From The Guardian:
When Orhan Pamuk was young, Turkey lacked a great library, so he started to build his own. As the Frankfurt book fair focuses on Turkish culture, he looks back on his days with the booksellers of Beyazit market.
I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer’s life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort of large library where you could easily locate any book you wanted. As for books in foreign languages, not a single library had them. If I wanted to learn everything that there was to be learned, and become a wise person and so escape the constraints of the national literature – imposed by the literary cliques and literary diplomacy, and enforced by stifling prohibitions – I was going to have to build my own great library.
Between 1970 and 1990, my main preoccupation after writing was buying books; I wanted my library to include all the books that I viewed as important or useful. My father gave me a substantial allowance and from the age of 18 I was in the habit of going once a week to Sahaflar, the old booksellers’ market in Beyazit. I spent many days in its little shops, which were heated by ineffective electric heaters and crowded with towers of unclassified books; everyone from the shop assistant to the owner, the casual visitor to the bona fide customer, looked poor. I would go into a shop that sold second-hand books, comb all the shelves, leafing through the books, and I would pick up a history of the relations between Sweden and the Ottoman empire in the 18th century, or the memoir of the head physician of the Bakirköy Hospital for the Insane, or a journalist’s eyewitness account of a failed coup, or a monograph on the Ottoman monuments of Macedonia, or a Turkish précis of the writings of a German traveller who came to Istanbul in the 17th century, or the reflections of a professor from the Çapa Medical Faculty on manic depressive disorder; and, after bargaining with the shop assistant, I would cart them all away.
I wasn’t buying as a book collector would, but as a frantic person who was desperate to understand why Turkey was so poor and so troubled.
More here.