MOSSES, Hong Kong's Hidden Independent Bookshop, Is More Than Two Designers' Private Hobby | Hong Kong Street Life ⑫
"Hong Kong Street Life" is a QDaily column written by commissioned contributors, an attempt to set down quickly whatever sketches it can of a place that is changing fast.
"Hong Kong Street Life" is a QDaily column written by commissioned contributors, an attempt to set down quickly whatever sketches it can of a place that is changing fast.
Hong Kong has an independent bookshop called MOSSES. The name means moss, and the shop sits the way moss does.
At first hearing it sounds like Moses, and it takes something of Moses's nerve at the Red Sea to find the place. On a wet, drizzling day you turn off Queen's Road Central in Wan Chai into the Sun, Moon and Star streets, pass St. Francis Mansion at 14 St. Francis Street, take one more corner, and only then see No. 15 tucked into the bend; go down the steps and you can declare a touchdown. There is no number plate on the shop, only "MOSSES" painted in white on an orange wall — like moss, which slips you up if you step on it carelessly, and which you walk straight past if you are not paying attention.
MOSSES was founded by the book designer Hu Zhuobin (Zhuo) and the illustrator Huang Sizhe (Zhe). The meaning is the one moss carries: tiny, easy to miss, and still able to work its way into a crack and find room to grow.
The space runs to barely one or two hundred square feet. Nothing is sorted by category; the shelves are a jumble, and customers are meant to hunt for treasure. "This shop is what we like," Zhuo says. "The space is already this small, so we only put in the things we love most." Of all Hong Kong's independent bookshops, MOSSES is the only one built on expensive books. To the two of them a book is an artwork, and a bookshop both shapes the city's taste and absorbs it.
It carries photobooks, magazines and books you rarely see. At first the two picked them up on their travels, from all over the world; they bought so many, and kept saying it made no sense that some of these books were not available in Hong Kong, that in time they opened a shop. They now bring in three or four hundred books from more than fifty countries, ordering straight from the people who make them. Many are limited editions; photographers leave work on consignment, other independent bookshops pass on recommendations, one introduction leads to the next, and a network slowly built up.
"These books — I dare say nobody else in Hong Kong has them." Everything is chosen by hand, and how each book got here has become a story worth telling; Zhuo has turned into a storyteller of books. Sabat, the witchcraft magazine from Britain, gave its first three issues to the desires of the maiden, the mother and the crone. "Witchcraft was a product of feminism to begin with, because most religions in the world would rather women did not say their desires out loud." Or Shukyu Magazine, a themed football title: its Identity issue introduces the strength of national teams that have never signed with FIFA, and one article runs under the headline Ten Ways to Get Hurt, guaranteed to make a football fan slap the table and laugh.
Science of the Secondary, published by the Singapore design studio Atelier HOKO, puts a bright red apple on the cover and asks what an apple is, how the structure of the hand relates to the apple, how you bite one, the various crunches eating makes — and the series goes on. Hong Kong writer Li Meiqi's new book Midnight Therapy 《夜半治疗》 sells for HK$400; only just over 200 copies were made, and more than 20 went at the launch. The most popular and best-selling title is Greg Girard's photobook HK:PM, at HK$350, which shows Wan Chai as it used to look.
The most expensive photobook goes for HK$25,000. Rabbits Abandon their Children exists in just over seventy copies worldwide, and "it's been resold up to a crazy price." It looks at first like a children's book: the first half photographs the green hills and clear water of Japan's Rabbit Island, then old archive pictures start to appear, and only at the end does the truth come out. "During the war there was a plant on the island, the Tadanoumi works, making poison gas, and it killed a great many Chinese. The book uses surviving photographs and interviews with former Japanese army staff who are still alive. It is a confession. It says this history cannot be forgotten, because the Japanese government no longer mentions it." They like it too much to sell it, so they simply put a price on it that scares people off.
He climbs onto a chair and takes down, carefully, a book that is not for sale from the highest shelf above the till: Junpei Ueda's Picture of My Life. A young Japanese man goes abroad to travel, and his parents, both suffering from depression, kill themselves because of it. Sorting through what they left behind, he looks back at his memories from inside despair, and slowly heals and lets go. It is the author's own story, published once a year, and this book too was printed in just over 250 copies.
Look up, and the ceiling is running, over and over, a 1985 interview with their favorite writer, Marguerite Duras: "I believe people will be drowned in a sea of information." "There is no one left who reads seriously."
The 2008 movement against the express rail link brought the two of them together. Both had studied design and had been classmates, and they grew close talking about the books they liked. Huang Sizhe remembers a reading event that invited Zhuo along: everyone was chatting easily about the pleasures of reading, and the moment he played this clip, which he had cut himself, the room went cold.
Running publishing events brought Zhuo a circle of independent publishers. They put on a few exhibitions and found they did not last. In 2013 he opened his first shop inside the Wontonmeen guesthouse, a space so small it had one wall and room for a single bookshelf; then came Book B in Kowloon, which moved several times. In 2016 the gallery café that had the space gave it up, they took over the lease, and MOSSES opened — their first proper bookshop, five years in the making.
The streets around St. Francis Street are quiet. They chose Hong Kong Island because Island people do not cross the harbor, and there are plenty of potential customers on this side. Half the customers now are foreigners and half are Hong Kongers, and you can spot them by their bearing: art directors, designers, photographers, artists. Zhuo counts off the odd ones he has met. A man came in, listened to the music for a while, then asked him: "What can I get for five hundred dollars?" As he tells it, Zhuo is digging around for the art book the man bought that day. "In the old days you could bootleg a vinyl record with white glue: spread the glue over the record, let it dry, peel the whole sheet off, and you could play it once or twice. Whatever record the artist liked, he copied with glue, and then made artwork on top of it." The man took one look, thought it was wonderful, and took it home.
A physical bookshop is really a place for exchange, where books and people meet, and it ought to take on the job of getting people reading again. "If you're going to read the classics, you'll read them. But sometimes you haven't read for so long that you can't get back into the state for reading. That's why this shop has so many photobooks — because I think that once you've looked at one properly, with attention, you can get back into that state. Read here as long as you like, then go and read other things."
"People say our books are so expensive that we look down on the poor. But we leave the door open and let anyone read. The prices are only back where they should be. If a writer spent years on a book, and the design is good and the production is good, and you still think it should cost less than a bowl of ramen at a hundred-odd dollars — I can't accept that."
Zhuo wants to do more than this. He worked at Joint Publishing once and quit after three months. For years he has designed covers for Kubrick, and his designs for books including The Necessary Silence 《必要的静默》 and Slow Wind Street 《慢风街》 won him HKDA Global Design Awards. He set up a design studio called Edited.
What pushed him into design was Wong Bik-wan. As a boy he loved her books — Thereafter 《其后》, for one — and pressed them on his secondary-school classmates. "Nobody was interested. Maybe I put it badly, so I blamed the cover for being ugly." He can't help laughing, and adds that Wong draws all her own covers. "Of course I'd want her to ask me to design one. It won't happen."
He went into book design five years ago and knocked on publishers' doors in person to get work. At the start the pay was HK$6,000 a month, below the minimum wage.
Zhe says that when he first knew Zhuo, Zhuo was the quieter one, nothing like the fluent talker in front of us now. Mainstream bookshops come to Zhuo for work these days; he says frankly that he charges a lot, so the jobs are few. Survival seems to have ground him sharp. Getting a design idea across to a client, Zhuo says, is part of the craft too.
The other shop is called Book B to remind people that a Book A exists. Mainstream bookshops have built a market around books costing about a hundred dollars. The publishing market is shrinking, mainstream publishers have too little pull, and the books they put out come off a production line. He thinks it a waste: plenty of the impressive people he knows, good at illustration or at writing, end up writing scripts, doing something else, because no publisher will take them on.
Talent still needs someone who can recognize it. What he wants most is for writers to have a choice.
Huang Sizhe pulls out a battered copy of Duras's novel The Little Horses of Tarquinia. He carried it everywhere through two years on a working holiday in Ireland. In the middle of a complicated relationship he would open the novel and seem to find directions for his life — though "then something unlucky would happen." At the end of that winter he made a point of going to Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, and spent three days there drawing in outline with a red pencil. Like saving the strawberry on the cake for last, he left Duras's grave until the end, to talk with her — "talking to myself." Some headstones have tickets on them; on Duras's there is a pot for pens, and he dropped the short red pencil stub into it.
The drawings from those three days became an illustration book, Where She Sleeps, designed by Zhuo himself, set in a headstone typeface and debossed into the paper. "Making a book with him is like being in a band," Zhe says, then pauses. "I don't think a mainstream bookshop could do that."
"People often think I'm the one who gives a book its soul. I'm not. The soul of a book is written by the author. Without a body you never see the soul, so the designer has to make a good body to hold it. Good design is when you feel it could only have been this."
Decade Novels: Remembering Hong Kong, designed by Zhuo, collects seven writers — Chan Wai, Wong Leung-wo, Wong Yan-kwai and Hon Lai-chu among them — each writing a story from a period beginning in the 1950s. On the cover, every writer's name carries a band of deep shadow shading from white to gray: the times getting worse. "I keep hearing people say all the good things about Hong Kong are gone." The title on the spine is printed in gold on purpose, the strokes coming and going as you look; he matched ink colors and typefaces to the printing technology of each period — the further back, the bigger and heavier the type.
"When I was small I used to wonder why a Hong Kong literary writer like Wong Bik-wan had never won the Nobel Prize." Zhuo has been to book fairs all over the world, Tokyo Art Book Fair 2017 among them, and has never once seen a Hong Kong publisher at one. He talks to foreign publishers often, and they always ask what books Hong Kong has — proof enough that mainstream bookshops do nothing to promote Hong Kong books. Hong Kong publishers mostly will not spend on new writers, or on making a cover distinctive enough to make someone buy it.
"I feel there's no way out. A cover designer has very little influence, books hardly travel abroad, and nobody has the appetite to find out about Hong Kong's literary writers — that alone is a problem." As for the literary giants, Haruki Murakami and Bohumil Hrabal and the rest, the traditional-character editions are all translated in Taiwan.
Hong Kong was once mocked as a cultural desert; the books borrowed most from its libraries are mostly travel guides. A city that does not read. Zhuo runs through the charges: the Hong Kong Book Fair draws a million visits now, but it sells the same books as the shops, with no vision and nothing of an exhibition left in it; publishers only want to move stock, and every advertisement is a spring sale, an autumn sale, a winter sale. "Thirty or forty years of that — who is going to pay full price for a book? Hong Kong publishing used to be formidable. Joint Publishing's book on Ming-style furniture sold hundreds of editions around the world. Publishing a book really was like printing money, and they piled up resources. Did any of it go to supporting local writers and publishers?"
Why the publishing market fell away is, he thinks, the big publishers' responsibility, and something they ought to examine in themselves. The two of them bring up "Sam Chung Sheung," the shorthand for Joint Publishing, Chung Hwa Book Company and The Commercial Press. All three belong to Guangdong New Culture Enterprise Development Co., which is wholly owned by the Central Government's Liaison Office in Hong Kong. It is the largest bookshop and distribution network by market share — 52 outlets, with publishing, distribution, printing and retail in one chain, and a store count and turnover that lock up eight-tenths of the publishing market.
By one count Hong Kong's independent bookshops come to 67 in all. After Page One, the big English-language bookshop, folded in 2016, many independent shops disappeared fast and without a sound. The Census and Statistics Department does not count bookshops separately, but retail outlets for books, newspapers and stationery fell from 1,540 in 2014 to 1,240 in 2017.
Should a small audience mean going upmarket? "I don't think there is a mass market any more. People keep calling us non-mainstream, but lately I've started saying something different, because a print run now is only 800 to 1,000 copies. I print 500 to 750 — a hundred-odd fewer — and I sell them all." He is willing to say that if a mainstream bookshop's writer came to him, the book might sell not two or three thousand copies but ten thousand, in bilingual or translated editions, all over the world.
Next the two will open a shop at the Nan Fung Mills, the revitalized textile factory in Tsuen Wan, and run publishing workshops teaching ordinary people to proofread, edit, do basic design, choose materials, and promote a book once it is out. The aim is to put more publishing resources within reach; MOSSES also holds publishing and music events. Proofreading as a profession is aging and fading, nobody joins it, and it now cares more about catching typos than about checking facts. He wants to revive the trade, however small his part, in the hope of moving other people one step further.
Hong Kong Reader, the literature-history-philosophy bookshop, has stood for ten years; its owner once said that reading is a luxury in Hong Kong. Space in Hong Kong is a greater luxury still — and Zhuo has just renewed his lease for four more years.
"From the time I started running independent publishing events, I've put in more money than I can count and never earned a cent. It's impossible to earn anything. But the most important thing —" he sighs, "the losses cut into the flesh." Tens of thousands a month from brand design covers the gap. "The point isn't profit or loss. Most people think you open a shop to run a business, but for me, business aside — if what my life is for is making books, then I have to run this bookshop."
"I want a bookshop that stands for this city." He visits independent bookshops in other countries when he travels, goes book hunting, looks at interesting books. A bookshop is, to some degree, a city's face. When foreign designers, experts and professors come to Hong Kong looking for distinctive publications that cross languages, he believes MOSSES holds up against any shop abroad.
The shop lives up to its name: it slips in with the wind at night and wets everything without a sound. In this melancholy, damp weather it has become an oasis in the cultural desert, holding on in one corner.
Duras is still playing on the ceiling: "People no longer travel. When you can go round the world in eight to fifteen days, there is no need to travel any more. Why? Travel takes the time of travel; it is not glancing at the sights in passing but living and seeing at once. Living by way of travel is no longer possible… In any case, a stretch of sea remains. Those oceans. And reading. People will find it again. One day, a person will read. And then it all begins over again."
All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.