Mapping Joburg’s literary district — one pin-drop at a time

Nearly a decade ago, I decided to take a walk around the Johannesburg CBD, mostly on a whim, looking for bookstores.

I was reliably informed there weren’t any. No-one in my suburban bubble knew of any. Admittedly, drawing conclusions about the city centre from informal focus groups pulled largely from the Parkhurst brunch crowd might invite sampling errors, but those perceptions were reinforced by a map.

When I searched for bookshops on Google Maps, the screen filled with neatly labelled streets and landmarks, but there was not a single pin in the city centre. The suggestions gently nudged me rather to try the well-known stores in shopping malls. And surely Google knows everything?

Blank maps say a lot. They suggest there’s nothing to see, so don’t even bother visiting. They imply that, even if something is there, it’s not worth recording. Because no-one has bothered to take notes or share what they found, some people fill the emptiness with their own stories.

“I used to go shopping there. That was the high street.”

“Wasn’t there a big cinema with chandeliers there?”

“My brother got hijacked in town.”

“Why would anyone go there?”

An empty map makes it hard to find what you’re looking for, and getting lost can be scary. But if you don’t know what you’re looking for, the blank spaces are just waiting to be filled in — an invitation to explore.

Hover over the pin to see the name of bookstore/bookshop/library.

Because, of course, that map was wrong. For all its resources, Google doesn’t really make maps — they just give the outlines of them, which users must then fill in.

I was too naive to know what I was looking for and really expected to find nothing. But on that first walk, I headed out from Park Station and before I’d even left the building I’d met a bookseller in the corridor. The Bon Voyage Superette offered travellers a hot meal from its takeaway counter and a second-hand book for the road.

Another purchase point was in the plaza outside — three tables stacked with popular fiction and children’s books priced at three for R20. More books were traded on the steps leading down to De Villiers Street. One store was packed with nappies, hair extensions and schoolbooks. A hair salon would sell you a Bible to read while you were having your braids done.

That morning, I found a dozen booksellers, and they recommended so many more it was impossible for me to keep track of them.

I knew I’d never remember them all, so I sketched them in an A5 notebook. My lines were crooked. The street names were often wrong, because the street signs were generally missing. And the penmanship was atrocious, given my notes were scribbled while I was balancing the notebook on my knees.

Eventually, those notes went into a Google Map — a publicly shared one, though not many people had any reason to look at it. And yet seeing the little pins clustered so tightly in the downtown zone made the reality of the city feel different. It was no longer an empty space, but rather a vibrant one filled with books.

That new way of looking at the city became a new way of thinking about it. Much like Johannesburg has a fashion district overflowing with fabric shops and tailors, we clearly have a literary district crowded with booksellers. That idea inspired me to open Bridge Books in 2016. It also convinced the Johannesburg Development Agency to send out architects in 2019 to design what LitDistrict might look like.

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But the physical space was still hard to imagine. I started talking to Laurice Taitz, founder of “Johannesburg in Your Pocket” city guide, about turning it all into a physical map, something to spread out on a table and write on — or, better yet, something to post around the city, so pedestrians can find their way. She and Bradley Kirshenbaum of Love Jozi call themselves “accidental cartographers”, as they have collaborated with each other to make maps for Johannesburg in Your Pocket, thereby making the city more accessible. They have also published a collection of essays on Joburg called I Love You I Hate You, which we stocked at Bridge Books.

The downtown area is huge and has a vast array of booksellers, and that made getting the map onto paper especially challenging. It’s hard just to name and give the address of 71 booksellers, let alone describe them, without using a microscopic font. So we have a very big map that can fold up or fill an entire wall.

The staff at Bridge Books updated the map this year. Since Covid, most of the national chains are gone. But they’ve been replaced by more small booksellers. Some of the street vendors have upped their game and started selling online only, mostly on Facebook Marketplace or WhatsApp. One runs a shop out of his flat, selling student textbooks, energy drinks and chappies via Uber Eats.

Some of the pins point to tiny pavement stands such as one in De Villiers Street owned by Ms Davids, who sells cosmetics, costume jewellery and motivational books meant to improve the mind and body.

One leads to the city’s oldest bookstore, Limbada & Co, which started trading in 1920. It is in Nathanson’s Building, a bright-pink row of shops built in 1905 on Diagonal Street. The current owner, Imtiaz Limbada, is the third generation of booksellers in his family, and has a strong collection on indigenous languages and knowledge. Need to know the names of medicinal plants in Zulu? Limbada has a book for you.

I once saw in his window what looked like a copy of Alice in Wonderland — a little chapbook with an old line-drawing of the White Rabbit on the cover. But it was actually a collection of Mozambican folk tales written entirely in Tsonga. That sparked a conversation about South Africa’s reading culture, but not a fretful one. Imtiaz remembers the 1980s, when Venda workers would come through the city on their way to work on the mines. They used to stop to buy books in Venda to pass the time while they were away from home. He wonders what happened to that reading culture. Where have all the Venda books gone?

There are four places to buy books in the Ethiopian Mall, the Old Medical Arts Building at 220 Rahima Moosa Street. But Netsi’s also sells coffee. Huge burlap sacks by the checkout counter contain varieties of coffee beans, which get roasted in small batches in a long-handled pan over hot coals. There’s no cappuccino — just Ethiopian coffee made the traditional way for R12. On my last visit, the only books in English sold there were travel guides. Everything else is in Amharic, though her collection is the best. The other three shops mostly stock Bibles.

About a fifth of the shops sell Christian books — rows of black Bibles wrapped in colour-coded book bands. Each language has its own colour — our linguistic rainbow nation on a shelf.

Some have very few books. Before Covid, Sui Hing Hong in the old Chinatown had a corner shop selling Chinese books and newspapers. Sauce bottles have taken over that section of the store now, but there are still a few books tucked away in the back if you ask for them. In April, they had two memoirs about Chinese and Taiwanese families in South Africa. The next aisle had fireworks.

The biggest bookshop by far is Collector’s Treasury, which claims to have 2-million books. Walking around the store, that certainly feels true, given its full eight floors of reading. Yet the owners know where everything is. When I was writing my novel The Golden Rhino, I went hunting for books about Mapungubwe. They had an entire collection on that topic, and steered me directly towards it.

For an even more jam-packed bookstore, Dominion Stationery has so many books that there’s no room for people. The owner welcomes you at the doorway, takes your request, and sends someone deep into the stacks to find what you are looking for.

In the Joubert Street Market, Henry sells a rich variety of books, along with magazines and board games. He’s always on the lookout for magazines, which he uses for a Diepsloot school programme he supports. Children there never have enough to read or cut up for school projects.

On the same block, Blessing and Joel like a good mix of literary wares. There’s cheaper romance and thrillers up front, and more prized African writers in the place of honour at the back. They introduced me to Present, who used to work as a distributor of second-hand books. He still does, but now he’s got his own outlet up the road, closer to Atwell Gardens. He’s a bit of a book pusher, always recruiting relatives to join the business. He’s got a keen eye and once found an original edition of The House at Pooh Corner in the recycling bin of a shop in Benoni.

Two of the bookshops are among the world’s most remarkable, or so writes Elizabeth Stamp in 150 Bookstores You Need to Visit Before You Die. One is James Findlay Collectable Books & Antique Maps, in the basement of the Rand Club. With centuries-old maps of Africa to rare first editions, the shop looks like a movie set — the fairy-tale version of what a bookstore should be.

Then there’s my effort at Bridge Books. We’ve finally finished our migration to the Barbican, in addition to keeping our charming shop in Linden. The Barbican is a landmark, a 10-storey art deco delight. Now we have corner windows onto the streets that run to the parks we’re trying to care for. It gives us space for reading programmes and book launches, as well as places where children can study after school. Bridge is not the biggest, the oldest or the most beautiful store. Half the time, I can’t believe it’s managed to stay open. But it is a curious spot — a good place to fill in some of the blanks in Johannesburg’s story.

For more information, visit Lit District