May 24-25, 2025: English-book warehouse open-house event, Seoul (UPDATED with event-report)

[Peter]

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On the weekend of May 24-25, some RAS Korean Literature Club members will be visiting the "Tongbang Books Open-House Warehouse Sale" event in Seongsu-dong (성수동), eastern Seoul. (Also marketed as "dbBooks").

Info on this event, and when to find other members of our Korean Literature Club:

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*** ENGLISH-BOOK WAREHOUSE OPEN-HOUSE IN SEOUL (and related events) ***

-- Place: Tongbang Books (a.k.a. dbBooks) (동방도서판매), eastern Seoul
-- Saturday, May 24 & Sunday, May 25, 2025
-- Time: 11am to 4pm both days (last entry: 3:30pm)
-- (extra: Saturday, 2-3:30pm author talk; & Sunday, 4-6pm, "Rooftop Book-Swap" event)

-- Address in Korean: 서울 성동구 성수일로 55 SK테크노빌딩 지하층 (Basement) (성수동).

-- Directions by subway: Ttuksom Station (뚝섬역), Line 2, Exit 5. Walk about 150m along the diagonal street (southward). Visible on your left will be the enormous "SK Techno" building. Enter through the gated rear area. (The warehouse's only public-accessible normal entrance, which faces east on another street, is closed on the weekend, but the rear-entrance will be open.) Tongbang Books occupies the basement floor lof this building. (Signs will certainly be posted; they may have the new marketing name "dbBooks.")

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Related events:

I learn there will be at least two related events going on in connection with this "open-(ware)house event."'

-- Saturday May 24, 2pm to 3:30pm: Author Talk with Mirinae Lee, author of the well-regarded novel Eight Lives of a Century-Old Trickster (May 2023, originally published by Little, Brown & Co. [Hachette]; rights now owned by HarperCollins, of which it seems Tongbang Books is the legal importer-distributer in Korea.)

-- Sunday May 25, 4pm-6pm: A "Rooftop Book Swap" event, the details of which are uncertain to me at this writing except that it has been promoted by one or more Book-Youtubers ("Booktubers"). It's on the rooftop of the warehouse building, and around closing-time on May 25th likely there will be many people heading up -- up into the spring late-afternoon weather.

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Tongbang Books is an importer-distributer of foreign books in Korea. They have the rights to distribute books in Korea from a number of major English-language publishers.

Tongbang Books ran the sales at the recent Red Sword book-launch event on May 3, 2025 (this club's June 2025 book):

-- See Red Sword book-launch event-report:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ---

and

-- My translation of the Author's Note appearing in the Korean-original edition of Red Sword (omitted in the English-version but greatly interesting to me, at least):
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).

Tongbang Books has a number of foreign employees these days. Indications are that since 2024 they are really pushing hard to leverage foreigner networks in Korea (a notoriously ephemeral-transient group, often with little sense of cohesion or identity).

Their office and warehouse are in Seongsu-song (Songsu), a former industrial area of eastern Seoul. The big warehouse building is one of many holdovers from the industrial era. Actual industrial activity there is now hard to see, having practically fallen into a niche category (as with the former industry of shoemaking, a big deal decades ago and a handful of mom-and-pop survivals still hold on, somehow).

These days, large parts of the Songsu-dong area have been revivified with mid-to-high-to-luxury-brand "pop-up stores." These stores take over old buildings for use of the cheap space and aura of marketable quasi-authenticity -- in-theory they are there only temporarily ("pop-up"). Large numbers of bargain-seeking visitors, including foreigners, can be seen in parts of the neighborhood, especially on weekends and holidays.

Although active for decades now, Tongbang Books has only recently begun to promote their own operations as a direct-seller. They seem to be going strong. Is the long retreat by many of the big names in the book-market over? People with memories of 2000s- and 2010s-Korea may remember such things as the now-gone mega-store "What The Book" of Itaewon. Judge for yourself, at the warehouse event, if you can go. (If you're seeing this message much later than May 2025, I am told there will be another such open-warehouse event around November 2025; don't ask me yet about 2026 or beyond).

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Sunday May 25, 3pm to 4pm: Jeremy, the leader of the Korean Literature Club, and others from this club will be at the warehouse sale starting at 3pm Sunday. Join us if you can!

---> This club's June 2025 book, Red Sword by Bora Chung, will be available for sale --- and at a price better than at the major bookstores. There are said to be signed copies of Red Sword, for those who missed the May 3 book-launch and want one.
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[Peter]

:
EVENT REPORT, TONGBANG-BOOKS OPEN-WAREHOUSE EVENT, MAY 2025

Our Korean Literature Club's participation in the book-warehouse event (Sunday May 25), and the rooftop party that followed, were a great success enjoyed by all!

People began assembling nearby as early as 2:30pm, in the afternoon of Sunday May 25, chatting and in good spirits. We headed to the warehouse as a group about 2:55pm. Some arrived later and made their own way.

In all, as many as 20 of our Korean Literature Club's members and guests were at the event for at least some time on Sunday afternoon-to-evening. I know of at least a few others who were there either Saturday or earlier in the day Sunday (schedules and availabilities differ, naturally).

A good portion of our people stayed until the rooftop event's wrap-up time, past 6pm. A group-photo taken on the rooftop of the warehouse building shows 15 of us. (One of our guests, standing nearby, decline to join the photo; a few others had already come and gone.)

As for other people, it seems hundreds stopped by, one day or the other.

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It was quite a scene, between 3:30pm and 4:00pm, to see the long line to buy books. The line snaked all through towards the rear of the warehouse.

True to his style, the leader of this Korean Literature Club, Jeremy S., was the very last purchaser!

Meanwhile, most of our group had already found their way up to the rooftop (10th floor). Jeremy and several other lingerers (including me) were still in the warehouse-basement went up together until the last moment. Greeting us up to was the May sun, a pleasantly cloudless (and seemingly smog-less) sky, plus dozens of fans of books, snacks (which some of our group partook in with enthusiasm) and chatter. Goodwill prevailed on that roof for those next two hours.

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The book-warehouse event was, for Korea, an unusually large congregation in one place of "foreigners who have no definite connection to one another" -- except for desire to go to the warehouse sale. By this I think I mean no institutional connection. Many were, I think, part of the loose group known as the Seoul Silent Book Club.

Down in the warehouse, people talked about all-and-sundry books, freely, to strangers, in a way that 2020s-society does not much encourage. Around the Korean-books-in-English-translation section of the warehouse, I heard a number of spontaneous conversations on Korean literature (some started by me), which, as I always point out, was a scene impossible to imagine ten years ago.

Up on the rooftop, topics of conversation were all over the map. And I mean that in several ways: Many non-Korean nationalities turned out to be present. (You never know who you'll meet in this wide world.)

An influential Book-youtuber (or "Booktuber"), known as @CariCanRead, was at the rooftop party and seemed to be one of the nexuses of attention. I later saw that the event had been advertised by saying that Cari would be there. Cari stood out in all black, which contrasted with her conspicuous shock of reddish-orangish-red hair.

Cari The Booktuber chatted pleasantly with all who approached. By all accounts she was pleasant and amicable, in the usual North American sort of way. Many of those up there were indeed fans. On the other hand, many who "turn up" at things in-person are also unlikely to be heavy Youtube-consumers and so a great portion didn't know who she was. (I confess that I wouldn't have recognized Cari the Youtuber had I bumped into her head-on, on the street. But many of her book-related commentaries get 100,000+ views. Several of our members in their 20s did know who she was and were impressed to see her and encouraged the rest of us to go bask in her stardom even if briefly.)

It didn't seem, however, that Cari had any interest in "leading" this party (or however the post-warehouse-sale rooftop event can be characterized).

Also present was Nathan Truong, a Vietnamese-origin U.S.-born Booktuber active in Korea for some time. Nathan has a modest following (on the @NathansNook Youtube channel). Compared to Cari, Nathan is a relative small-timer. But his activities are still impressive, for social-media. Nathan also co-hosted the book-talk with Mirinae Lee the day before (Saturday May 24).

As a bit of an aside, and something I've noticed before -- and not necessarily a comment directly on Cari (and/or Nathan) -- I'll add this: The skills needed for success in the world of social-media personalities (as with big Youtube channels) are NOT the same skills as needed for leading a group of physically-present people. As someone old enough to remember the "pre-social media world" of the 2000s and early 2010s, I've noted with interest the "social-media reality vs. in-person reality" phenomenon. (It's hard to say what quite to make of it, except that it's probably great fodder for the fiction writer...)

As far as I know, there was no "Booktuber" phenomenon, yet, ten years ago in 2015. The influence of this new phenomenon might be given a soft "start"-date of around 2018-19; before that, I think Booktube and similar were relatively limited. The Booktuber phenomenon is a big deal now; it's uncertain how good or bad it is for "Literature" as such. For me, the "BookTok" community of TikTok has little redeeming value. I'm not sure about Instagram. A lot of these social-media communities are not necessarily about the books at all but image-promotion. ("Not reading, but being seen as a reader," as some wag aptly put it.)

The rooftop party ended up carrying its own momentum, with small grouplets forming and reforming and occasionally blending. I think our own group (the RAS Korean Literature Club) may just have been the largest single cohesive group, if you want to put it that way.

The owner of the book warehouse told me there will another of these in November 2025. This one was quite a shining success, from the looks of it, even if completely exhausting to the staff of Tongbang Books!
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