Pamuk and Alaadin's shop...

If you have read Pamuk’s “The Black Book,” you will remember his early chapter (Chapter Four) about the store-keeper, Alaaddin. The character is based on the real Alaaddin, whose store is five blocks from our apartment. It is a large corner store packed to the gills with things you would never expect. On our fourth day in Istanbul, Ray bought a two-foot-high robot there...

I’ll let the Nobel take it from here:

For years on end, he’d bound those old Texas and Tom Mix comics with his own two hands; every morning, while the city slept, he’d opened his shop, swept it out, tacked his magazines and newspapers to the door and the chestnut tree next to it, and arranged his latest novelties in the window. He’s combed the city for toy ballerinas that twirled when you brought a magnetic mirror near them, and tricolored shoelaces, and small plastic statues of Ataturk that had blue light bulbs in their eye sockets, and pencil sharpeners shaped like Dutch windmills; signs saying “for rent” and signs saying “in the name of God, the compassionate and merciful; pine flavored chewing gum that came with birds numbering from one to a hundred, and pink backgammon dice that you couldn’t find anywhere by the Covered Bazaar… (and on and on!)

So here is a picture of Alaaddin’s store, with the news of Pamuk’s win of the Nobel Prize plastered over the headlines (and Milliyet, playing on “My Name is Red,” with “Benim adın Nobel,” my name is Nobel).