I re-joined the workforce last month. A job I interviewed for at the end of last year opened up again, and the hiring manager called me to ask if I was still interested.
Reader, I was interested. After close to a year of running around and around on the flimsy plastic hamster wheel that is the English job market in Copenhagen, I had reached the last of my backup plans: handing out my CV in cafes. I did not want to work in a cafe. My hospitality career consists of two weeks washing dishes in a cafe in Canberra, Australia in 2010. I have mentally repressed the experience and so cannot tell you much about it. I do know that I was covered in aioli the entire time. I also know that I dropped a tray of (mercifully empty) wine glasses on a concrete floor, in front of customers, and then reflexively burst into tears, also in front of customers. So while this job has been a very nice and unexpected development for me, it is particularly good news for the hospitality venues that have not had the misfortune to employ me.
I am not alone in having been unprepared for the reality of finding work in Denmark as an international. And this job now has a time limit, thanks to a recent change in the law, so it is most likely going to end at the beginning of next year. I’m not going to write about that here. Instead, because I can’t spend as much time there as I used to, I wanted to write a little love letter to ark books.
ark (in lowercase) is a bookshop, and I have been volunteering there almost since I arrived in Denmark. Aside from my five hours a week of state-funded Danish lessons, it’s been the thing that has most consistently forced me to leave the house and interact with humans who are not my husband. In that sense it’s been a lifeline, a way for me to keep some feeling of purpose and identity through the often dehumanising process of looking for work in a new country. There’s only one Dane there at the moment, but ark is an example of Danish volunteering culture at its best: a collective community space that exists because it should exist, kept alive by young people who care about it.
The shop is in Nørrebro. It’s on the same street as an old, very beautiful Jewish cemetery, and also a chicken sandwich place that got a few seconds of screen time in the Copenhagen episode of The Bear. A bakery on the corner sells croissant cubes with green pistachio filling, and on weekends people queue out the door onto the footpath. It’s a good street for people who like books: LiteraturHaus, a volunteer-run cafe and events space, is across the street in a converted Methodist church. Red Door is a specialist poetry shop in a basement a little further down. There’s also a Danish language bookshop, Møllegades Boghandel, which I have never been in, because it seems to be always closed and because I am still a couple of years away from being fluent enough to read anything it sells.
ark is easy to miss. It’s the size of a living room, and it also looks a bit like one—full of slightly wilted plants and secondhand armchairs. The shelves are uneven, which I thought was deliberate (it is not), and the signage is handmade or drawn on post-it notes. The skirting boards are painted the same blue as the antique Danish enamelware you find in junk stores. Everything is a little scuffed and battered. It smells of paper and dust. I loved it immediately.
I actually found the shop before I left Sydney. I didn’t realise it was run by volunteers; I followed it on Instagram because the photograph on the website looked friendly, and I thought it might be somewhere I could join a book club. About a week before I moved, the store posted a call-out for new volunteers, which I replied to. It turns out that I was very lucky: these call-outs don’t happen often, and far more people want to volunteer than the shop can accommodate.
ark is not only independent, but completely not-for-profit. The money it makes from selling books goes towards paying the rent, keeping the lights on, and buying more books. If it’s been a good quarter, the extra proceeds are donated to charity. Many of the volunteers at ark are PhD students, or former PhD students, or considering grad school. There are also people with completely unrelated day jobs who just like reading. The shop is run through a committee system: when you become a volunteer, you join one of three committees responsible for ordering stock, organising events, or hiring more volunteers. The committees make decisions collectively and report back to the general volunteer meeting each month.
The way the stock is ordered is one of the most fun things about ark. All the volunteers are given access to the UK-based wholesale website we use, and we just add books we think are interesting to the shopping cart. The book committee then goes through each fortnight and selects some of them, depending on which sections in the store need replenishing, how expensive the titles are, and whether the titles fit the general vibe of what we sell: ‘literary’ rather than genre fiction, philosophy or theory over general nonfiction, experimental authors over people you can find in Bog og Idé. There’s no database to track the stock we have—whatever is on the shelves is it—and the collaborative ordering process makes the collection very curated and surprising. Fiction is arranged on the shelves by the region the author comes from, rather than alphabetically, which makes it very easy to find books that you’ve never heard of before, and to stop yourself defaulting to Anglophone writers from the UK or the US.
The first time I went to ark, the volunteer who interviewed me made me a camomile tea in a Voldemort mug (surprisingly not the most cursed item of crockery in ark’s collection) and told me that it’s very important for visitors to the shop not to feel pressured to spend money. I spent five or six years working in different shops when I was a student, selling jeans, children’s clothing, perfume, scented soap. Every single one of those jobs had sales targets and KPIs and an electronic thing over the door to measure how many people walked in and out again, so that the staff could be penalised later if they’d failed to convert visitors into sales. (One shop took this metric so seriously that if we wanted to go out to the bathroom or to buy a juice, we did a kind of limbo through the door to avoid the sensor). Even when I liked being in the store environment, gift-wrapping things in red paper and wearing a matching ribbon and pretending to be dumber than I was, I always felt the anxiety of being surveilled. The idea of a shop where people can just walk in and browse, or sit around on the couches for as long as they like, still feels strangely utopian.
Because ark is a good space, it attracts good people, and talking to visitors is one of the things I most enjoy about volunteering there. I once had a forty-five minute conversation about James Baldwin with a Danish man from the cinematic
who had just come in to ask if we’d put up a poster. An aging hippie from the US came in last summer and spent a long time telling me about how worried he was about the political system at home. A visitor from the UK, when he worked out that I was Australian, told me he’d seen Helen Garner (one of our national treasures) on stage in London the previous week and been disappointed by how old and almost senile she seemed. A surprising number of international tourists tell me they go out of their way to find independent bookshops in different cities when they travel, which honestly gives me hope for humanity—or at least for a small, quiet section of it.
Sometimes customers ask questions about how the shop was started, and I have to tell them that I don’t actually know. Old volunteers float in and out, but ark has been open for eleven years, and everyone involved in setting it up has moved on.
I could of course easily find out who and how, but not knowing sort of adds to the charm. Writing this, I thought about the part of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own set in ‘Oxbridge’—a fictional amalgam of Oxford and Cambridge. After a disappointing dinner, the narrator asks her friend how the modern women’s college they are staying at was set up. Her friend tells her that, unlike the building of the grand and storied men’s colleges, the process was bureaucratic and dull: “Rooms were hired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed.”
There’s nothing particularly magical about the process of writing grant applications or setting up a not-for-profit. But the shop is magical. I am so glad to be part of it.
You can find ark books at Møllegade 10, København N. To keep up with in-store events like bookclubs or author talks, follow the shop on Instagram (@arkbookscph) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/arkbookscph).
