A blue-eyed American owns a bookstore in Seoul Hannam-dong that specially deals with selling original texts from the United States. The owner of the bookstore, “What the book?,” is Chris Chiavetta, a 30 year old American from Florida.

About two thousand new or used books published from the United States and Canada are treasured in this bookstore. He said, “We have all kinds of books on literature, culture, politics, economy, society, and history, etc. Since new books are very expensive, we also sell used books at a lower price.”

Chiavetta came to Korea four years ago as an English teacher at a institution. He thought of opening a bookstore as he saw his fellow American friends going in and out of big bookstores trying hard to find English books that they were looking for.

Chiavetta said, “Books are expensive in the United States. Adding to that, when books are exported to Korea from the United States, prices jump up as transportation, delivery fees and taxes are added to the original price. That is where I got the idea to open up a bookstore that is equipped with good quality but low price English books.”

Managing the store, however, was not as easy as Chiavetta had thought. He had to wake himself up early in the morning just to get in contact with wholesalers in the United States. Walking up a steep hill carrying loads of books on his shoulders was a regular task for Chiavetta. Afterwards, not even one person showed up to buy books, which was last July when the store just opened.

Chiavetta said, “The work, however, was interesting beyond my expectation.” Customers are still mostly foreigners. He said that he feels satisfied when seeing foreigners or Korean students happy to finally find the books they were searching for.

That is why Chiavetta opened a webpage for the store (www.whatthebook.com) late last year. Although on-line transaction service is not yet available, people could use the search engine and read information about new books in store.

Chiavetta said it is 20 to 30 percent cheaper to buy books from his store. Obviously, a slogan “Why pay more?” is posted on the shelves.

Chiavetta majored in modern European history at Montana State University. After graduation, he saw through the Internet in 2000 a job advertisement looking for native speakers to work at an English Institution in Korea. As Chiavetta was looking for jobs back then, he immediately decided to come to Seoul.

He met his wife, Yu Hye-rim (34), while working as an English teacher and married her last year. Yu said that they plan to bring in Korean books for Korean customers in the future as the business prospers. He and his wife are expecting a baby this coming March.

Chiavetta smiled when asked about his Korean, which he said is still at the beginner level. He pondered for a while as he was asked to name a “good thing” and a “bad thing” about Korea. Chiavetta said, “The worst thing is that I can't sleep because of the load voices coming from the megaphones of people selling fish and vegetables early in the morning. Other than that, everything about Korea is good.”

(Jan Jun-seong, peace@chosum.com )