Indus
Books
1808
NE Alberta St., 281-2476
www.indusbook.com
The shop also
serves as a gallery, with a current show of Bob Gervais'
photographs of India and South Asia, some of which are shown
on this page.
The professional bookseller is almost extinct in America.
What was once a noble trade has become a dead-end job in the
global economy. Since 1992, independent bookshops have closed
by the thousands while corporate megabarns scab the landscape,
cuffing literature to strip-mall ethics and the stealth censorship
of mass-marketing. Instead of booksellers, readers now meet
low-wage grunts and shelvers who wouldn't know the difference
between Suetonius and Seuss. If a title doesn't appear in
the store's database, it probably never existed, but have
a nice day. At least you can still find coffee in the in-store
cafes.
Though Portland's leading independent book store, Powell's,
has tragically "restructured" its expert staff into near
oblivion, the city remains one of the last bastions of intelligent
bookselling. Small shops still shut down (Holland Books
most recently), but Portlanders remain discerning book buyers,
creating an environment in which new independent ventures
are actually emerging. Perhaps the finest of these is Indus
Books, which has an extraordinary genesis. While many book
dealers dissolve their stock into virtual stores on the
Internet, Tammy Stotik has taken her lucrative website of
fine and rare books on India and poured the contents into
a small storefront on Alberta Street.
Stotik is a well-known cultural figure in Portland. She
appeared on the arts scene in the early '80s as one of the
members of Jungle Nausea, one of the few noise bands in
town that defined the extent of punk in Portland. Stotik
immersed herself in the music scene, working at Urban Noize,
discovering free jazz at Mildred's, warring with Courtney
Love at The Metropolis and aligning herself with the artists
and musicians at Smegma House,
eventually joining the band Smegma for a year. ("I joined
bands rather than take up knitting," says Stotik, "though
I wasn't a credible musician.") Her last gig in music was
as the drummer for Plastic Horn Devil, a trash art band
that gained a name for its range in material from ballads
to dead American actresses to Sir Ernest Shackleton and
the Endurance.
But in the midst of her music career, Stotik moved into
bookselling. She became a buyer for Powell's, moving on
to spearhead the Hawthorne store's set-up. Stotik left the
City of Books in 1994 to help Steve Holland reopen his bookshop
on Southwest 12th Avenue, where she was given a back room
to set up her own virtual bookshop of "Indiana."
Stotik's interest in India began at 12, when her mother
gave her a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. "I
was astonished by what I read," Stotik remembers. "I became
deeply curious about this other culture and its different
experience with time and history." Before joining Holland,
Stotik and her husband, artist Eric Stotik, struck out to
travel India and see the subcontinent for themselves.
Stotik never intended to open a bookshop. "I decided to
go onto the Net because my focus was fairly specialist,"
Stotik explains. "I knew that academics were already experienced
web scouts." Though she had been cautioned by booksellers
that the market for Indian books was dead, Stotik soon found
herself with a successful business, one that Time Out
New York called one of the best collections of its kind
in the country.
Since then, Stotik has made many valuable contacts with
publishers and writers in India through her website. "Indian
writers email me offers all the time," said Stotik. "From
a Tamil translation of the Finnish Kalevala to an
Indian novel on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal."
Last year, Stotik finally decided to try working from an
open shop, and she discovered the perfect storefront on
Alberta. After installing disused shelves from Powell's,
Indus opened for business in April.
My first visit to Indus brought back memories of my own
stint of bookselling at Francis Edwards Antiquarian Bookshop
off London's Charing Cross Road. It was a low-lit niche
crammed with everything from battered Jane's or
a rare quarto of Hobhouse's Albania to a section
of Indian books written on humidity-scalded, scripture-thin
paper. Bibliophiles like historian Peter Hopkirk, who frequently
searched the shelves for rare books on Afghanistan, came
in for coffee and conversation.
Similarly, upon entering Indus, I found a knot of booksellers
gathered over wine and a stack of Hopkirk's books. "Hopkirk
is a great writer," declared Stotik, a sentiment I share.
But Indus is better lit than the London shop, with high
ceilings above a comfortable room filled with Indian art
pieces and the faint blend of book must and incense.
Among the books on Jainism and on Goa in Portuguese, Stotik
stocks other great finds, such as a copy of Ibn Khaldun's
The Muqaddimah and Wilfred Scawen Blunt's Diaries.
"Portland is a wonderful town for the book trade," Stotik
says. And Indus is another bulwark against the mass-produced
present.
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