TSUM (Sofia)

Central department store in Sofia, Bulgaria.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	setting	Five floors of goods that looked made before 1938.

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Neither Here Nor There · Readwise highlight

Sofia had a dark and enormous department store called TSUM, at least as big as Selfridge’s in London, spread over five floors and containing not a single product that looked as if it had been produced more recently than 1938—chunky Bakelite radios, big stubby black fountain pens, steam-powered washing machines, that sort of thing.

• Role: setting
• In the book: Bryson remembers Sofia’s dark, enormous department store, as big as Selfridges, with nothing that looked newer than 1938: Bakelite radios, stubby fountain pens, steam-powered washing machines. He spends most of a day there watching families treat it like a museum of science and technology.
• Why it matters: It is his emblem of communist Bulgaria’s frozen consumer world.