For my sister’s birthday we went to a restaurant I cannot afford. Alpen Rose is the sort of place that doesn’t announce itself. The arcade is unlit. There are no windows. You find a marker stone with a monogrammed rose and say your name to a locked Dutch door. Once inside, the caramel-colored interior brimmed with noise of clicking glasses. The bartender made well-distanced small talk as our table got ready. “I have made a few Italians happy with Montenegro sour, “ he said.
The place is traditional steakhouse with no fancy plating and no shiso with beets presented with sunflower. We got some bone marrow toasts and shrimp cocktail to start. Later, dry-aged duck breast, confit, and beef Willy showcased some prep skills. The waitress rattled off names of mushrooms in our side dish when we asked, and as if couldn’t stop herself, added a whole recipe: “sautéed slow, on high to stop, topped with a dash of vinegar for acidity.”
To match the confidence of the kitchen and the floor, the dining room itself is restrained and intimate. The chandeliers were clean and well-sized for the ceiling arch. A large unadorned mirror hung off the wall. I sat facing a wall of hardcover books, angled differently than another book wall across the room, below which sat a man in a double-breasted suit. I thought it ridiculous because these books had to sit there looking at silk curtains and people sipping Martinis. They also seemed to have a mechanical engineering lean, but the gold engraved titles were too far in taste from the rough-edged budding engineers I know.
When my gaze fell back on the book wall I saw high, high up there was a bandaged book. The book had its arm neatly wrapped by a strip of cotton. Where there was a title, someone had written something with a pen. It could have been a repair, or a way of hiding an offending title. Eitherway, I liked how the book fits in despite physical or ideological wear. The bandage reminded me of the matte and glossy covers I used to carefully wrap around my books as a child. I cared for them then. That changed when I began moving from city to city every few years. There was little room for physical things, and books were often the first to be left behind. Now I buy a book thinking about where it could end up when I have to move again.
The way books are handled tells you something about the people who keep them. In Johannesburg, there is a private book club where members paid steep dues to read leather-bound volumes of Thomas Hardy. The club sat in the city center, not far from a street that had been split in half weeks earlier by a gas explosion. Some people still slept nearby that split. And yet, it was here that books circulated with a different kind of care. They are stacked neatly in wrapped carts. Some dragged suitcases filled with academic texts. Vendors stepped into traffic to tap on car hoods to sell the drivers ballads and short tales. All this, when the JoBurg city library had been closed for four years. There, I saw how books can be less like decor and more like assets.
Books take on the shape of cultural assets in other contexts. The closest comparison to this vending I can think of is the green book carts along the Seine carrying frayed French books. These books anad their sellers are officially deemed culture and protected by UNESCO recognition. Considerable effort goes into keeping those stalls from turning into souvenir shops, yes, but one has to really dig through antique fashion leaflets to find other kinds of thoughts. As Simone de Beauvoir once observed, the best books are always at a friend’s house—-and never quite come back. Similarly the many many bookstores in Kyoto and the tiny publishing houses lining the neighborhood of Exarchia, Athens, probably think of books as assets too.
On second thought, it’s fitting that books sit in this bougie restaurant. In an age of exploding information, books still cost enough to produce that many non-junk information can be found here. At this time of writing, books are still a good medium to carry knowledge to break the cycle of wants and needs. The time to find, read and understand them keeps this knowledge inaccessible for many, and resources to maintain small personal libraries gatekeep future insights. I suddenly realized that while academia may keep me poor, books make me rich. And I could still aspire to give my books a home one day. With that thought, I proceeded to let my sister’s family pay for dinner and parking.
Written by Natasha. Last edited:2025-12-03 09:37:23