Veteran Korean Publisher Kim Eon-ho: How Did Books Drive South Korea's Transformation? | Interviews

"Publishing cannot stand apart from the currents of society. It should watch social problems constantly, and then focus on how to improve and solve them."

Kim Eon-ho, 75, has spent 43 years making books. He is president of Hangilsa, a well-known Korean publishing house, and chairman of the cultural foundation of Paju Book City, the world's largest book-publishing complex. He stands high in Korean publishing: he founded the Korean Publishers Conference in 1998 and served as its first and second chairman.

"The core force leading Korean society today, the elite class, are all readers of Hangilsa, you could say. I walk down the street and get recognized on the spot — it happens often. Readers who know me seem to be everywhere in Korea," Kim Eon-ho told QDaily.

As a leading figure in Korean publishing, Kim Eon-ho has also taken part for years in the East Asia Publishers Conference, and once served as its chairman. Other active participants include Otsuka Nobukazu, former president of Japan's Iwanami Shoten, and Dong Xiuyu, former general manager and editor-in-chief of China's SDX Joint Publishing Company.

By history and size, though, Hangilsa is not Korea's most formidable publisher. It is only 43 years old and has published just over 3,000 books. But during Korea's democratization movement, Hangilsa awakened countless young people and became an important force behind the country's transformation — and that is what earned it its reputation.

"During Korea's democratization movement in the 1980s, ours was, I would say, the humanities publisher standing at the very front and at the very center of it all," Kim Eon-ho said.

The Korean publishing-culture magazine _list: Books from Korea offered a similar assessment: "Hangilsa occupies a unique position in the history of Korean publishing. Throughout the so-called era of authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 80s, the press published one book after another that provoked strong social response. In this sense, Hangilsa was seen by the intellectuals of the time as a kind of intellectual fortress or stronghold against authoritarian power — a symbol of the era."

As Hangilsa's founder, Kim Eon-ho has a life bound up with modern Korean history, and it carries the unmistakable marks of his era.

He recalls in Bookstores, East and West (《书店东西》):

"Korea in the 1950s was a scene of devastation. By the 1960s, Koreans had finally turned their eyes to the outside world, and books came to occupy an important place in Korean life. The spirit of freedom and democracy awakened by the April 19 Revolution fell into a slump after the May 16 military coup, but at the call of books, countless young Koreans threw themselves into a new world of humanistic learning."

"In 1960, Korea's young students drove President Syngman Rhee from power. At the time, young people rallied around a spiritual and intellectual leader: Ham Sok-hon. In 1958, Ham Sok-hon published the essay 'Only a Thinking People Can Survive,' which woke a young generation of Koreans numbed by life under Rhee's corrupt regime. Ham Sok-hon's words were a light in the dark, showing them how beautiful a thinking person, a thinking society, and thought itself could be. Under Japanese colonial rule, Ham Sok-hon was arrested and jailed again and again, and his convictions only hardened. He denounced Park Chung-hee's coup and seizure of power in blunt terms, while preaching non-violence and peace, and sowing the ideal of coexistence."

Kim Eon-ho, born in 1944, grew up in exactly that atmosphere. He began reading Ham Sok-hon as a teenager, and after entering publishing he went on to commission and publish Ham Sok-hon's complete works, collected writings, and studies of him. "Ham Sok-hon is a symbol of someone who lived out his principles in modern Korean intellectual history, and he is my eternal spiritual mentor."

Partly because of Ham Sok-hon and others like him, Kim Eon-ho chose after high school to study journalism at Chung-Ang University and Seoul National University, and became a reporter at The Dong-A Ilbo after graduating. "Journalists can change society. They bear an inescapable responsibility for building a better society, and they play a crucial role. That was my understanding, so I chose journalism and became a reporter."

But Kim Eon-ho lived in an era when press freedom in Korea was not guaranteed. He and his colleagues often disagreed with the authorities and clashed with them. In the end, the Korean government made The Dong-A Ilbo dismiss more than 100 of its reporters at once. Kim Eon-ho was among them, and his eight years as a reporter were over.

After the dismissal, Kim Eon-ho felt he "couldn't do anything else." Publishing, he reasoned, was the field closest to journalism, and the contacts he had built as a reporter would help him make books. So in 1976 he founded Hangilsa, beginning nearly half a century of publishing.

After founding Hangilsa, Kim Eon-ho published a run of books with large social impact, including Idols and Reason (《偶像与理性》), On the National Economy (《民族经济论》), Understanding the History Before and After Liberation (《对解放前后史的认识》), The Complete Works of Ham Sok-hon (《咸锡宪全集》) and The Complete History of Korea (《韩国史全集》). He believes these books pushed young Koreans of the day to think and to act, and drove the country's transformation. For instance: "The pro-democracy demonstrations by students and citizens that broke out in Busan and Masan in 1979 became the trigger that brought the dictatorship crashing down. The Busan-Masan Uprising was precisely the result of reading awakening the young."

Along the way, of course, banned books, arrested authors and personal danger were all routine. "There were far too many books banned by the authorities back then to count. But once a book was banned, more people read it — students copied it out by hand and passed it around. The more it was banned, the hotter it got." "But I felt that as long as a book itself could push society forward, the risk was worth taking. I don't regret any of it, not in the least."

After Korea's transformation was complete, Hangilsa went on publishing books in the humanities and social sciences, hoping to build a rational society through reading. Besides the Korean Publishers Conference and the East Asia Publishers Conference, Kim Eon-ho also opened a new-concept bookstore called BOOK HOUSE, and joined in building Paju Book City and the Heyri Art Village, hoping to "bring out the spirit of books and their humanistic value." Building a utopia of books, in his view, is one way to rise above reality.

He also worries about the steady decline of Korea's brick-and-mortar bookstores, as people sink into their phones and read fewer printed books. So he set out to visit bookstores around the world. "I wanted to visit bookstores all over the world, to talk with the people who run them, to hear how they hold on to the value of the bookstore in a harsh reality, and to share their experience and wisdom. Visiting bookstores around the world, I felt the dignity of books and the power of the bookstore, and rethought what publishing and reading mean."

Bookstores, East and West is the fruit of those travels. The book was published in China in January 2019. To promote it, the publisher invited four Chinese booksellers — Dong Xiuyu, One Way Space co-founder Xu Zhiyuan, Librairie Avant-Garde founder Qian Xiaohua, and Zhongshuge founder Jin Hao — to a conversation titled "Keeping Watch Over Independent Bookstores" (《独立书店的守望》).

All four spoke of the same impression of Kim Eon-ho: a fanatical book lover, full of passion.

Jin Hao said Kim Eon-ho "reads so intently that he won't stop to eat," while Qian Xiaohua called him a "publisher I greatly admire," and wondered "where all that passion comes from." "We've known each other for 13 years, and Mr. Kim really is an extraordinarily fanatical book lover — far more fanatical than an ordinary book lover, an idealist utterly, utterly mad for books. At our meetings he is always brimming with passion; every time books come up, he stands and lays out his views. Just delightful!" Dong Xiuyu said.

Xu Zhiyuan spoke of feeling close to Kim Eon-ho, a sense of "meeting of minds." "These publishers were, back then, rebels of their era… Reading, in that period, became something deeply romantic, charged with a spirit of resistance. We talked about how Korea changed in the '70s and '80s, and I really love the intellectual charm they carry — their firmness about personal freedom, about knowledge itself, and about what books hold."

As for Kim Eon-ho, he has always believed in the power of thought and of books, and he sees that power as the way to avoid the "banality of evil" Hannah Arendt described. The bookstore, meanwhile, is a fine public space for people to meet and exchange ideas.

"To live like a human being — this phrase has run through my whole publishing career as a motto. Writing a book, editing a book, reading a book: all of it is done in order to live like a human being. I have given more than forty years to publishing, and the years have rushed past, yet the question still presses hard on me, and I am still looking for the answer," he writes in the book.

Q = QDaily

Kim = Kim Eon-ho

Korean-to-Chinese translation: Jin Danshi, whose translations include Bookstores, East and West: Twenty-One Independent Bookstores Around the World and A Burial for Spring: Selected Poems of Ko Un.

During Korea's Democratization Movement in the 1980s, Hangilsa Stood at the Very Center of Humanities Publishing

Q: You introduce Ham Sok-hon briefly in the book, but I noticed his works still haven't been translated into Chinese. Could you say more about what makes Ham Sok-hon valuable?

Kim: Mr. Ham Sok-hon stressed justice. He stood on the side of justice, on the side of the people. But he rejected violent means and always insisted on struggle by peaceful means. I started reading Ham Sok-hon in high school, and I admired him. The books I read young had an enormous influence on me. He is our spiritual mentor. Ham Sok-hon had a particular sympathy for the poor — he stood with society's weak, with the people, understood their suffering, answered it with compassion, and from there pushed for social change.

Q: Why did you want to publish Ham Sok-hon's books in the first place? What effect did they have in Korea?

Kim: Back then, if you asked Koreans which thinker had the greatest influence on Korea after liberation and independence from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, every Korean would say Ham Sok-hon's name in unison. So there was a need to organize his thought into a system and get it published. That was my original intention.

Korea had already begun its democratization movement in the 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s were its height. Within that movement, Mr. Ham Sok-hon's place was as its spiritual leader.

I too had been a reporter, and was later dismissed from the mainstream press, and then I founded a publishing house. Nearly everything we published was humanities and social science titles driven by a strong sense of the issues, closely tracking Korea's democratization movement and social change. I invited leaders of Korean intellectual life to write essays, then gathered them into series. So with Mr. Ham Sok-hon as the most central, most influential mentor in Korean political and intellectual circles, I felt that publishing his selected works and his complete works was an inescapable responsibility for our house — an obligation.

I believe publishing cannot stand apart from the currents of society. It should watch social problems constantly, and then focus on how to improve and solve them. This is a subject publishers should never stop watching.

Over 43 years I've published several thousand books. The only standard by which I judge, choose and decide whether to take on a book is whether it has value for society. Other things — whether the book will make money, say — are certainly not my concern. Publishing should push society forward.

The Complete Works of Ham Sok-hon was formally completed in the 1980s. Later we also published selections of his work, and various other editions of his books. Some of them certainly lost money, but others sold quite well. Commercially, taken together, we roughly broke even, which is how I was able to keep publishing so much of Ham Sok-hon's work.

Beyond Ham Sok-hon, many other authors' books also displeased the government, didn't suit its taste, and were banned. We had authors arrested and sentenced over books we published. I faced that kind of danger a number of times myself. But I felt that as long as a book itself could push society forward, the risk was worth taking. I don't regret any of it, not in the least.

Q: In the late 1970s you published Idols and Reason and Understanding the History Before and After Liberation, both of which made a huge impact at the time. Why did you decide to publish them, and what did they change?

Kim: Idols and Reason and Understanding the History Before and After Liberation were both wildly popular in the 1980s and sold a great many copies. Understanding the History Before and After Liberation is a thick, heavyweight work; its first volume alone sold 400,000 copies. Scaled to China, that would be like selling 4 million. Idols and Reason sold more than 100,000.

The 1980s in Korea were, as a whole, an age of books. Every college student had a book in hand; they gathered, argued and thought about how to build Korea into a better, more democratic society. They turned that thinking into action and launched the student movement — that was the kind of young people they were. These two books were required reading for any progressive young person who cared about society and the real world. A college student who hadn't read them felt ashamed.

Understanding the History Before and After Liberation came out in six volumes over ten years, from 1980 to 1989. The set essentially rewrote the direction of research into modern Korean history. Korea's leading scholars and experts today all read it in their youth.

If a book can carry the spirit an era calls for, and reflect what that era demands, then it is bound to become a bestseller. We published many other books besides these. During Korea's democratization movement in the 1980s, ours was, I would say, the humanities publisher standing at the very front and at the very center of it all.

Q: You just said Understanding the History Before and After Liberation rewrote the direction of research into modern Korean history. How should we understand that?

Kim: Around 1945, Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. But liberated or not, the country's south and north were split. As a result, modern Korean history couldn't be studied properly — the South had no way to study the North, no way to research the North's political activity in depth or judge it fairly. And research into modern history was treated by the government as taboo. Understanding the History Before and After Liberation took the courage to talk about that period specifically — modern and contemporary Korean history above all — and to put it boldly before a wide audience.

Not only that set. From 1986 to 1994 we also published a 27-volume Complete History of Korea, running from antiquity to the present. That set, too, gave a great deal of space to research on modern Korean history, which no other book could manage. The young scholars who grew up reading Understanding the History Before and After Liberation became its contributors.

We didn't only publish books of ideas. We published novels, poetry and other books that shape people's social and cultural life, and we put out quite a few good ones. But the government drew many no-go zones around the sale of certain books. This kind of book couldn't be sold, that kind couldn't be sold — I didn't agree with that approach. Books should be many, wide-ranging, various in every way; only then can the human spirit grow rich. Fence off a category of books and the human spirit cannot develop, and serious scholarship cannot develop either.

So from the 1990s on, we published a great many humanities classics. To date, Hangilsa's humanities classics series has put out more than 160 titles. We've also published a great many books on art. These books carry universal spiritual values.

Korea has changed enormously; the times have changed, and to some degree a democratic society has been achieved. What should we do to help a society mature? I feel today's young Koreans read less than the young Koreans of the 1980s did — they don't love reading the way that generation did.

But against that backdrop we have indeed published many bestsellers that sold in the millions. Jo Jung-rae's novel The Taebaek Mountains (《太白山脉》) sold more than 4 million copies, and Choi Myung-hee's novel Soul Fire (《魂火》) also sold more than 4 million. Keigo Higashino's The Miracles of the Namiya General Store and Nanami Shiono's The Story of the Romans (《罗马人的故事》) were ours as well, each selling more than 4 million.

Don't these books make a lot of money? I use what they earn to fund humanities books that sell badly and get overlooked but are extremely valuable. So some people think Hangilsa is a publisher that specializes in books that don't sell (laughs).

The overall trend in Korean society now is that people are ruled more and more by their phones. The phone is a reading tool, but reading through the phone alone can't enrich a person's spiritual world. Brick-and-mortar bookstores have been hit hard and many are closing, and that is what suddenly turned my attention to bookstores — to see where their appeal lies, and where the problems are. I made this journey among books, writing and photographing, to underline the bookstore's existence. It is a call to society: we should rediscover the appeal of the printed book, and go back to it.

Only a People Who Can Think, Who Have Ideas, Can Save the Nation

Q: You just said young Koreans today don't love reading as much as before. Why? And what problems does that bring?

Kim: The biggest problem is that the young have been domesticated by digital civilization. I believe the whole world faces this together. It really is convenient, but what phones supply is neither especially creative nor distinctive, and it lacks feeling — it can't reach your emotions.

Young people today are sunk in their phones, and it troubles me deeply. I rack my brain over how to get them to pick up printed books again. The best space for a person and a book to meet — the most convenient, most varied, most appealing space — there is really nothing besides the bookstore. It isn't only publishing houses; newspapers and magazines, all print media, are losing readers, and everyone is drifting away from the written word. Newspapers and magazines face a crisis too.

If none of this affected human growth and development, we could simply stop reading print, walk away from books, newspapers and magazines, and never raise the question. But as I just said, purely digital content isn't original, and it can't nourish your spirit or bring you any emotional richness. Is there some wisdom, some method, that would let phones and printed books live together in harmony? That is something we can think about and discuss together.

Q: You also write in the book that human society's misfortune comes from people's lack of the capacity to think, that this era is moving toward a technological totalitarian society, and that the "banality of evil" embodied in Eichmann is becoming universal among modern people. How do you see the relationship between thinking and action? I find that many people see a problem very clearly but are never willing to act on it.

Kim: Let's settle for the smaller goal first: learning to think. Once you have thought something through, acting is a higher level again. Many people don't know how to think. Why do we live? Many people never ask themselves that. They're simply pulled along, as if by habit, staring at their phones day after day. If we learn to think, then we have hope of avoiding the "banality of evil." When Arendt spoke of it, she said it doesn't live only in people like Eichmann — it lies dormant in every one of us. So we use thinking to find it, and then overcome it.

What Ham Sok-hon stressed most of all was that a person must think — you have to become someone who can think for yourself. Ham Sok-hon had a famous line: only a people who can think, who have ideas, can save the nation. So how do you become someone who can think, who has ideas? The most basic thing is that you have to read.

I think reading printed books deepens your reading. The bookstore is a space that offers you, and provokes in you, encounters with books that spark all kinds of thought. At the same time, the bookstore should offer space for discussion and argument. People shouldn't keep their thoughts bottled up inside; they should bring them out and share them, and form public discussion. The bookstore could become that kind of space.

I think two spaces spark or grow knowledge and wisdom: the library and the bookstore. Neither can be missing. People usually think of the library as a public space, but the bookstore is a public space too — more open than the library, in fact, and more public in character. Compared with the library, the bookstore can shelve new books at once, has no barrier to entry at all, is open to anyone, and is very convenient. In that space you can freely come across all kinds of books. You walk in, pick a book up, and think. Of all the spaces human beings have created, I don't think there is one more varied or more useful than the bookstore.

Modern lives are isolated; we've become cut-off individuals. There are many bookstores now in the streets and alleys, and they offer the hope of restoring a new communal life, of realizing community. I think the bookstore has cultural meaning; it works like a living room. I even think the government should put money in to improve bookstores and support their growth, so this public space serves the public good more fully.

So why hand the whole responsibility to individuals alone? You can set a bookstore as the place to meet someone, then discuss a book together with a friend. Lovers can do the same — pick up a book, finish it, and talk it over. A mother can take her child's hand, look at a picture book, and talk about it in the bookstore. The space that makes great civic education possible is, I think, the bookstore.

I grew up in the countryside around Busan and went to high school in the city. What appealed to me most wasn't the school but the bookstores, big and small, around it. That space was full of wonder. Let bookstores big and small open up, put that space to use, and make it a space for civic education for the young. This should be the direction of our era. I wanted this book to make the case for the value of the bookstore, the value of books, and the power of books. Let people come together and talk, and form an atmosphere and a shared understanding.

Here is the message I want to pass on: the bookstore is the starlight that lights a neighborhood. A community with a bookstore is different; it looks beautiful. Bookstores big and small are the catalyst that can make a community beautiful. Paris or London, it doesn't matter — slip into a small side street, come upon an old bookstore, and the whole city's character and taste rise at once.

Q: You just mentioned Busan. In the book you name two bookstores there that shaped you: Yeonggwang Books, and Bosu-dong Book Street. At the first, in the early 1960s, you devoured the monthly Sasanggye (Note: Sasanggye was a well-known monthly that, from the mid-to-late 1950s on, prompted Korean youth to reflect on their era); at the second, in the late 1970s, you took part in the "Good Books Cooperative movement" that swept Korea. Beyond what's in the book, can you say more about how these two bookstores shaped you?

Kim: I was involved from the early days of the Good Books Cooperative. Back then Bosu-dong Book Street had more than 70 bookstores. When I was in high school everyone was poor and no one had money to buy books, so we all went to Bosu-dong Book Street, where you could read all kinds of books for free.

Yeonggwang Books came along a few years later. Why did I write about it? Because all the other independent bookstores have closed, and I'm so grateful it has held on to this day. It moves me, and I feel gratitude for it. Once, when Busan's citizens voted for their favorite spaces, Yeonggwang Books made the city's top-50 list of landmarks, at number four. That Yeonggwang Books could become the place where the people of Busan meet to talk business, that it became a landmark — what a remarkable, wonderful thing. There you can read, drink tea, meet friends, meet a lover — how good is that!

Whenever I go to England and arrange to see an English friend, I always say let's meet at Daunt Books in London. When people meet, no place has more taste or suits better than a bookstore — convenient, and good for you too. If you hit traffic and run late, no matter, you can read while you wait. Set the meeting at a bookstore and your friend won't complain about how long you kept them. For modern people, the bookstore is a kind of utopia. A big bookstore has its uses; a small bookstore has its own charm and character. In a small bookstore you can go through its books from end to end. There's a saying that puts it well: Small is beautiful.

Q: What did you actually do as part of the Good Books Cooperative?

Kim: In the Good Books Cooperative, members paid a small fee, then pooled the money to buy books and read them together. It was a reading movement, meant mainly to get our generation reading. So I have a hopeful wish: how good it would be if young people today came up with a new version of it, forming a "reading cooperative" the way we had the Good Books Cooperative. The core members of the Busan Good Books Cooperative were all arrested by the government later, and the group fell apart. The books we read regularly were considered ideologically suspect, not to the government's taste. Looking back now, what kind of problem was that? What kind of "problem books" were those?

Through a process like this a person becomes more fully human, and your life comes to reflect what being human means. Through reading, a society, a nation, a people form a shared ethics and a shared understanding. Without books, without reading, how would you create and build a just, ethical society? Reading sparks thought and makes you a person with ideas — that matters a great deal. Arendt's account of the "banality of evil" belongs to this same context. After you read, you feel an urge to talk, to have a conversation, an exchange. Look at people who don't read — you have nothing to say to them; what would you even talk about? Having a friend you can really talk to is the greatest happiness there is.

A Book Can Make a Society Better — This Is My Conviction

Q: You studied journalism in college and worked as a reporter for eight years afterward. Why did you choose journalism and reporting in the first place?

Kim: When I studied journalism and worked as a reporter, it was a very harsh era in Korea, because the government was crushing press freedom. I became a reporter under the influence of Sasanggye, and works like Ham Sok-hon's had a great effect on me too. Journalists can change society, bear an inescapable responsibility for building a better society, and play a crucial role — that was my understanding, so I chose journalism and became a reporter. But my colleagues and I stood in opposition to the government, didn't we? There were a lot of clashes. I had always wanted to keep reporting, but I was dismissed. And not alone: that year, more than 100 reporters at The Dong-A Ilbo, where I worked, were dismissed together, all at once.

Q: What exactly was the reason?

Kim: When students took to the streets in protest, for instance, we weren't allowed to report it, but we reported it anyway — so the reporters who were fired were the paper's most central, most seasoned, best reporters. We weren't allowed to say the measures the government chose were wrong. Working as a reporter then, I felt that in such a harsh environment we needed to think these problems through and speak out for society.

The government's crackdown was so severe back then. We couldn't write about crowds being suppressed; this couldn't be written, that couldn't be written, so what was left for me to write? In the end all I could write were pieces about rare foreign birds, or a cactus flowering for the first time in decades. That is the reporting they had us do. Finally the young reporters stood up and declared that we couldn't bear it any longer, that we had to make our voices heard, and so, under government pressure, the paper dismissed them. Some of those dismissed later became members of parliament, speakers of parliament, scholars and experts.

After I was dismissed, I couldn't do anything else, work was very hard to find, and I hit bottom. I thought: what's closest to the press? Publishing. So I started a publishing house. We did keep demanding reinstatement, to go back to the paper. Looking back now, though the press and publishing are connected at the root, making books suited me better than reporting. Because I think books matter more than the press in shaping a person's nature and character.

The core force leading Korean society today, the elite class, are all readers of Hangilsa, you could say. I walk down the street and get recognized on the spot — it happens often. Readers who know me seem to be everywhere in Korea. Why? Not because I'm so remarkable, but because the books I published are truly important, and they had a huge effect on those readers. I bask in the books' light, and that is why I'm shown respect. That is the power of a book. A book can make a society better. This is my conviction.

Q: As a reporter, there were many articles you couldn't write; in publishing, many books you couldn't put out. Did you ever hesitate, or feel afraid? What were you thinking at the time?

Kim: When I published a book, I felt the limits of what I was publishing were reasonable, within limits Korean society should be able to accept — that it could be published, could be tried. I never really felt the books I put out had definitely crossed a line, that I'd be arrested and suppressed; I don't think I had that worry. But in fact, after those books came out, our authors were arrested, and books were banned.

Some people say the calls I made took courage. I don't think it was courage — it was a duty I couldn't shirk, something I had to do. In the early 1980s the government meant to shut our house down. I worked hard to persuade them, and in the end pulled the press back from the brink and saved Hangilsa. I was threatened too, told I'd face the consequences and so on. At the time I used every means I had to talk with the authorities, to reach them directly, to bring them round. I tried to persuade the government officials in charge of culture, and argued with them over why I thought a given book was reasonable. So my friends all found it strange: so many people were arrested, how were you never arrested? At bottom I'm an optimist. I believed it would turn out fine, that I wouldn't be arrested (laughs).

Q: In journalism and in publishing alike, you have always hoped to change society, to build a better one. In your view, then, what kind of society counts as a good one?

Kim: Where everyone can take up the work they want, do what they want to do, and live alongside others hand in hand; where the interests of the community are respected; where there is freedom of expression; and above all where society's weak and its children are cared for and protected — that, I think, is a good society. In other words, a society that is just and ethical. And it should be democratic as well. It isn't about you alone doing well; it's about living together with others.

The cover image shows Shakespeare and Company; the long banner image shows the bookseller statue at the entrance to Bosu-dong Book Street. Both come from inside Bookstores, East and West, photographed by Kim Eon-ho.