I'm Craig and with a group of beautiful friends that I love,
and at this moment miss very much, I run a small bookshop
in the town of Oia, on the island of Santorini in the south of Greece.
And we do philosophy books, and we do some Greek history
and general non fiction, we do travel logs and journals.
We print our own books once in a while and we celebrate tzatziki at every opportunity,
and we feed it to people on our terrace until they explode.
We have readings in the evenings in the shop
and we make bonfires on the terrace at night.
But mostly we specialize in fiction.
When the rare occasion does come,
that someone offers to give me money in exchange for a book and I perk up,
they're generally putting a story on the table and saying "I'd like this"
and then more often than not, they'll ask "What are you doing here?",
"Who are you?" and sometimes they'll ask "Do you take dollars?"
or "Where are your copies of 'Fifty shades of grey'?"
(Laughter)
(Greek): Bullshit
(Laughter) (Applause)
And if I am in the mood and if I've had a glass of wine
or I'll offer a glass of wine to the customer and we'll sit down and,
I'll tell them a little bit of stories.
And over the years we've had a thousand tellings of the story over and over.
And people come and ask for our nativity story
and we have a thousand alternations of it, and to keep us awake and alert,
and keep our muscle taught, sometimes, we'll, just for fun,
throw in little twists on the truth, to see what we can slip by a customer
that we're probably never gonna see again.
So I'll tell them that I was born in Mississippi instead of Tennessee,
or I'll tell them that I got to college on a basketball scholarship
or I'll tell them that I was one of the founders of Facebook and watch them shake.
And I mean, this is what we do,
our stock and trade, honestly 75% and more of our day is spent
selling and telling stories at the bookshop.
And so, when I was invited here, I had actually to spin and tell our story.
I had to actually think for a minute, because I wanted to make sure
that I didn't mess up, get the facts wrong.
After a while, you start to dissociate yourself
and the story becomes something that you weren't even there.
You remember it more as a story that you've told,
than a story that you've actually lived.
So I came back to this instant and then I thought OK,
I should probably tell something much more proximate to the truth here.
But then I realized, probably the quickest way
to quickly tell that would be to base it
on the most important lies that we encountered,
and that we told ourselves to make this bookshop happen.
So indulge me for a couple of minutes,
and I'll give you the quick story of how we did this or are doing this so far.
The way that I'll set it up, so yeah,
we start printing these books in the back room of the shop,
just on our own as a little money maker on the side to make ends meet,
because we've always wanted to do it.
And so we were looking at old titles in the public domain
of favourite authors of ours, and one of the fellows in our crew,
Chris Bloomfield, that's Bloomfield with two O's he wanted me to mention,
Chris Bloomfield came across this old essay that this very handsome man,
Mark Twain, wrote for a speech competition in Connecticut back in the 1880s I believe.
He did not win the prize, but it's a beautiful little essay.
And there is this one little part of it that I'll just launch off of it
and if you want to read along with me, it says,
"Lying is universal. We all do it."
And we can argue that later, but I think everyone, we're on the same team here.
"Therefore, the wise thing is for us to diligently train ourselves
to lie thoughtfully, juduciously; to lie with a good object,
and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own;
to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously;
to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily…
Then shall we be rid of the rank pestilent truth that is rotting the land;
then shall we be great and good and beautiful."
And so we looked at each other and we said "Yeah, we're doing this, yeah."
(Laughter)
So let me tell you a little about the best lies of all,
and give you a sense of how we came to be here from far away.
I first came to Santorini by chance, by coincidence,
got on the first boat out of Pireaus,
when I was on holiday with my friend Oliver.
This was back in 2002, we came to this island, we sat down,
we poured ourselves a glass of wine, poured some olive oil over some tomatoes,
and basically sat on our terrace and stared out
with our mouths slightly gape for several days
and then on about the fourth or the fifth day we were there,
we ran out of books to read and there was no bookshop.
So, we did some drinking instead.
And we were stumbling back from a restaurant one night
and I just looked over at Oliver and said,
"Oliver, we gotta open a bookshop, so that nobody else has to do this",
and he said "That's a great idea, we'll call it Atlantis books",
and I said "That's not a very good name, but we'll worry about that tomorrow."
And we woke up the next morning and I said "Bookshop!",
and he said, "We're sober now", and I said, "No, no, no, bookshop."
And so we went back to Athens,
we went to the commercial services office at the Embassy,
and we met this lady, Eleni,
(Laughter)
and we said, "Can a couple of Americans open a bookshop in Greece?"
and she looked at me and she said (Greek): "It will be easy".
(Laughter)
It will be easy.
You know, you go to the tax office and they give you a paper with the stamp
and then you go to the cash machine store
and you buy a cash machine and you put it on your desk.
And (Greek) here you go, you are a bookstore.
and so we said "Great, great" and it was such a good answer
and we ran with it so fast that we didn't even think to ask her a second opinion,
because when you get an answer that's that good,
you're just going to run with it.
So we went back and we went about the business of graduating from university
and got together the best people that we knew,
the most incredible group of friends and convinced them to come along with us
and one girl that during that time I happen to fall in love with,
and told her that I was going to build her a bookshop at an island
in the south of Greece.
And she said, "OK, if you do it, I'll come
and I'll make orange juice for you in the mornings",
and I said, "Great, great."
So we got this crew together, we took a van
from Cambridge, England, Christmas 2003
and we packed up the van and drove it across the continent
and across the Alps and down to Greece and we got to the tax office.
And they said (Greek): "It's not going to be easy".
(Laughter) (Applause)
So that's another long and much more horrifying TED talk to give you,
all the details on that. We're on the same team here clearly.
(Laughter)
So we gridded our teeth, and I sort of slouched
like in that picture for several months going through
and, you know, in the meantime we met the locals and the community.
We introduced ourselves to them,
and we said, "We are going to open a bookstore" and they believed us,
and they start treating us like booksellers.
And so we found this hallucination of a building,
beneath the castle at the edge of town, this old Venetian castle.
And we went to the landlord and we said, "We want this building",
and he said "I will rent it to you, but I will charge you way too much,
and then at the end of the year, I will kick you out
so that I can build presidential suites",
and we said, "OK, fine, we'll take it, it's too good to pass out."
And we're going do such a great job the first year
that we're going to melt his heart
and it's a wonderful life all over again and we'll be fine.
And even if it doesn't work, if we're going to do it just once off,
and it's going to die anyhow, this is the perfect place to have the experiment.
So, we got this building, we adopted a dog and a cat,
we started putting up some shelves, we started building some tables,
we got an old fisherman's boat and put it on the terrace.
And our friends started coming, because they heard that we actually had a place.
And I started writing their names on the wall
just so we can keep track of who is passing through.
If you can see there, that's just the very inception of that back in the years.
And we got things going, and we were ready to go.
And by Easter time more and more of them where coming.
We had Easter Eve, we were ready to go and our shop was very nearly there.
And we were laughing about how this was really gonna happen
and that some day we were going to have beautiful kids, like these,
and they were going to run the shop for us.
And that first summer was glorious and people came and we had a blast
and we sold good books.
And an old drinking buddy of mine from Paris, this fellow Jeremy Mercer,
was asked to write an article for the Guardian
about his ten favorite bookshops,
and on a lark he put us as his favourite.
And it turns out that journalists like to copy what they read on the internet,
because soon we saw ourselves popping up
on all these other lists of the ten best bookshops in the world.
That's the only reason, because I had this one friend,
who wrote something in the Guardian, it comes up
and that's why everyone believes it. Turns out we were just lucky.
(Laughter) (Applause)
So, notice that there was no beautiful girl there,
because in the time that it took to raise that money and motivation
to actually get it going, she had fallen in love with someone else,
and got off and I didn't know what to end.
We were getting close to the end of the year,
we could hear the footsteps of the landlord, coming closer and closer.
And we were going to go home, and then another beautiful girl walked in
and I just completely forgot about anybody else who I had ever seen.
And I said we were going to fight, we're going to come back.
We were going to find, we were going to built another one.
I'm going to build it for her.
She is the one that I was going to build it for all along.
(Audience): Bravo! (Applause)
And then the landlord came and kicked us out.
(Laughter)
And the next winter, so over the winter we found another place,
that we haven't even noticed the year before, this little dingy place.
And we rented that and we started painting and bashing down walls,
and deliberating where we're going to put the new shelves.
and bashing down more rocks.
You have to be ambitious to do this kind of thing once by hand,
but you go a little bit crazy the second time it turns out
and by Easter year two we had a new shop, and the books were better,
and they were more of them and we sit upon our terrace,
and we began to cruise, and we sold our books.
And we got a new cat and we put the cat to work and we...
(Laughter) (Applause)
We got a crew to start coming back,
and Chris was holding court in the back room, there he is.
And we served up some more tzatziki, as we do.
And we have more readings and Chris played his cello.
And we had bonfires in the evening and we met new friends.
And we danced among the bookshelves in the evenings until the sun came up.
And we laughed and we argued about which was the most beautiful bookjacket.
And we pontificated and we watched as things got a bit hairier on 2008-2009.
Since then it's been a series of us trying to do
whatever we could creatively to stay alive,
as I'm sure many of you can relate.
And somehow every year we have this conversation "Is this the end?"
And we say "Maybe it is" and the we say "Well, what can we do?" and we wait.
I think it's since 2002 when we first came up with this idea.
We said "We're just going to run with this until there is a wall that we bash into",
and we haven't bashed into it yet.
We started printing our own books in the back room of the shop like I said
and that's gone larger and that's helped to supplement where,
we are figuring any sort of ways that we can, to streamline our operation,
to find new and better and more beautiful and rarer books and it keeps us busy.
And we're still laughing about maybe our kids will run it some day.
So, I would say, that in these days, if you find yourselves in the situation
that we're in, it's now the end of the tourist season
and I'm looking at the books and I'm going to go back to Santorini
in a couple of days,
and take a look at where we are at the end of the year,
and I'm gonna hold my breath,
and hope that we can pay the rent to get through to next spring.
And, I believe, I'm gonna tell myself that we're going to do it.
We're going to keep lying gracefully to ourselves,
and we're going to run with these graceful lies
that women like Eleni are going to keep telling us,
because if she hadn't lied to us to our face,
this would never have happened.
So I would say that. Let us lie gracefully a little bit more
and watch the people that come and start to believe your story,
because that spiral over the years grows and continues to grow.
And we had this spiral that's on the roof of the building,
and we don't know how we're going to keep everything underneath,
but there is fellow Henry David Thoreau, another handsome man,
who said "If you build castles in the air, your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be. Now build foundations under them."
And that's what we're doing and if you happen to find yourself
in a magical place, on a magical land, in some strange and difficult times,
maybe it's time to believe a few of those lies,
maybe it's time to look at those castles in the air and keep them there,
and keep building the foundation under them.
Because you remember that fellow Oliver, that came on that first trip with me,
he actually left out the first year.
He met a girl the first year and he took her home.
And they went back and they got married and on the 4th of January 2012, this year,
eight years to the day, after we first landed on the island of Santorini...
There is Oliver and there is Annie Palmawise, they had a baby.
So if we can hold on for 18 more years, she can run the show for us.
I hope we stick around, I hope to see you soon.
(Applause)