An American bookworm on Hydra

Josh Hickey recounts a funny scene that played out in the first year of the Hydra Book Club, a pop-up bookstore he established in 2021 on the first floor of the Hydra Historical Archive and Museum, featuring Greek and foreign books, new and used, on the island. It concerned a visit by Dakis Joannou, the renowned Cypriot art collector who owns two of the loveliest houses in the Saronic island's main town and put Hydra on the international contemporary art map with the annual exhibition of top-flight artists at a converted slaughterhouse.

"As he was perusing the editions, he discovered that I had placed a book by George Seferis beside one on his artist friend Maurizio Cattelan, so he turned to me with a puzzled expression on his face and asked, 'What on Earth do these two have in common?' One was a Nobel Prize-winning poet and the other a visual artist who made a splash in...