Q&A – Antoine Abi-Heila

It all started with a 10-franc copy of “Madame Bovary”. Now Antoine Abi-Heila is ensconced at Bibliopolis, his appointment-only Aladdin’s cave of literary treasures in Beirut’s Ashrafieh neighborhood. A dealer, restorer and polymath, he spoke to Executive about his life surrounded by rare and historical tomes. How did you succumb to the charm of the first edition? It’s simple. In the 1970s, at the age of 18, I discovered that a contemporary edition of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was 10 French francs, and a new edition was the same price. So I preferred to buy the nineteenth century edition in a nice leather binding. I discovered [collecting] early. Books… can’t be compared to other antiquities or antiques. [They] concern the spirit, and the spirit is universal and timeless. So the content is as important as the material value of the edition? I compare this to — this is a