VIKING ADULT, SEPTEMBER 2014There is a bookshop in old Athens. It is the loveliest I know. It lies in an alley near the Agora, next to a shop that sells canaries and quails from cages strung on the façade. Wide louvres admit shafts of light that fall upon Japanese woodblock prints propped on a painter’s easel. Beyond, in the gloom, there are crates of lithographs and piles of topographical maps. Terracotta tiles and plaster busts of ancient philosophers and playwrights do duty as bookends. The scent is of warm, old paper and Turkish tobacco. The stillness is disturbed only by the muted trills of the songbirds next door.
I have returned so often, and the scene is so constant, that it is hard to remember when, exactly, I ?rst walked into George Papadatos’ bookshop. But I do recall that it was the drachma’s last spring, when Greece was still poor and cheap and you landed at Ellinikon where the clacking ?ight boards listed Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut and Belgrade and you still felt as if you’d travelled east. George—lank grey hair, a bookman’s paunch—sat at his desk reading an old French political tract. Years ago, he told me, he had taught at Toronto—‘But in Greece, they still had poets.’ He returned and named his store for the lyric muse.
Scanning his shelves, I saw Andrew Lang’s Odyssey and three volumes of Jowett’s Plato. They ...
