Saturday, September 1, 2012 — Reykjavik’s Bookstores

Ice­land is famous for hav­ing a very high lev­el of read­ing, and I saw plen­ty of evi­dence of this. Reykyavik’s core has a half-dozen fair­ly large book­stores, well stocked with both Ice­landic and Eng­lish books, and they are always crowd­ed. A Cana­di­an city of this size would be lucky to have one. I vis­it­ed a sec­ond-hand book­store, and mar­velled at the large selec­tion of old books in Ice­landic, dat­ing back to the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, when the pop­u­la­tion of the island was tiny. These includ­ed both trans­la­tions of the world’s out­put, but quite a lot of orig­i­nal works in Ice­landic. My will-pow­er broke down, and I pur­chased a two-vol­ume set of Sagas. These are use­less to me, as they are in Ice­landic, but they are beau­ti­ful, and I ratio­nal­ized the pur­chase as the vis­i­ble sou­venir of my trip that will look at me hand­some­ly from my book­shelf. Per­haps a wan­der­ing Ice­landic schol­ar will drop by and read them.

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