Tongmunkwan rare book shop, one of only two left in Insadong,once Korea’s largest market for antiques, artwork, and rare books.
Photo by Shin Dong-yeun for Joongang Daily.
Tongmunkwan is a 75-year-old bookstore in the Insadong neighborhood of Seoul, Republic of Korea. A sign in front of the shop reads, “It’s better to pile books than gold.”
Not lately.
South Korea, which once had a thriving rare and antiquarian book trade, is down to its last fifty rare book shops with more closings on the horizon.
According to a recent article in the JoongAng Daily, numerous factors are at work.
The reasons are eerily similar to what is occurring in the U.S.; we are not alone.
Reading books is no longer high on Korean minds. Only 58.9 percent of Koreans aged 15 and over read books in the past year, down 3.3 percentage points from 62.2 percent in 2004.
“Our customer base skews older,” Lee Jong-woon, the owner of Tongmunkwan, said. “Getting no customers in a day was once unthinkable.”
A young friend of mine recently cracked that if he wanted to see antiques he’d go to a rare book fair and look at the people. The little whippersnapper.
Another problem lies with the current pricing structure, reminiscent of the pre-Internet era in the West before the Net unveiled wild discrepancies born of ignorance (one can only read so many catalogues) of the actual marketplace. JoongAng Daily reports that one store might sell an old book for 100,000 won ($82.26) while the shop next door sells the same one for 500,000 won. That, the paper notes, erodes consumer trust. You think?
It is the love of touching and feeling the book that has kept the South Korean trade off the Internet, though some dealers, in survival mode, are considering closing their shops and working through ecommerce, as their surviving clientele increasingly turns to the Net to buy books.
Close the shop to save the business. How familiar is that?
But now we reach the crux of the matter. Yo Soon-ku, a scholar and lover of rare books, observes that fewer people in Korea have expert knowledge of and experience with old books..
To truly become knowledgeable in older books, he said, one needs to study as much as a scholar to develop an expertise in the content, publication dates, editions and printing methods of the books and texts. Younger Koreans now, Yo continued, don’t want to spend their entire lives studying for a business that provides limited income and has a bleak future,
There are currently fewer than ten members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) under forty.
It’s one of the dark jokes about the rare book trade that rare book shops are where old books go to die. In Korea it’s becoming a reality.
Yo Soon-ku, the Korean gentleman mentioned above, is the director of the Hwabong Book Museum.