L'insolito destino di Gaia la libraia
The unusual fate of Ellen the bookseller
Written by Valentina Rizzi
Translated by Daniela Neri
Illustrated by Natascia Ugliano
Published by Bibliolibrò Editore (Italy)

 “To the friends who have shut up their shops,
and to those who have reopened,
to those who still resist
and those on the streets who never give up.
To the independent booksellers
who have inspired this story
with their courage.”

My neighborhood is full of grey buildings
and department stores
In place of the shopping malls, 
there once were many small shops. 
In the street where I live there was a pastry,
a grocery store, a watchmaker’s.
And then there was her.
Yellow, green and blue, with red windows.
Small, squeezed between two big banks.
Her, the children’s bookshop.

The bookshop was near my school 
and before going home,
I often used to visit it.
The library was full of paper, voices, stories.
The books inside were all different, just like us.
They were big, small, colorful.
Large, thin, soft.

"Quick, let’s hide! "
Bruno used to say to me and Julia, trying to stay a bit more in the bookshop.
Behind the counter there was a lady who wore a fluffy, enveloping scarf.
She was used to having us always around.
Ellen the bookseller hardly ever left the store.
The most she would do was to come out of the counter and climb a crooked staircase
to grab a book and read something to us.

Ellen was a funny bookseller. She seemed to have tentacles
in place of arms: she used to take books, puppets, telephone, 
receipts and everything all at once.
In place of a pair of hands she seemed to have two suckers:
she always managed to grab even the most hidden and secret books.

Whenever she started reading, she used to change completely.
She took off her scarf, she turned off the main lights
and switched on a coloured light. 
Her fingers turned into gloves
able to pull the characters out of the pages.

Her eyes turned into headlights that lit up
and turn off each time she turned a page.
Her tongue turned into a big pencil
so that when she spoke she drew with her voice all the scenes 
of the book she was reading to us.
Sometimes she used puppets to tell stories.

During the reading groups her hair turned into
a bush tangled up in words.
If there were too many people around, 
two locomotives steamed out of her ears: too many customers to serve!
Her nose used to turn into a red button
every time her boyfriend Mario entered the bookshop.
When Ellen was reading, her legs always changed into 
two roots firmly planted on the ground, and her feet
began to sprout and grow into travels and adventures.
We would often change too,
becoming part of the story.

One day the bookseller’s scarf has become a flying carpet
for the grand finale.
The parents applauded as she closed the book
tying the scarf around her neck.
When she turned off the lights of the reading area
we understood it was time to go home.
 “Come back soon!
A new story is already awaiting you!”

Our neighbourhood, one day, 
started to become darker:
 “I guess some lamp-posts have stopped working”
I initially thought.
Suddenly the streets have become dirtier and gloomy.
People have started to prefer to visit the shopping malls, 
and the windows of the small stores in the area started to empty out.

Ellen the bookseller hardly ever left the store,
yet one day she wasn’t there anymore. 
"How can it be?
Where are the books? "
We asked ourselves the day our favourite bookseller disappeared.

A week later we found a new phosphorescent sign 
on the store window.
The bookshop had become an arcade.
No sign of Ellen.

And while we were still watching that new sign in shock,
a big, bad and bold guy came out
unrolling a greasy, wrinkled roll of cash.
 “Excuse me, do you happen to know where Ellen the bookseller is?”
Bruno kindly asked.
 “Oh no, not her again! It is the hundredth time since morning
that someone asks for her. People always care when it’s too late.”
 “Why, what happened? What have you done to her?”
Julia shouted angrily.
 “Calm down, little girl, it is not my fault if Ellen is a failure
and is fed up with fairy-tales and little brats.
She left the shop and now I have taken over. It’s all legal.
I told her she could stay and work behind the counter,
but she has packed up the whole kit and caboodle
and has gone home with her boyfriend.
Rest easy though, at least he's got a job.
Anyway, here it is full of video-games, why don’t you take a look?”.

Actually, looking inside the place all you could see
was a bunch of people with vacant, bloodshot eyes, people that greedily 
kept putting money inside machines that were promising big cash winnings.
We walked away, worried we could get sucked
into the vortex of those one-armed bandits.

Sad days followed, without Ellen the bookseller
and above all with no readings.
What now?
We tried to buy something to read in a supermarket
but there wasn’t much choice.
Or better said, at first glance from afar 
the amount of books seemed huge. But at a closer look
we realised they all looked embarrassingly similar.
Rats and pigs were winking at us on dozens of books.
They all looked the same to us.

When we tried to ask for a different book,
they told us to ask at the counter, where there was an endless queue.
No one had time for us.
What happened to Ellen the bookseller?
We missed her, we missed her stories,
we missed our stories and we missed that magic place
where there was a space for us
ready to welcome us away from the hustle
and the shopping carts.

We tried to ask for her in the library
and they sent us to some booksellers friends of her
We discovered other magical places,
however far away.
Those booksellers were all different.
Some of them loved silence and silent reading
others spent their days talking with customers
and again others preferred to listen.
 “What happened to Ellen the bookseller?”
 “The same thing that will happen to us if people keep reading on screens and buying books
found in the supermarkets near the lentils.”

Ellen’s friends were not influenced 
by the brand of the book, the authors’ fame
or the sponsors behind them.
That’s why you could always get from them
even the most sought after and rare books.
Each of them made every effort to offer us different reading choices. 
They cultivated stories the same way they would cultivate a garden 
with gorgeous and rare plants all different from one another.

Fu all'uscita da scuola,
a few weeks later, we heard a car horn and a megaphone behind us.
 “Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Here comes Bibliolibrò, the travelling
story-teller. Come on, come all!”
The voice was unmistakable: it was her, 
Ellen the bookseller, on a three-wheeled bookshop.
In the trunk we found our stories again,
our books and our puppets!
 “Hello kids! How is it going?”
See, I had to find another way to tell stories. Running the shop was too expensive.
I had to pack up, put my stories in some boxes and load them into Mario’s van.
Then, I came up with this idea: turn my three-wheeled car into a travelling bookshop.
I didn’t want to stay at home.
I missed you!”

Some of Ellen’s friends had to close their shops
because the stores’ rent was too expensive and had started to sell stories on the street.
 “There is a word we cherish: bibliodiversity. We do our best to make sure people can get different books from us, that is why we buy just a few copies of each title,
so that we can propose different reading suggestions. But people prefer to chase the discounts, buy books where they are cheaper, in places where they are sold in bulk,
on shelves with no bookseller around, where choices are dictated by passing fads. This is putting a strain on us and on all the people who are brave enough to create new different books.
The mechanism has jammed and here we are on the street without our shops.”
“The opportunities to learn and grow offered to the readers are suffering a crisis.
In a world where books are all the same we are running the risk of becoming dull; we are running the risk of giving up what is most important: the ability to look at the world from a different perspective in an atmosphere of mutual respect, in order to find the right key to happiness in life. That's why we have decided to remain independent in our choice of books, even if this means going out on the street driving a van.”

The streets began to get crowded with stories, voices, rustling paper
in spite of the traffic lights and signs.
The traffic got jammed, driving the traffic wardens to despair.
What now? The booksellers were forced to leave, but people rebelled.
“It’s time to close the arcades, enough with these videogames!
We want our bookshops back; we want our booksellers, and our choice of books!”
Then Ellen took the megaphone.
 “Thank you for the moral support,
but there is only one way to get your bookshops back:
adopt them and do not abandon them!”
There was a round of applause.

A month later we found the arcade closed.
 “This isn’t over, you bunch of scoundrels,
sooner or later we will meet again!”
Shouted Mr Money Maker while vanishing 
into his van with his pockets full of holes.
 “Who’s a failure now? I hope your wife has got a job!”
Ellen the bookseller shouted, amused.

A few months have passed since that day
but Bibliolibrò is still waiting for us
at the school gates.  
When you least expect it,
you can see it coming out of the corner of a street.
Bibliolibrò’s Ape car, like Ellen,
is able to turn into something else.
In place of the headlights two eyes appear,
in place of the car trunk  a trunk full of books opens 
and in place of the window
appears a proscenium from which a group of puppets emerge.
Who’s on stage?
And another story begins.

After a while, a window is still closed…
... or almost open.
It’s just a matter of time now.
We have decided to adopt Ellen’s bookshop.
During the week we are all here: grandparents, parents 
and neighbours. We help cleaning up this place
and putting up the shelves.
Julia, Bruno and I will create here our birthday wish list
and the same will do our teachers and our schoolmates.
In this way we will support the bookstore
and make sure it doesn’t close down again.

We also decided to always leave an open suitcase
at the entrance: it is the “suspended stories” corner. 
It will be filled with books that can be donated
to the children in need.
Dad says that they do something similar with coffee in the bars of Naples.

The new bookshop is almost ready.
Mario the handyman is now preparing the space
and putting the chairs in a circle. This year we will be able
to join those cool reading groups.
We will read the same book and then talk about it:
everyone will see something different 
and it will be good to compare our ideas.

Ellen's books have the power to change us!
In place of our eyes, we get two kaleidoscopes, 
and in place of our mouth a long carpet of words that rises and lifts us up, 
making us all travel together between the lines,
in search of new worlds.
If walls had a soul they would tell all the stories stored in these rooms
and also those that cannot fit in but that we never really lose 
because they are gathered and saved by those street poets who never give up:
the itinerant booksellers.