have one or two novels I want to purchase or at least borrow. This year, I decided to form the good habit of putting the book titles in writing, so last week I put them down on a sheet of paper and today I went to the market to get them. I went to an area called Park here in Port Harcourt, there is a market there and there a lots of shops that sell books. Today I discovered that in the Park market, bookshops sell mostly academic books. Text books for biology, physics, text books for courses studied in the University etcetera. Do they stock up on those because the market for novels is not profitable? Or like they say "the market is not 'moving' "? I believe that most of the shop attendants I met today were illiterate to an extent. I think they know the books by sight, not because they can read the lettering on them. I asked one girl where they keep novels written by Nigerians and she pointed to one book by Dan (i don't remember his last name), a foreigner. I checked as many places as I could, but it was the same thing everywhere. "We don't have" , "We no get am", "Check another place", "Check for front". I know someone will say that I don’t know where to go for books.

I finally went to GRA to check on one book shop I used to know. I had to trek a really long distance because okada ( common term used to refer to a motorbike used for commercial transportation) has been banned in Port Harcourt. The book shop is called CHAPTERS and it is not far from the Starcomms office. They had like seven titles (if there weren't seven, the novels I saw by Nigerian authors were not more than ten) – lots of Burma Boy by Bimi Bandele, Eugenia Abu’s In the blink of an Eye, A Life Elsewhere by Segun Afolabi, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie, one other book I can only remember one word of the title, three or four others and then Swallow by Sefi Atta. Swallow was on my list but I want to read her book Everything Good Will Come before Swallow for no tangible reason. I was disappointed. When I went to that same bookstore early in 2008, CHAPTERS had a lot of titles, their store was full. Now i'm almost certain the store holds less books. I think some shelves are even gone. I bought my copy of Swallow for N1,400. That’s expensive O! I went to a bookstore on the ground floor of the Hotel Presidential building. There were a good number of titles by unknowns, there. I saw Ben Okri's The Famished Road, and another book of his and also Flora Nwapa's Efuru. The three were pirated and very expensive.

When I’m in school I buy from the Nsukka market, their stock is not vast and most of it is pirated but it’s a little less disappointing than what I saw today. Someone might add that that market is for students so it’s better stocked…okay O.... When I was in Lagos early this month, I went to the Shoprite complex near Lekki phase one. They used to have a really, really good book store when I went there early last year. That store is, sorry, was the best bookstore I have ever entered. There were books everywhere, it was all arranged into sections. Books authored by Nigerians were stocked in large quantities. That is where I bought my copy of The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi. The price was reasonable too. I spent as much as my student pocket money let me, without my returning to Nsukka to starve. When I went there early this year, I discovered they had left the building. Their space was boarded up. I went to Silverbird Galleria, and the bookstore there was boarded up too. I thought about going to Lantana(It is on 13 Oko Awo close in Victoria Island), but it was some distance away from where I was staying and the last time I was there they were selling mostly Christian and motivational books, which is good, but not what I wanted at the time. Why aren’t there good bookstores around me, eh? (I suspect it's the same all over the country). Everytime I want a book I have to ask those ‘outside’ to buy for me. Is it that people here don't read a lot (cough) or opening a good bookstore requires enormous capital? Do YOU know any good bookstore around you or even far from you? Good in the sense that it is well stocked and our local authors are well represented? If you do, send me an email via webrashh@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post. Leave the name and address of the bookstore and I’ll post everything I get from my readers on the first of February.

I wish I had the resources and the time, I would have loved to do something like “Top Twenty Bookshops in the West or East or Lagos or Port Harcourt or wherever, but I can’t now. I won't kill the dream shar. You can help everyone who reads this post by giving the name and address of the bookstore that meets your needs. I don’t want you to send me the address of just any shop that has BOOKSHOP written over it o! I want you to send me the address of one you have BEEN to and you know deserves the title 'BOOKSHOP'!

(Only bookstores with addresses in Nigeria will be posted. I keep mentioning 'Nigerian Authors' in this piece because I was on a search for novels written by them. I'm not biased or something...)