From colonial-era stalls to curated community spaces, bookstores in Korea have evolved with society while struggling against the country’s deepening decline in reading.
People wait in line for the opening of Chaekbang, Oneul ("Bookstore, Today"), an independent bookstore in Seoul’s Jongno District run by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Han Kang, in November 2024, when the store was still in operation. The bookstore recently closed.YONHAP
Shin June-bong
The author is an editorial writer at the JoongAng Ilbo.
In Park Tae-won’s novella “Half a Year” (1933), Korean students studying in Tokyo haggle over the price of a book at a bookstore near Jinbocho. The book in question is German author Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929), listed at 1.50 yen, less than 1 cent. The clerk insists on receiving at least 70 sen, or seven-tenths of 1 yen. One of the students, Cho Suk-hui, proposes a compromise: 50 sen for the book itself and 20 sen as a donation. In the end, he pays the requested 70 sen, though he consoles himself with the thought that the book’s true price was only 50.
It is a small act of psychological triumph. Yet one wonders whether the bookstores of colonial Korea, which imported modernity through Japan, were shaped by similar tensions and compromises.
The earliest bookstores that emerged towards the end of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) were often combined with stationery shops. Such businesses not only sold books but also produced them. Later came the age of dedicated publishing bookstores. During the colonial period, Jongno’s night market became one of Seoul's most famous attractions.
Popular fiction known as “ttakji editions” flooded the stalls. The books earned their nickname because their brightly colored covers resembled cards from the children’s game of the same name. After liberation in 1945, streetcorner bookstores enjoyed a golden age. According to Kang Sung-ho’s “The Age of Bookstores” (2022), countless new publishers sprang up in the postwar years, but with few established retail channels available, many resorted to selling books from makeshift stands on city streets.
Book critic Han Mi-hwa argues that bookstores began to develop a new self-awareness in the 1990s, coming to see themselves as cultural spaces rather than mere retail outlets. For decades, bookstores had largely displayed whatever wholesalers supplied. By the 2010s, however, independent neighborhood bookstores emerged in which owners exercised their own judgment over what to stock, embracing the role now known as curation.
More recently, a third generation of bookstores has appeared, some charging admission fees to enter. Han describes this development in her book “Exploring the Sustainability of Neighborhood Bookstores.”
One such curated bookstore was novelist Han Kang’s Chaekbang, Oneul (meaning “Bookstore, Today”) in Seoul’s Tongui-dong, which closed its doors last week. The immediate reason was that the building housing the store had been sold. But Han had already acknowledged deeper difficulties. In a 2022 interview, she said the bookstore was “chronically running large deficits.”
Even a Nobel Prize-winning writer proved unable to overcome the public’s declining interest in reading.
Three days before Han Kang opened her bookstore, sociologist Noh Myung-woo, a professor at Ajou University, launched Nieun Bookstore near Yeonsinnae Station on Sept. 2, 2018. At the time, he argued that “it is time to redefine the space known as the bookstore” and that people should actively engage in activities centered on books in whatever form possible.
His remarks reflected a growing awareness that the closure of bookstores is no longer someone else’s problem. More than 1,000 neighborhood bookstores now operate across the country, each searching for ways to survive in a society where reading rates continue to fall.
The transformation of bookstores mirrors broader changes in Korean society. They have evolved from stationery shops into publishing houses, from street stalls into curated cultural venues and from commercial spaces into places where communities gather around books. Yet their future remains uncertain.
Faced with historically low levels of reading, the question is no longer simply how bookstores have changed. It is what, if anything, we are willing to do to preserve them.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
