Books are sometimes like people: they can make you happy, but they can also become a burden, especially if you have too many of them. The flood of bookcases popping up all over the streets speaks, er, volumes.
Recently I spoke to a man for whom the book seems to have been invented: Kor Boven, 85 years old, from Castricum. A sprightly man with clear eyes that examine you intently. He had invited me for a conversation in an Amsterdam café because he collects books signed by the authors themselves. Did I feel it too? Then he would take some of my books.
I had barely sat down opposite him when he explained himself. “Some authors offer to send me their autographs, but that’s not just me. I would like to meet them in person. It shouldn’t be long, if only I get an impression of them. I’ll take that with me when I read them later. Writing is an art, I can look at it with so much admiration.”
He said that in recent years he had visited writers of all kinds, such as A. den Doolaard, Adriaan van Dis, Rutger Kopland, Gerrit Krol, Connie Palmen, Günter Grass, Václav Havel and Simon Wiesenthal. Afterwards he always took a few pictures that he kept well. He had 5,000 books at home, his wife thought too many, so that he sometimes felt compelled to sneak a book into the house. He still read three books a week, both non-fiction and fiction—as long as it wasn’t Tolkien.
Maybe he used to work in education, I asked. No, he came from the construction world where he organized all kinds of projects. Books were never discussed there, but that didn’t bother him. “You can talk about so many other topics.” Like about Ajax of which he is a supporter; I understandably began to feel more and more kinship.
After our conversation, he asked a waitress to take a picture of both of us. Last Sunday I saw him again in the Eus book program on TV. He was in his element with all those writers and books around him.
In the meantime I had a less pleasant experience with the book world. The owners—a married couple—of a large antiquarian bookshop where I occasionally bought books told me that they were closing their shop, sorry as they were. It no longer paid off. When they made their decision, they had 80,000 books in their store. They couldn’t share them with anyone, not colleagues, not libraries, not museums. Nevertheless, there were many special specimens. They had now asked a student to stuff books into the bookcases on the street. There were still 28,000 books left, while they could only take 2,000 to their new home.
It all sounded extremely sad, and so did they feel. Those books had been their life’s work, they had collected and cherished them with the utmost devotion. I could confirm that they only sold books in good condition. They were so broadly sorted in all sorts of areas that they rarely had to say ‘no’.
This is the umpteenth antiquarian bookshop that has had to close its doors in recent years. The conclusion is almost inevitable: there are too few Kor Bovens in the Netherlands for too many books.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 24, 2023.