Scenes from Independent Bookstores:

Kuo’s Astral Bookshop

On a pleasantly warm sunny day in late spring, Taipei’s historic Dadaocheng area is packed with tourists. But visitors who enter Kuo’s Astral Bookshop immediately leave the noise and bustle of the streets behind.

In the shop one sees a series of books introducing Taiwan’s history and culture, including Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation and Imperial Japan in Formosa, 1895–1945. The displays on the first floor are considered “very Taiwanese” by customers. As manager Willie Chao explains, the layout is designed to “resonate with the neighborhood.”

“The artists Kuo Hsueh-hu and Huang Tu-shui nourished the arts in Dadaocheng, and this is a place where Taiwanese cultural consciousness is very strong. Our bookstore must have the kinds of books that reflect the reasons why people come to Dadaocheng,” says Chao.

The shop also carries foreign-language books in order to meet the needs of international tourists. They want to buy books that will help them remember Taiwan, such as translations of works by the Taiwanese writers Qiu Miaojin (Chiu Miao-chin), Kevin Shih-hung Chen, Sanmao, and Wu Ming-yi; volumes that introduce Taiwan’s democratic development or historical events like the February 28 Incident; or illustrated travel books with recommendations for good food and fun places in Taiwan.

Looking up from the space between the front and rear structures at Kuo’s, one can see sunlight streaming in.

Willie Chao, manager of Kuo’s Astral Bookshop, feels that the selection of books on offer in the store has both breadth and depth, and resonates with its neighborhood’s history and ideals.

The story of an old house

The building where Kuo’s is located—a three-story Baroque-­style brick structure at No. 129, Dihua Street Section 1—was originally the family home of Kuo Chung-­hsing, head of the Book Republic Publishing Group, who provided funding for the bookshop.

Willie Chao says that to hear Kuo Chung-hsing relate his family’s history, it is a story of a rise and a fall in fortunes. It started when Kuo’s grandfather Kuo Wu-lung founded a wholesale food business called Kuo-Yi-Mei in Dadaocheng during the era of Japanese rule.

“The Kuo-Yi-Mei Store was poorly run by the second generation and went under, and the family home was sold. Kuo Chung-hsing has said privately that this was the lowest point in his life, because this was where he was born and grew up, but finally he was booted out,” says Chao. Relating a talk that Kuo, by then in his seventies, gave at the 2023 Taipei International Book Exhibition, Chao mentions that on day that Kuo’s Astral Bookshop first opened, Kuo bought a book there, and when he saw that the establishment’s Chinese name as printed on the receipt was “Kuo-Yi-Mei Store,” referring to the home of his childhood and youth, he suddenly found himself in a state of confusion. When Kuo reached this point in his story, says Chao, he choked up, with tears rolling down his cheeks, and it was some time before he could carry on speaking.

Chao says that among the historic structures in Dadaocheng there are few that are as open to the public as Kuo’s Astral Bookshop. The entirety of the front and rear buildings, from the first to third floors, is open free of charge to visitors, making the shop like a public space for all people.

Kuo’s Astral Bookshop hopes to turn casual visitors who come to take photos and check in online into readers and buyers of books.

The power of reading

Turning his old home into a bookshop was in fact a beautiful coincidence. Kuo says, “I hope there can be bookstores everywhere in Taiwan.” In 2021 he launched his bookshop program and invited Willie Chao to manage the first one. It was Chao who suggested he name his second store “Kuo’s Astral Bookshop.” Kuo’s only requirement is that a bookstore should carry at least 30,000 titles.

“Kuo has faith in books and reading. He often says that bookstores only need to be filled with books, and people will come.” Chao, who majored in business ­administration, says that these days many people buy books online, and it is a major challenge for bookstores to make money solely by selling books.

Kuo’s Astral Bookshop, which opened in December of 2022, takes advantage of the charm of its historic location and its careful book selection to create a different style and atmosphere on each floor. The first floor is focused on Taiwan, the second on the rest of the world, and the third on art and aesthetics. There is a coffee shop in the rear building where people can chat. “Customers think this is an amazing bookstore, because there are no other cultural and creative products for sale at Kuo’s, only books, and these days it’s unusual to see such a ‘pure’ bookstore.” Chao adds that there is a great deal of power in purity.

Kuo’s held a lecture on “The Secrets of the Taipei Xia-Hai City God,” and even brought in a statue of the City God for the event. (courtesy of Kuo’s Astral Bookshop)

For the community

Chao states: “The success of Kuo’s Astral Bookshop lies not in attracting people who already are in the habit of reading and of buying books, but in attracting people who don’t read much and don’t buy books.”

The second floor is divided into thematic areas, with the selection of books and their display designed to stimulate the minds and interest of readers. Chao points to the famous New York independent bookstore ­McNally Jackson as an example of the approach he prefers. Kuo’s Astral Bookshop leaves the main decision-making power over book selection to its staff, enabling frontline workers who understand and love books to interact with members of the local community and learn what kinds of books the community wants and needs. Their choices are not limited by the influence or recommendations of publishers, ensuring that Kuo’s maintains the authentic spirit of an independent bookstore.

Kuo’s Astral Bookshop takes advantage of the lighter foot traffic late in the evening to hold tours. Many participants will linger to have a cup of coffee and read books, making for a memorable evening. This is the genuine value of a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Willie Chao relates: “Readers who used to buy most of their books online have told me that they come especially to buy books at Kuo’s because they want the shop to exist forever.” This is a very supportive gesture.

Nonetheless, argues Chao, “Independent bookstores cannot rely exclusively on these kinds of gestures—we also have to find our own value.” The value of a bookstore’s existence lies in reading and the community.

In order to promote interactions with the community, Kuo’s Astral Bookshop is included in the itineraries of walking tours of Dadaocheng, and the store hosts community seminars and invites writers of books about Dadaocheng to give lectures there.

Kuo’s also periodically holds exhibitions of illustrations and photography, as well as family-style concerts. Chao says that by proactively engaging with the local community, the bookshop becomes more than just a bookshop—it also serves as a supporter of community culture and an arts center for the neighborhood.

The scenery of bookshops is not limited to their decor but also includes the looks of concentration on readers’ faces.

Kuo’s has launched a program to help children get into the habit of reading. (courtesy of Kuo’s Astral Bookshop)

The Titsia bookstore

Kiwi Cultural and Creative is a firm located in the part of Taipei with the highest concentration of bookshops and publishing firms: the area around Wenzhou Street, Roosevelt Road, and Tingzhou Road. Founded ten years ago, Kiwi is situated on the 7th floor of an office building on Roosevelt Road. Creative director Liu Ting-kang decided in 2022 to use half of the office space to open the Titsia bookstore.

Besides selling books published by Kiwi itself and new books recommended by the Indie Publishers Association of Taiwan, Titsia also has secondhand books and a reading area. “This is probably Taiwan’s most intellectually challenging reading area, with Freud, Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, and a complete set of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” says Liu, who manages Titsia.

Many foreigners who come to Taiwan to study Mandarin feel that the selection of books at Titsia is well defined. The most popular titles are manga (comic books) on Taiwanese history and culture, many recommended by store staffer Wu Zhiran. Favorites include the mystery novel The Tragedy of Goldsmith Family, which incorporates local monster legends and elements of Taiwanese history and culture; The Season When Flowers Bloom, which depicts Taiwan around the 1930s; and Lost Gods, an introduction to Taiwanese culture and legends written by Evergreen Yeh. Such books enable readers to better understand Taiwan and also have entertainment or literary value.

Titsia bookstore founder Liu Ting-kan believes that bookstores can enrich and complete the reading lifestyle.

Bookshops can creates opportunities for people to experience enjoyable encounters with books and to find out what they like to read.

Chance encounters between people and books

When asked “Why are bookshops important?” Liu Ting-kang replies: “Reading is a kind of lifestyle, but it’s not enough merely to have sales channels and publishers—the reading lifestyle needs to be propped up by bookstores.”

“I want to go back to the original nature of bookshops, as places for encounters between people and books,” explains Liu. Titsia uses a layout with separate areas for new books, poetry, Taiwan-related issues, and manga to enable readers to encounter books.

The manga area, for example, has three main strands: Taiwanese manga, alternative Japanese manga, and reference books. Liu believes that Taiwan is in the midst of its third golden age of manga. There are many manga works that incorporate Taiwanese elements and Taiwan’s relationship with the world, expressing a sense of shared Taiwanese identity and attracting many readers who don’t read comic books but are interested in Taiwanese history, culture, and transitional justice to switch to this alternative medium of popular culture.

The store also promotes the study of Taiwanese ­Hokkien. Bestsellers in the shop include Lau Seng-hian’s A Linguist Breaks Down Taiwanese, while Liu Ting-kang recommends a book published by Kiwi Cultural and Creative called Learn the Taiwan Language Phonetic Alphabet in Ten Days.

Titsia offers people unusual ways to interact with book

A vehicle for social participation

The most unique things about the Titsia bookstore are the Nietzsche book club, which meets every Tuesday, and the sociology book club hosted by Liu every Friday.

The Nietzsche book club was founded ten years ago by Yeh Chi-jeng, a professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Now presided over by Ray Gao, a student of one of Yeh’s students, the group is currently reading On the Genealogy of Morality. Titsia invited them to hold their meetings at the shop. Of the 19 members, half are community residents, and one is a German named Günther working in Taiwan who says he has read all of Nietzsche’s works except On the Genealogy of Morality.

Liu Ting-kang, who has a doctorate in sociology and teaches various classes on subjects including the sociology of literature at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), personally presides over the sociology book club. They have read everything from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition to Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception. Besides having 15 to 16 people attending in person, the sessions are also livestreamed online.

“I am really touched that so many people are taking part in the club to read books of this level of difficulty,” says Liu. For example, 27 people signed up to read the weighty tome Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, by Pierre Bourdieu. Liu says that although there are many intellectually challenging books, he hopes to be able to link the books’ content with each reader’s experiences or personal reality. For example, with regard to the five roles in the book On Doraemon by Shunsuke Sugita, he asks: “Which character are you most similar to? Are you like Nobita? Many people feel that Nobita is a wastrel, but there is perhaps a useless Nobita in each of us.”

Some authors opt to work with small independent publishers, and you can see books in Titsia that you can’t find in big bookshops.

A distance-free bookshop

In April of 2023, drawing on the example of foreign poetry competitions, Titsia bookstore held its first poetry slam. The store invited poet Lo Chih-cheng (Luo Zhicheng) to be a special guest, and had members of NTNU’s Fountain Poem club and the Titsia team compose and read their own verses on the subject of “youth.” After the readings there was an immediate one-person-one-vote ballot to choose the winner.

Besides book clubs and poetry slams, Titsia also organizes a “salon” where issues such as creative freedom or the production of a live-action series based on the Japanese manga One Piece are discussed. They also offer spiritual growth workshops, which are popular with the community, inviting local residents and NTNU students to attend. In these ways they put into practice the ideal of a bookshop being a venue for social participation.

Every activity sheds light on Liu Ting-kang’s original motivation for opening the bookstore: “After my enthusiasm for publishing had been burning brightly for ten years, I needed a new spark—I wanted to see actual ­readers.”

Liu says that every customer has their own story and their own hopes for reading, and wants to reexamine their direction in life. When customers share stories about how reading has changed their lives, this gives Liu encouragement and reaffirms his choice of a career in publishing.

Liu plans to open another upper-story bookshop in Zhongshan District in the northern part of downtown Taipei, as he seeks to realize his ideal of using bookstores to spread the reading lifestyle and put sociological principles into practice at a local level.

One of the most unique things about the Titsia bookstore is the Nietzsche book club. (courtesy of Titsia bookstore)