We like laptops. We couldn't live without the internet. We want smart phones. We live through Facebook. We have tons of cyberfriends. It's cosy out there. But there's just one thing Facebook seems to be missing. It doesn't smell like paper. It doesn't feel like a brand new page. You can't write a note in it and give it away to someone. It doesn't fill your walls at home with beautiful, poetic, sad or intriguing titles. It's not a book.
We like books. A lot. At Paard van Troje Bart Van Aken and his wife Annelies Joos do too. In just a few years time they managed to make quite some people forget about Fnac and Standaard Boekhandel. And they're the main reason why we are happy the Billy bookcases at Ikea are so cheap.
THE RABBITS: Paard van Troje is quite an interesting name for a bookshop. Did you want to surprise the book market?
ANNELIES JOOS (Paard van Troje): We have been looking for a good name for quite a while. During a conversation with a friend (we were talking about the preparations for the bookshop) I said we could enter the bookshop market “as a Trojan Horse”, when she suddenly said: “that’s it!”. However, nowadays Paard van Troje is more a concept or a notion than a name with a specific meaning.
THE RABBITS: Why books? Do you have a literairy background?
ANNELIES JOOS: No we didn’t study literature or linguistics at all. It’s more Bart’s story. We were in Nepal, thinking about the future, when we got the idea. Bart has worked at De Kaft (in Leuven as well as in Ghent) and has been collecting books for a long time. On the other hand he’s very into music as well and has worked at a record company. When the music industry collapsed he either wanted to have a bookshop or a restaurant. He did work at a restaurant for a while but that was physically very hard. So "something with books" it was and Paard van Troje was born. Bart has a very large affinity with books as a product, while I’m more of a reader. Bart also has an incredible mental archive around books: authors, titles, availability, etc.
THE RABBITS: Is Ghent the ideal city for Paard van Troje?
ANNELIES JOOS: Any city is a good location for a bookshop, but in Ghent we have a very mixed audience from very different sectors. A bit of a willful, quirky public too, that has the guts to want and do things differently and wants to discover new things. This is a good breeding ground for us to try out new things and people really appreciate that. To give a concrete example: we don’t separate books because they are somewhat different than mainstream. Everything is mixed up and put together. Sometimes people ask where the Top 10 lies or where they can find “the new books”, but they’re everywhere, next to the other books. That’s how people can discover books they don’t know. We avoid categorising as well; one day we got a request to put a pink shelf in the shop for the “holebi literature”. That was too ridiculous for words.
THE RABBITS: How did you know you were ready for adding a coffeebar to the shop?
ANNELIES JOOS: We already started it at our previous location in the Volderstraat, but there it was very limited. We saw a lot of customers who appreciated they could have a coffee while reading a book so we thought we could give it a try here at Kouter. At first we considered serving food as well but it was safer to start small and see how things would go.
THE RABBITS: Were you inspired by foreign bookshops where a coffee bar is often included? Did you do somekind of market research first?
ANNELIES JOOS: Oh no, we never did market research or whatsoever. That’s not our cup of tea. We both approach things in a very intuitive way, you see. Anyhow I would like to emphasize we are a bookshop where you can drink coffee as well, instead of a coffeebar where you can read a book.
THE RABBITS: How come you changed locations?
ANNELIES JOOS: Our previous location was a bit too "heavy" from a financial point of view, certainly with respect to the financial capacity of the bookshop.
THE RABBITS: You are very close to bookshops such as Standaard Boekhandel and Fnac. Is that a challenge?
ANNELIES JOOS: We were and still are the only independent bookshop in the city centre and it has a lot of success, but we need to work hard. Our clientele is very different from Standard Boekhandel, but very much alike with the Fnac customers. Nevertheless we can distinguish ourselves by giving personal advice for example. Bart is definitely the best person to ask for advice, except for children's literature perhaps, which is more my territory, together with contemporary literature.
THE RABBITS: Do you get a lot of reactions and feedback from customers?
ANNELIES JOOS: Yes. We recommended “Valse papieren” (Valeria Luiselli) a lot and got very positive reactions, while Knack only wrote a “moderate” review on it. Some of our customers also ask for a specific person in the shop because they know they have the same taste. But the other way around we also get tips from customers. Customers who read international newspapers for example. Or customers who order a cerain book of which we think: “Hmm, we might offer it in the shop as well”. And I have no problems with admitting that sometimes we have to change our opinion about books we didn’t order because we thought it wouldn’t work out.
THE RABBITS: How do you deal with the inevitable paradox of promoting your bookshop and books as a product via digital channels such as websites and social media?
ANNELIES JOOS: First of all, our website doesn’t contain anything more than the contact details of our bookshops in Ghent and Leuven. A lot has to do with the fact Bart is not a “digital person” and I don’t really have time to spend on it. A second reason might be that we both don’t really see the point of having an extended website: we still don’t have the feeling we should do anything more with it. Anyhow, from time to time we do get orders in via the site because certain people absolutely want a certain book and then of course we're willing to send it to them. But we feel it’s not our strength so we don’t expand it.
On Facebook however we have been active since more or less one year and I have to admit: it pays off very well. We announce events, arrange give aways , post quotes, etc. We get a lot of positive reactions to it and we even have to be careful we don’t forget to announce the same things in the shop itself. We might not have a newsletter but our fans can follow everything on Facebook.
THE RABBITS: Do you give books as a Christmas present?
ANNELIES JOOS: Yes, in the end we are running a book shop. So we do give a lot of books, but not to people who don't like them. It’s a nice challenge to get the right book for the diehard readers in our social circle: something they don’t know yet.
THE RABBITS: Do you have a favourite book?
ANNELIES JOOS: (Silent during a couple of minutes, thinking about what to answer) No. Books are very much related to a moment and a place. The books I found incredible ten years ago don’t necessarily mean that much to me anymore now. It also depends on my mood what I take from the bookshelf. And books are so different amonst eachother. It’s both very hard and useless to pick just one.
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