Bosu Book Street

This guide to Bosu Book Street in Busan opens with the stairs behind the alley and the chaos of 1950, when Seoul's fall sent hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into this port city, among them a husband and wife from North Hamgyong Province who laid out boxes of secondhand books and started selling. It follows how that single stall multiplied into a street of used bookshops fed by refugee schools, smuggled American textbooks, and displaced writers trading their own libraries for food money. By the 1960s the alley held roughly eighty stores, stacked shoulder to shoulder along the same slope where refugees once built a hillside neighborhood from scrap.