Bookshops

  Austerlitz, the hero of W. G. Sebald’s novel of that name, experiences the most decisive moment of his life in a second-hand bookshop near the British Museum, one that is owned by a beautiful woman whose name is a pure haven: Penelope Peacefull. While she is solving a crossword puzzle and he absent-mindedly flicking through architectural prints, two women are talking on the radio about “the summer of 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on special transport.” Austerlitz’s mind and body are invaded by a kind of trance: “. . . and I stood there as still as if on no account must I let a single syllable emerging from that rather scratchy radio escape me.” Those words allow him at a stroke to recover his own childhood, his own journey and arrival in England escaping from a Europe in flames, his own exile: years his memory had erased completely. In a bookshop, he suddenly remembers who he is, from which Ithaca he has come.

  Childhood and especially adolescence are periods when you fall in love with bookshops. I spent so many Saturday afternoons browsing among the shelves of Rogés Llibres, the ground floor of the Garden City of Mataró that had been converted into a second-hand bookshop, that I am quite unable to shape them chronologically or date them. I am sure those sessions only took place on the weekend and on holidays, because during the school term I went in the opposite direction, towards the city centre. On my way I would go into the Caixa Laietana Library, where I read all the Astérix, Obélix and Tintin comics and took out all the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators and Sherlock Holmes novels, and on my way home at dinnertime would pop into Robafaves, which I discovered much later was a cooperative and one of the most important bookshops in Catalonia, where a book was launched nearly every evening, and I’d listen as if in church or class to those words that, although they were there between mouth and microphone, objects as tangible as the books surrounding me, sounded remote, an incomprehensible babble, completely disconnected from my firm desire to be a writer.

  When I was fourteen or fifteen I accompanied my father on his visits to homes in a neighbourhood in Mataró, next to the Central Park, the velodrome and municipal swimming pool, where as a child I saw peacocks, races and cyclists and my own body diving into the water as if I were not scared of all those litres of blue chlorine. After an eight-hour day at the telephone company, my father worked as an agent for the Readers’ Circle. First he would ­distribute the new catalogues and then we picked up the cards with the orders from the subscribers and processed them and a few weeks later, when all the books had arrived at our house, my mother helped us organize them by street and finally we took them to their new owners and collected payment. Some customers forced us to go back two, three or even four times, because they never had the 950 or 2,115 pesetas their order cost. Conversely, others bought five, seven or nine books every two months and always had the 10,300 or 12,500 pesetas ready because they were expecting us and so much wanted to start reading. I suppose it was in one of those family flats or flats belonging to old ladies or single men, complete strangers, that I first saw well-stocked private libraries and decided that, one day, when I was a writer, I would have one too. The first aspiration was too abstract to be more than pie-in-the-sky; the second, on the other hand, assumed a tangible form that, like girls’ bodies, was pure desire.

  in Auto da Fé, Elias Canetti writes that a child is at the mercy of the wares of any old tradesman dealing in books as soon as they can read and walk. He concludes that young children should be brought up in private libraries. He is probably right, because I cannot recall a single book I bought in Rogés Llibres or in Robafaves that changed my life: the great reads in my life came later (or simply: late), when I had moved away from Mataró. Nonetheless, Robafaves is the most important bookshop in my life because I was introduced to something I had glimpsed in those private houses there: a life in which books played an intimate part. In 2666, Amalfitano muses that a book probably came to him via Laie or La Central. I could say the same about most of my library, a third, perhaps, to which one should add the “restless” titles bought in Altaïr and the comics purchased in Arkham. The other two thirds come from my travels and what publishers’ publicity departments send me. I have sent dozens of boxes from Rosario, Buenos Aires and Chicago: libraries and the nomadic spirit are always wedded in my mind. My own experience of cities is shaped by the intersection between strolling and bookshops, so most of my usual itineraries cling to certain shops as my personal hubs or stops. Streets, bookshops, squares and cafés represent the routes of modernity as well as settings for two essential acts: conversation and reading. While literary writing—which, until a few decades ago, was still taking place at café tables, has been retreating into private space, or at best to libraries, talks and readings, premeditated or chance encounters, and the diary, novel or magazine—continued to be articulated in the social sphere of metropolitan life. Blogs and social media allow you to exchange data and ideas in the cosmopolis, but your body continues to tread a local, domestic topography.

  As we read in “The Journey of Álvaro Rousselot,” one of the stories in The Insufferable Gaucho, Bolaño thought that the bookshops of Buenos Aires and their contents had lives of their own. In other words, it is not only the movement of readers’ bodies that threads together the different bookshops in a city, books themselves shift and wander, open lines of escape and create itineraries. That was the idea that inspired the Barcelona theatre director Marc Caellas when he decided to adapt Robert Walser’s The Walk into a walk around the Argentinian capital. Its pages were suddenly incarnated by an actor, a stroller, who wanders round the various emblematic spaces in the modern city as happens in the story. Of course, one is the bookshop:

  As now an extremely splendid, abundant bookshop came pleasantly under my eye, and I felt the impulse and desire to bestow upon it a short and fleeting visit, I didn’t hesitate to step in, with an obvious good grace, while I permitted myself, of course, to consider that in me appeared far rather an inspector, or bookkeeper, a collector of information, and a sensitive connoisseur, than a favourite and welcome, wealthy book buyer and good client. In courteous, thoughly circumspect tones, and choosing understandably only the finest turns of speech, I enquired after the latest and best in the field of belles-lettres [. . .] “Certainly,” said the bookseller. He vanished out of eyeshot like an arrow, to return the next instant to his anxious and interested client, bearing indeed the most bought and read book of enduring value in his hand. This delicious fruit of the spirit he carried carefully and solemnly, as if carrying a relic charged with sanctifying magic. His face was enraptured; his manner radiated the deepest awe; and with that smile on his lips that only believers and those who are inspired to the deepest core can smile, he laid before me in the most winning way that which he had brought.

  I considered the book, and asked, “Could you swear that this is the most widely distributed book of the year?”

  “Without a doubt!”

  “Could you insist that this is the book one has to have read?”

  “Unconditionally.”

  “Is this book also definitely good?”

  “What an utterly superfluous and inadmissible question.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said cold-bloodedly, left the book that had been most absolutely widely distributed, because it had unconditionally to have been read, where it was, and softly withdrew, without wasting another word.

  “Uncultivated and ignorant man,” the bookseller shouted after me, for he was most justifiably and deeply vexed.

  This is the walker created by the Swiss Walser, in some bookshop in Boedo speaking with an Argentinian accent, making fun of conventions, of literature tied to sales figures, of the absurdity of the world of culture, being directed by a Catalan. Marginal centres and central margins, abolished frontiers, translations, changes of city, quantum leaps, transcultural interactions: welcome to any bookshop.

  The same relationship between periphery and centre that I experienced qu
ite unawares when I visited Rogés Llibres and Robafaves, as if they were mazes, second-hand and antique bookshops and shops for the latest titles, can also be established between bookshops in the centre of Barcelona and those on the city’s fringes. Gigamesh was the first shop I entered in Barcelona and I soon started to explore others selling comics, science fiction and heroic fantasy that surrounded it and still do, like a plague of aliens proliferating over time, in the vicinity of the Paseo de San Juan. The area of that impossible centre occupied by Laie, Documenta, Altaïr, Alibri and La Central, and so many others, is small and walkable. Until the end of 2015 you only had to cross El Born, a district without bookshops, to reach La Negra y Criminal that Paco Camarasa ran for almost fifteen years in a backstreet of Barceloneta. Now both districts are orphaned. Bookshops imitate the neighbourhoods that welcome them: this place could only exist among those fishermen’s houses, and in Gràcia a mere fifteen minutes’ walk from the Arco de Triunfo, Taifa and Pequod are unimaginable without the context of a locality, a context of nearness. Camarasa and José Batlló, the Alma Mater of Taifa (now run by his heirs, Jordi Duarte and Roberto García) are two of the key individuals in Barcelona’s world of books that finds its originating myth in the pages Cervantes devoted to it in Don Quixote and which has always negotiated the city’s literary bilingualism. Taifa has been the pre-eminent bookshop north of the Diagonal since 1993, as La Negra y Criminal is south of the Ronda Litoral. Batlló is a poet, publisher and legend. He is famous for his culture, for being a great friend to his friends and for his skirmishes with customers whom he is capable of scolding, depending on the titles they buy. Those he has sold most over the last twenty years are Hopscotch and City of Marvels. Second-hand books are in cell-like spaces at the back, as if to remind us that it is normal for novels and essays to cease to circulate, for publishers to shut down, for us to be forgotten. Similarly Pequod, the belly of the whale that, as they say, was born yesterday, sells both new and second-hand books, because we live in hybrid times. Despite its small surface space, this bookshop transforms itself into a gallery for micro-exhibitions, an area for conversations about Italian literature and an aperitif bar at the weekends, and spreads itself around social media, because nothing new exists solely in the world of what we can touch.

  In a second circle—orbit within an orbit—other Barcelona bookshops have vied for recognition over the last few years. I am thinking, for example, of +Bernat, the bookshop and restaurant on calle Buenos Aires, next to the Plaza Francesc Macià, which is managed by Montse Serrano and defines itself as a “cultural store,” and is the favourite haunt of Enrique Vila-Matas since he switched neighbourhoods. Or of Llibreria Calders in calle Parlament in the Sant Antoni district, with its piano and agenda forever in flames. Or of Nollegiu, in Poblenou, that Xavi Vidal has turned into an important cultural centre. Fortunately, they are not the only bookshops that have been generating urban interest far from the city centre. Because, although hubs where bookshops are concentrated have heritage value, like the popular Port’Alba that Massima Gatta has called “the Charing Cross Road of Naples,” or Amsterdam’s elegant Het Spui and adjacent streets, a democratic city is a network of public and private libraries and small and large bookshops: a dialogue between readers who live in multiple centres and various peripheries.

  My strolls often lead me to calle Llibreteria, the ancient Decumanus in Roman Barcino, where you now find the Papirvm artisan shop and La Central in the Museum of the History of the City, one of those places—like the bookshop in the basement of the College of Architects—where Barcelona archives its own memory. The brotherhood of Sant Jeroni dels Llibreters was founded in 1553. If St Lorenzo, one of the Church’s first treasurers, is held to be the patron of librarians because of his work classifying documents, the austere St Jerome, one of the Church’s first ghost-writers (he wrote Pope Damaso I’s letters) is held to be the patron of translators and booksellers. St Lorenzo, the man who some legends identify as the mysterious individual who hid the Holy Grail to protect it against the wave of violence that also ended his own life, died a martyr grilled to death on the outskirts of Rome: on August 10 every year the reliquary that contains his head is exhibited in the Vatican, I am not sure whether it is venerated solely by librarians. St Jerome, on the other hand, after a period as an ­outstanding translator, went to Bethlehem in self-exile, lived in a cave and devoted his time to attacking in his writings the vices of Europe textually and beating himself with a stone in acts of penitence. He usually appears in the iconography with the Vulgate, the Bible that he translated into Latin from Hebrew—though he was an expert in ancient Greek, too—open on his desk, a skull as a symbol of vanitas and that stone which rumour-mongers say he used as a kind of translation dictionary that had yet to be written: he beat himself and God revealed to him ipso facto the Latin equivalents of the Hebrew original.

  Your city enters its bookshops through their windows and customers’ footsteps, a hybrid space that is neither wholly private nor wholly public. The city walks in and out of its bookshops, because one cannot be understood without the other, so the pavements outside Pequod or La Negra y Criminal are always crammed with people on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, drinking wine and eating steamed mussels, and books on Barcelona find their way into every city bookshop, which is the space where they naturally belong. And when they start to get dog-eared, the novels, essays, biographies and books of poetry that citizens have man-handled and owned return to the city’s stalls, to the Mercado de San Antonio, to the second-­hand bookshops or that arcade with books and a Uralite roof that was at the back of Los Encantes where passers-by turned out to be collectors, antiquarians and rag-and-bone men.

  If the metropolis vamps up its bookish dimension on Sundays in the Mercado de San Antonio or on the days Los Encantes is open, there is one day in the year when the city reproduces in its every corner that sensation Don Quixote took away with him: the city breathing the printed word. The Spanish Day of the Book was the brainwave of a Valencian, Vicente Clavel, who had established himself in Barcelona as the youthful owner of the Cervantes publishing house. From the Chamber of Books and with the support of the Catalan Labour Minister, Eduard Aunós, he gained recognition for his project through a royal decree in 1926 in the middle of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Although the idea was to encourage Spanish book culture at all levels of the administration, so that every library and city would participate in one way or another in the festivities, from the very first it became polarized between mass celebrations in Barcelona and institutional, academic events in Madrid. Guillermo Díaz Plaja wrote these words in an article after Clavel’s death:

  Almost half a century later the decree remains in place, with a single important change—the decree of September 7, 1930—which switched the date of October 7 that was originally agreed—two days before the certified baptism of Cervantes—to April 23, the day of his death. This historically exact date meant that the Day of the Book in Barcelona coincided with the day of St George, the patron saint of Catalonia. When Don Gustavo Gili pointed that out, Clavel immediately retorted, “It doesn’t matter. The roses for St George will flower for ever. The only risk we run is that Cervantes will be forgotten.” The years gone by have shown that it was to be a happy marriage of both commemorations in the legendary Barcelona festival. The city of the Counts is without a doubt the vanguard of the Peninsula in terms of the breadth and popularity of the Day of the Book.

  the year 1930 was when publishers began to launch new books in Catalan on the Dia de Sant Jordi and the general public responded with enthusiasm, while Madrid took the first steps to organize its Book Fair on another date and the rest of the country also gradually forgot Cervantes’ Day. The Civil War paralyzed the publishing industry and Francoism banned Catalan and eliminated the Book Chambers by replacing them with the National Spanish Book Institute. The Day of the Book did not start to become important again in Catalonia until the 1950s. In 1963 the opening address was given
by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Minister for Information and Tourism, who defended the need to promote literature in the Catalan language. The front page of La Vanguardia Española on April 23, 1977 (15 pesetas), together with a photograph of a street packed with people, reproduced in Catalan the following lines by Josep Maria de Sagarra:

  The rose has given him joy and pain

  and who can say how dearly he loves it;

  bringing more blood to his veins

  to defeat all the dragons in the world.

  Thanks to an initiative taken by the First Latin American Congress of Book Associations and Chambers, from 1964, April 23 became the Day of the Book in every country where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken and from 1966 it has been International Book and Authors’ Rights Day. Perhaps because not only Cervantes and Shakespeare died on that day but also other internationally known writers, like Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Eugenio Noel, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and Teresa de la Parra.

  I love to visit my favourite bookshops on the days prior to Sant Jordi: I buy all my books then and during la diada I simply like to stroll and observe, “like a better sort of tramp, a vagabond and pickpocket, or idler and vagrant,” as Walser says. Like all self-respecting writers and publishers, I use these walks to check whether my books are there or not and to put them in the proper place on the shelves of my everyday bookshops. And in those where they are absent. Even in the book section in El Corte Inglés. Even on the second floor in Fnac, in the middle of the city, where I imagine many of the young sales assistants, with their BAs, MAs or PhDs in literature would have been great booksellers in another—no doubt better—world, or perhaps already are in this one, which although in crisis is the only one we have.