SANTORINI, Greece On a wall above rare first editions, old maps of this volcanic island and a stained linen lampshade, a painted timeline traces the evolution of Atlantis Books from a wine-drenched notion in 2002 into one of Europes most enchanting bookstores.
A terrace overlooks the Aegean Sea. Bookshelves swing back to reveal hidden, lofted beds where the shops workers can sleep.
Somewhere along the way, word spread that visiting writers too could spend summer nights scribbling and snoozing there, and the owner began receiving emails requesting a bunk at earths most stunning writers colony, on an island Plato believed was the lost Atlantis.
But the writer-in-residence program was also a Greek myth.
The idea was not to come here to write the great American novel, it was to sling books, Craig Walzer, the stores owner, said. You are here for the bookshop first.
Over the last 15 years, as cruise-ship hordes and souvenir schlock have overrun the village of Oia on Santorinis northern tip, Atlantis Books has become an unlikely oasis of authenticity and cultural sanity.
Yellowed pages and shelves fashioned from driftwood give off a musty smell. The soundtrack on a recent visit shifted from Beck to the BBCs commentary of the Wimbledon mens final. Customers sidestepped the shop dog, Billie Holiday, to peruse just-so offerings (Plato: Cool as a Cucumber) from the stores own press of classics.
Have you read Rilke in Paris? Sarah Nasar, a veteran of Shakespeare and Company, asked one customer as Mr. Walzer steered a skeptical boy away from The Little Gray Donkey to a childrens version of the Iliad.
Boys being boys, Mr. Walzer described the plot of Homers epic.
Bibliophiles around them leafed through a lovingly curated collection of fiction, poetry, essays and rarities. A first edition of F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, minus one of the rare-book worlds most sought-after dust jackets, was on sale for 6,000 euros beneath a label reading I must have you, a nod to the novels opening epigraph. Behind the register sat a 1935 edition of James Joyces Ulysses, illustrated by Matisse, and an exceedingly rare first edition of Charles Dickenss A Christmas Carol. It was listed at 17,500 euros.
Thats a big boys book, Mr. Walzer said.
Expensive rare books sell well here, Mr. Walzer explained, partly because the island has become a popular destination for people who have way too much money, but also because honeymooners and other visitors often want to take home something more meaningful and less common than a diamond bracelet, say. Books offer tourists something tangible and not digital, he added; theyre not just another posed photo in front of the sunset.
Right on cue a customer interrupted to ask whether pictures were allowed in the store: Its so cool.
Sure, Mr. Walzer said.
Almost despite itself, the shop has become a tourist attraction. That is especially strange for Mr. Walzer, who for years called the cozy place home. He alternated beds. One is hidden behind shelves now displaying copies of Homers Odyssey and the Harry Potter series in ancient Greek. The other one (the master bedroom, Mr. Walzer called it) sits above the German section. That spot is now occupied by one of the stores employees, Katie Berry, a 22-year-old graduate in English from Harvard (Surprise, she deadpanned) who was spending her third summer sleeping amid the stacks.
This is clearly where the visiting-writer legend began, and Mr. Walzer, who moved to a neighboring town in 2017, wanted to clear up some other misconceptions.
The shop is run by him, a 38-year-old Memphis native who keeps barbecue sauce in the back fridge and who affectionately uses the words chief and dude, not by a twee old British man whom many tourists ask to meet. Atlantis is not the oldest and smallest bookstore in Europe. Harry Potter was not set here. Ernest Hemingway did not write here.
And yet, the story of Atlantis is not without its mythic elements.
It has a muse-inspired (O.K., booze-inspired) origin. Mr. Walzer and a friend came up with the idea during a visit to the island during a break from Oxford in 2002. It has a great journey: a van ride with fellow founders from Britain to Santorini, during which Mr. Walzer read John Steinbecks East of Eden, the tattered copy of which is kept in the back like a talisman near a signed, plastic-wrapped galley of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.
It has no shortage of twists and turns. An original location below the ramparts of a 13th-century castle built by Venetians closed, and the founders were forced to rebuild the shop in a ruined captains house. Love interests came and went. (Love Stories, for Suckers reads the label in the stores romance section.) One of Mr. Walzers drinking buddies, the author Jeremy Mercer, injected a dose of deus ex machina in 2005, when The Guardian asked him for his favorite bookstores and he topped his list with Atlantis.
We had no business being on that list, Mr. Walzer said. Now I think we do.
And Mr. Walzer himself stands in as the tortured hero. He left the island in 2005, enrolled and dropped out of Harvards Kennedy School and its law school, then went underground essentially in New Orleans. He found his way, and returned to Santorini and his bookshop for good in 2011. Survival led to success, but as the shop flourished the real estate fates descended. In 2015, landlords threatened eviction unless Mr. Walzer came up with a million euros to counter an apparent offer on the building.
But since international coverage at the time raised the alarm that Atlantis could be lost again, Mr. Walzer hasnt heard back from the dreaded landlords. He said he is still operating without a lease.
One day the bell will toll, he said. But not today, because its Sunday afternoon.
And it was a lovely one. As he sat on the stores terrace, with the shimmering Aegean filling the Caldera on one side and tourists flowing like lava down Oias narrow sunset boulevard on the other, Mr. Walzer rolled a cigarette. He looked with contentment at the sea and the people scanning a blue shelf of used books.
The challenge used to be selling books. Now its finding the books to sell, he said. We figured it out.
Moments later, his phone buzzed. Billie Holiday had vomited by the Bs in the fiction section. He excused himself to help clean up. It took a lot, he noted, to make this mythical place.
See more here:
On a Greek Island, a Bookstore With Some Mythology of Its Own - The New York Times
- Water Purification Island - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Private Islands: South China Sea Style - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Best of Fiji - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- High Cay: Bahamas - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The World: Back on the Market - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Island Market is Back - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Haunted Halloween Island - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ambergris Island Property - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Paradise Sinking - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Parrot Cay: Own a Piece of Privacy - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- An Icky Day - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- It's a Cory's! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- There she blows! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bye bye Whale - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- No Bunting Mistake - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Whale of a time... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Leaving day - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Look who's back... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lanced... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Migrants role in... - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pups away! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Double take - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Northerly wind blows - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Northern visitors - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Siege! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Storm time - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Storm season - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Storming over - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Sealing mission - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Still no go - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Over they go! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- All change - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Welcome back storms - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Fight club - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- V Australia to Fiji - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Tahiti Sun Travel For Sale - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cook Islands Travel Guide - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Perfectly Frank – Fiji - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cook Islands Tax Hike - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Easter Island Travel Guide - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Surviving Paradise - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Canada Seal Hunt ‘09 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Tuvalu Travel Guide - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Saudi Arabian Sojourn - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Laurent Pichot on Moorea - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Largest Island for Sale in the World. - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Isla Kiniw: Incredible Island Rental - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Save at Sandals Resorts - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Marvelous Mediterranean: Skyropoula Island - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Branson Talks Necker Island - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Hog Island: Affordable Nova Scotia - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Banyan Tree: Seychelles - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Celebrity Secret Vacation Spots - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Star Island - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- 7 Islands in 7 Days - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Counting continues - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Life goes on - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Payback time - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- No let up - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Game on - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Deal or No Deal? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Food glorious food - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Mainland beckons... - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The tempest is coming - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Tought times ahead - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Tystie day - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Saying Goodbye...maybe - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Departure Day - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Seal pups - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Seabird Breeding Season 2009 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Maritime Terminal Papeete Tahiti - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- A splash of colour - December 14th, 2009 [December 14th, 2009]
- Tiger Woods Wife purchases Island Retreat - December 15th, 2009 [December 15th, 2009]
- New Flights to Fiji - December 18th, 2009 [December 18th, 2009]
- Five Star Fiji - December 19th, 2009 [December 19th, 2009]
- Go Farther in Nicaragua - December 19th, 2009 [December 19th, 2009]
- Zoo Island - December 21st, 2009 [December 21st, 2009]
- Seasons Greetings 2009 - December 23rd, 2009 [December 23rd, 2009]
- Green Ark Island - December 23rd, 2009 [December 23rd, 2009]
- Merry Christmas! - December 25th, 2009 [December 25th, 2009]