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 1999 with an installation depicting the Pope being crushed by a meteor. So I responded, perfectly naturally, that they each had a unique point of view that is worth getting to know. That was it; the ice was broken,” says Hickey.
‘I wanted to give something back to Hydra in my own way, since she was so generous with me from the very start’
Although an American who was born in Philadelphia, Hickey can be described as part Hydriot, since he splits his time between the Saronic island, New York and Paris. He’s more than equipped for running this project since apart from studying literature at university and working as a literary researcher and curator, he also worked at jewelry powerhouse Cartier for many years as a creative director of events.
“I first came here on holiday in 2009 and have since developed a very special bond to the island. I wanted to give something back to Hydra in my own way, since she was so generous with me from the very start,” Hickey tells Kathimerini as the Hydra Book Club launched this year’s edition on September 1, running through end-October.
“I realized that there was this very strong community of artists, musicians, poets and writers on the island, but also that this island has been producing literature for more than a century. So that’s sort of how the idea of creating this book club once a year came about, of bringing together rare, but also new editions, in different languages, on the subject of Hydra,” he adds.
Hickey’s initiative has been a resounding success thanks to its eclectic selections of literature, and to the talented writers and poets who have set their stories on Hydra, from Margarita Karapanou, Thanasis Petsalis-Diomedes and Miltos Sachtouris, to Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller and Rachel Cusk.
What’s more, each edition of the Hydra Book Club has a different theme, which determines the selections; this year’s is vacation and last year’s was utopia.
“I am so glad to have been able to do my part in the area of literature, alongside people like Dakis Joannou and [artist, curator and critic] Dimitris Antonitsis, who have done so much for the island,” says Hickey.
