Between the lines the story of an unusual tome

Lyu Chonghua shows his sketchbook while sitting behind the counter of Fangyuan Bookshop[Photo by Yang Yang / China Daily]

So he drew a caricature of himself as a signature in the bottom right corner of each order. Each would express a different emotion: angry with glaring eyes and wide open mouth when he felt his orders were being overlooked; a smiling face when everything was going smoothly; a worried look when there was a shortfall in any order he received; and crying when debtors were late with their payment, and so on.

On average, he drew three to four orders a day and over the next 10 years, before fax was largely supplanted by e-mail, he built up a stack of more than 10,000 orders.

After returning to Xi'an from the Beijing Book Fair in 2010, Lyu started preparing the book. By then, the family had run the bookshop for 28 years, and the ambitious Lyu can see the family running it beyond when it is 100 years old.

"My children can take over the business, if they want." He has a daughter, 16, who is good at painting and a son, 11, who is good at calligraphy, he says.

However, beyond that cheery optimism for the family business, Lyu is well acquainted with the tough times the book industry is going through and appreciates that in fact the family business may be much closer to its end than its beginning.

Business

The family started the book business in 1982 soon after Ma Xiulian arrived in Xi'an with her two sons, Lyu and his older brother Lyu Qinbing, to be with her husband, Lyu Anwei, who was a lowly paid teacher of scenography at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts.

At first they sold books about the arts, with their wares spread out on the ground, around universities, and business was brisk.

In 1984 they sold 250 of the 5,000 sets of the first print of the Complete Collection of Shakespeare and 600 of the 4,900 copies of the first print of Sigmund Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

The following year the family rented a shop of less than 20 square meters next to the Xi'an Conservatory of Music and later moved to its current location in Jixiangcun, where the poet Li Bai of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) is said to have once lived, and it expanded to the current size.

After leaving high school in 1991, Lyu joined in running the business and in 1996, after he graduated from the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, Li, by then 25, decided to take over the business from his father.