Piero Onorato, a bookseller in a bell tower in Palermo

As far as we know, it is the only bookshop in the world housed in a church bell tower: La stanza di carta – libri & arte is situated on Via Giuseppe D’Alessi, in the centre of Palermo. The most evocative time to visit is at the stroke of midday, when the great bell of San Giuseppe dei Teatini chimes just a few metres above. Piero Onorato is a long-serving bookseller who, due to a striking resemblance to Antonello da Messina’s “The Unknown Sailor”, prefers to use the image from the painting rather than his own photo on Facebook and WhatsApp.

The base of the bell tower previously housed a school and university bookshop from 1920 to 1999, after which it stood empty until June 2019, when Onorato opened the ‘room’ following a very long career in the sector. Rare books, modern antiques and high-quality publications are his main offerings. A wooden ladder, nearly a century old, is used to reach the volumes on the furthest shelves, six metres up.

Not book consumers but readers, both locals and visitors: there are those who come to the city once or twice a year for all sorts of reasons and invariably stop off here. I do not stock titles found in the bestseller lists, apart from the occasional book from Sellerio, for example, but rather books printed over the last hundred years, almost all of which are as good as new, which I acquire from private libraries. Some visit in search of a specific volume and often discover another: here, as the British writer Mark Forsyth observes in his little book The Unknown Unknown, ‘you can find what you didn’t even think you were looking for’. My tacit recommendations are on display in the shop windows and on the central table. There is also space for art, featuring works by Bartolomeo Manno – alias Bartman – a historic figure of the Palermo avant-garde, who has reached the age of ninety-eight with enviable mental vigour. If I am a bookseller, I owe it to him.

He was a leading figure in the artistic movements of the 1960s and the founder of the Nuova Presenza bookshop, where I began working. By the end of 1969, I was nineteen and had read very little. I found myself by chance in that space – which had previously been an art gallery – inside a Art Nouveau building designed by Basile in Via Enrico Albanese. Thanks to Manno, the bookshop grew little by little, and I grew with it: he had designed modular shelving to arrange the books so that their covers were always visible rather than their spines, and they added colour to the white walls. Bartolomeo is a man of great intelligence and culture, and he turned the bookshop into a hotbed of intellectuals, a popular meeting place frequented, to name but a few, by Ignazio Buttitta, Roberto Andò and Marcello Sorgi, but also by a young friend of mine called Ninni Cassarà.

Seventeen years. When ownership changed in 1985, Manno became a minority shareholder and the new owners wanted to change the direction of the paper, so I left. I was even about to change careers, but I was contacted by a newsagent’s that also sold books: it was called Mercurio, on Via Marchese di Roccaforte. I soon transformed it into a bookshop that also sold newspapers: a wonderful experience that lasted three years, after which I spent another three managing the Sellerio bookshop and then, for nine years, the Flaccovio bookshop. Finally, he opened the Broadway theatre bookshop with his daughters, featuring a magnificent theatrical set design, though it sadly closed down. Perhaps it was down to the influence of *Nuova Presenza*, but he has always tried to organise spaces that did not simply replicate the usual clichés.

In my head. No website. I do not wish to be enslaved by the computer; it would take up too much of my time. I know where to look for things, and the index is sufficient for me.

It may be surprising, but three-quarters of my clients are under forty, and even though readers from all over the world pass through these pages, I would not go so far as to call it a happy place. But when I think back to Palermo fifty years ago, when Mafia-related deaths were counted on a daily basis, I remember a city that was culturally far more vibrant, with its newspapers, magazines, off-the-beaten-track theatres and cinemas. This is an observation made without nostalgia, a sentiment that is not my own.

I am not keen on fuelling the cloying rhetoric about independent booksellers. The job is difficult enough without needing to pin medals on one’s chest. Let’s face the reality: the figures show that people are reading less and less, yet more and more is being printed; book fairs, conferences and launches are proliferating, not to mention social media, where from morning till night people are swarming, dishing out reading recommendations. As if that weren’t enough, even self-publishers—without any editorial filter—want their work on the bookshelves. It is clear that something—or rather, several things—is amiss.

Publish less but better; let serious voices have their say; don’t go on about how wonderful every book is. The vast majority of new releases are rubbish that quickly fades from view but drowns out the good books: if a title is already old news after three weeks, it’s impossible to do it justice. It’s high time we all came back down to earth a bit.