Bronwyn Law-Viljoen does not shy away from the manifold challenges of publishing and running a bookshop, writes PercyZvomuya.
If you get to the end of the bewildering classic, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by the Jewish-Serbian writer Danilo Kis, you will see a line in one of the short stories that goes: “To write one must have more than big balls.” It’s a sentence that is apt for summing up the duo of Bronwyn Law-Viljoen and Oliver Barstow, the team behind the art publishing company Fourthwall Books.
Law-Viljoen isn’t just a publisher and art critic. She is also working on a novel, is head of the creative writing course at the University of the Witwatersrand and recently opened a bookshop called Edition, which she describes as “a project of Fourthwall Books”.
But why that name for a bookshop? “We want to make reference to things that are made in limited editions; particular iterations of a thing,” she says.
As the cords of philistinism tighten around us, Law-Viljoen’s pursuits are the kind that only the bloody-minded and, shall we say, ballsy would engage in. The bookshop can be found at the shopping compound 44 Stanley Avenue, in Milpark, Johannesburg. (Coincidentally, at the time she opened Edition, two good bookshops shut down in Johannesburg.)
NOTE: The good news for Capetonians is that Fourthwall Books are available through David Krut Projects at Montebello Design Centre.
Full story in Mail & Guardian
