What the post beautifully captures here is that Al Manhal sits at one of those rare intersections where publishing’s social function is stripped back to its irreducible core: the right to know, the right to question, the right to your own story.
A compelling post by Olivia Snaije that appeared in Publishing Perspectives this past week, gets to be the first to be featured under a new TNPS banner, The Best of the Press. Kudos to Erin Cox and Andrew Albanese for giving space to this story.
There is a street in Damascus called Straight Street. It dates to Hellenistic and Roman times, gets a mention in the Bible, and now – in one of those small, stubborn acts of cultural defiance that publishing occasionally produces – it is home to a bakery and bookshop that may matter more per square metre than most of the world’s literary institutions put together.
A Very Specific Grievance.
Al Manhal Bakery and Books opened in early 2025, a few months after the fall of the Assad regime ended 54 years of dictatorship and censorship. It was founded by Asser Khattab, a Syrian writer and journalist who had fled the country in 2017, spent years in exile in France, and returned with a very specific grievance: that the bookshops of his youth, plentiful as they were, never once stocked what he actually wanted to read.
Khattab’s curatorial vision – books that provoke critical thinking, that tell Syrians their own history, that span Arabic, Kurdish, Armenian, Aramaic, and Syriac identities – is not the product of commercial calculation. It is reparative. A generation raised under censorship is being offered the books that censorship stole.
Necessary Improvisation
The model is necessarily improvised. Al Manhal functions currently as a lending library, with a stock of over 200 personally curated titles carried in by friends, left in Paris or London for Khattab to collect, ferried across borders by hand.
Books are priced as second-hand because most Syrians cannot afford full cover price. The infrastructure isn’t there yet; neither is reliable supply. None of that has stopped the regulars from arriving.
The View From The Beach
Olivia Snaije’s piece for Publishing Perspectives tells the story with the kind of granular human texture rarely seen in the trade press, and that propels the post into my Best of the Press selection.
What the post beautifully captures here is that Al Manhal sits at one of those rare intersections where publishing’s social function is stripped back to its irreducible core: the right to know, the right to question, the right to your own story.
Khattab, asked about his standards for what makes the shelves, delivers the line of the year: “Beggars can be choosers.”
He’s right. And he’d know.
Original report by Olivia Snaije, Publishing Perspectives.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
