[URBAN LEGENDS] The English-speaking bookworm’s survival guide to Beyoğlu

A literary walk down İstiklal Street and its surroundings gives one a great opportunity to decide whether an English-speaking bookworm can survive in this city.

Near the start of İstiklal Street, at Büyükparmakkapı Street No. 8, you will see Pandora Kitabevi (“bookshop”), with its few floors full of books, books and more books, all in English (www.pandora.com.tr). Pandora has been there since 1991 and has been great help to all sorts of bookworms, from academics to travel enthusiasts, poets to hobby freaks and self-help book addicts. They are open seven days a week and have a really helpful distance-order service as well: you choose the book you want them to import, pay a certain percentage of it and they bring it for you within a few weeks, without charging you shipping costs since they order many books at a time. Pandora Kitabevi has also branches on the campuses of Boğazici and Koç universities.

A little further down İstiklal Street, on the left-hand side, you can see Literatur Kitabevi. You won't be impressed by their selection of books in English; however, they do have a discount section where you might find a classic that you had long intended to read at a pretty reasonable price. This is also a good place to look for test prep books for the TOEFL or GRE, as well as a good collection of dictionaries of “rare” languages.

Book-worming becomes even easier as you reach Galatasaray High School. When you head down Yeniçarşı Street toward the Bosporus, on your right-hand side you will find Homer Kitabevi, known as “Turkey's largest publisher of English-language books.” This means if you happen to have written a book on “İstanbul's culinary gems” or on “where to find a Turkish millionaire just dying to marry you” and have not yet found a publisher, Homer Kitabevi is the one to consult. It is a pleasure to lose oneself in Homer Kitabevi's basement floor among dozens of Jungs, Freuds, Aristotles and all the theory books you could want. Upstairs is where the fiction stretches out over shelves upon shelves of tragedies, Murakamis, Galeanos and what-have-you. The room at the back is the “hobby section,” where you can find Lonely Planet's little culinary guides, books on yoga and meditation, gardening tips and even books to awaken the plumber or carpenter inside you. Their Web site, where you can make book orders as well, is www.homerbooks.com. Homer Kitabevi has branches at İstanbul Bilgi University, Işık University and Özyeğin University. I should say their staff is the friendliest of all English-language bookstores in the vicinity.

Just a few steps down is a great fanzine and comic book store. It is fun to be in such a beautifully designed store; there are all sorts of periodical comic books and fanzines as well as albums from well-known cartoonists in English.

Although their selection is largely in Turkish, Denizler Kitabevi (www.denizlerkitabevi.com) on İstiklal Street is a very interesting bookstore. Its name literally means “The Seas Bookshop,” and it has all sorts of old and new maps, navigation books, books on fishing and books on everything having something to do with the sea. They are also pretty famous for their Sunday auctions of old books; a Dutch friend of mine bought an original French version of a Pierre Loti book on İstanbul for a very reasonable price, and since then, I tend to keep an eye on what is on offer in their auctions. It is also a good place to look for books on İstanbul's urban history.

Robinson Crusoe Bookstore is at İstiklal Street No. 389 and is the most stylishly decorated bookstore in all of İstanbul. It is the type of bookstore where you could spend hours, strolling through the pages of Lonely Planet series, books on İstanbul, Leonard Cohen's poetry books, books on music making and musicianship, literary magazines: You name it, they have it. The first floor is dedicated to books in English, and the second floor to those in Turkish. They have the most extensive selection of poetry in English, all the William Blakes, T.S. Eliots or Walt Whitmans you have been craving are there. The wooden shelves and the big clock just outside its big beautiful wooden door all give a pretty wintry air to this stylish bookstore. It is stylish but not the least bit pretentious. You can special-order English-language books there, as well, with no shipping costs. Robinson Crusoe is really a boutique of books -- just like the Boutique de los Libros in Buenos Aires, alas without a café inside. However, the comic and fanzine bookshop just down Yeniçarşı Street near Homer has a connection, maybe even a secret passageway to Robinson Crusoe, where the illustrative books are stacked. I presume the fanzine aficionado among the bookworms that founded Robinson Crusoe could not help but open an entire store just as stylish to exclusively sell comics and fanzines.

On a bookworm's survival tour of Beyoğlu, we cannot leave out the Şahaflar Çarşısı, which is a secondhand book market spreading over two floors of Aslihan Pasajı. You can enter it either through the Fish Market (Balık Pazarı) on İstiklal Street, or across from the British Consulate through an unpretentious door among shops selling electrical appliances and sewing material. In Şahaflar Çarşısı, you can find posters of old cult Turkish films, rare and kitschy postcards and secondhand books in English and French, and it is actually the cheapest option if you are not looking for a specific book but just searching for something fun to read while waiting for your friends at a café nearby.

Though they have a rather narrow collection of books in English, Ada Kitabevi, with its huge café-restaurant inside and almost always good music, is also an option to consider, as well as Dünya Kitabevi, at the end of İstiklal Street toward Tünel.

Actually, the bookstores and secondhand bookshops in and around İstiklal Street, in tiny passages or little street corners or right on İstiklal Street, are so impressive that one can easily spend a day just “visiting” bookstores and getting lost in the dust and smell of books on their shelves. İstanbul can easily be a bookworm's paradise if you know where to look, be it for your academic needs or poetic cravings. And then it is just like visiting a newly acquainted friend and afterwards gossiping about them in awe: “İstanbul reads it all; I've seen it on her shelves; everywhere is full of books. She reads Wittgenstein, Rumi, Fromm, Cohen, Loti, Bukowski, Rushdie, Hayyam and what-not, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I'm telling you; you wouldn't believe the bookshops this city has…”