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Álvaro Castillo Granada
We had already spoken once. It was at the Modern Gymnasium, during the Bogotá Book Fair in 2015. With Federico Díaz Granados we had a wonderful meeting in the school library. From those you can not forget. This time, three years later, the meeting began to take shape, as it should, in Federico's office. Alberto Manguel was one of the guests of this year's book fair. I wanted to talk with him again. I was at the office Giusseppe Caputo, cultural coordinator of the fair. I asked him if it would be possible to talk with Manguel. He gave me the name and telephone number of the person responsible for his agenda on behalf of the Argentine flag. I called her. We coordinate the day and the hour. I was there He went down to the lobby of the hotel and recognized me. We continue to talk like yesterday. In a moment I showed him a copy of my book A Librarian. He said:
– Good! Where is it done? I will buy it. "
I replied: -I will give it to you
-But you have to dedicate it to me …
And I wrote him a dedication where I could finally thank him for all that
We spoke for a moment about two subjects that fascinate me: the bookstore and the book trade
We were two readers sharing what unites us and makes us equal: reading.
We were two readers who shake hands
LA LIBRERÍA
– Let's see … We know that the history of bookstores goes back a long way, I would say it goes back to the Egyptian temples where, The equivalent of a bookseller, has sold to the faithful the Book of the Dead.This notion of person, place, responsible for the distribution of texts from the very beginning forms the image of what. is a bookseller In Greece, especially in Rome, the bookseller becomes a primitive publisher, making copies of books, selling them Begins to have the reputation of the person who not only receives orders to copy texts for sale, but also chooses the texts that he copies for that. When the first authentic libraries appear there is a confusion between the library and the bookstore. This is why the term in English is "library" and in French (until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), "bookstore" means library. And so on. The role of the bookseller, from the nineteenth century, is concretely defined as the person who is the intermediary between the author, the publisher and the public. And so he will be responsible for selecting what will be visible in an intellectual world. No library, no publisher, no bookseller can have everything. So this selection is necessarily a censorship. This can be very good or very bad censorship. But I choose, if we talk about the positive aspect of this, for example, more booksellers who do not sell bestsellers who would give them money, who waste literature, and prefer to resign themselves to have less money and more quality. The bookseller can also be a stronghold against state censorship. We know that, for example in the Spain of Franco, booksellers sold banned literature, especially that published in Argentina, in paper bags behind the counter. I had an experience a few years ago in Saudi Arabia, where religious censorship is fierce. One boy was sentenced to thirty lashes for saying in an email that he "felt like a friend of God". And I visited a great bookstore in Damman and there was Simone de Beauvoir, Chomsky … modern writers that one might badume that censorship would have banned them. But censorship has looked at religious texts. Then they banned some theological works but a book by Simone de Beauvoir did not interest them …
My librarian experience began before I worked in a bookstore because it was still there. where I was going to discover new friends. I had a very lonely childhood, my father was ambbadador, he raised a nanny … In my first seven years I did not go to school, I did not see my brothers, I did not talk to my parents and she started my relationship with literature. She was a woman educated in German culture. And there was a bookstore in Tel Aviv, near the embbady, where at three or four years I went to consult the low shelves, which were accessible … When I visited Israel, a lot of 39 years later, there was the same bookstore with the same shelves. And I bought a book on these shelves that I remembered from my childhood. As my nanny did not know how to treat children, she treated me like an adult. I had full freedom, I could choose what I wanted. Sometimes I was wrong, sometimes no. And the bookseller advised me things. He said "Maybe you like it" and I looked at it … I wanted some picture books, of course. Since then, very early, there has been a relationship of friendship and pedagogy with the bookseller. And bookstores were always a magnet for me. All the trips I've made are bookstores.
Libraries are of many types. In my teens, when I started working in Pygmalion 's English / German bookstore, which was a bookstore that was selling new books from Europe and coming from America, the owner wanted that we knew these titles. Recent But I liked more old bookstores. Always. I like books with biography. I love books with history. I like surprises. I like bookstores that are not too organized. There was in the village of my parents-in-law, in England, a large bookstore (now closed as many) where they bought libraries and did not worry about what there was. Batteries piled up and we could go see. I found incredible works … The first publication of Finnegans Wake in a magazine … Things like that … First editions of Stevenson … An edition of the fables of La Fontaine, annotated by Marianne Moore, for her publisher because she was translating it … Not at all … the grace is to find it for nothing because with a million dollars the Gutenberg Bible is bought.
It has changed a lot. On the one hand the internet has made that almost no bookseller does not know what he has because, if you do not know, he is looking for "Cervantes-Don Quijote-First Edition" and s & # 39 is okay. This means that in many bookstores and antique dealers the prices are absurd. If I have to pay the really higher price for a book, unless I'm a millionaire, I can not have it at the library. That makes no sense I ask someone to buy it for me. There is one much more serious thing that is not the disappearance of the chance that hurts me personally, the online sale of Amazon.
They transformed the library into the equivalent of virtual bad. The physical experience of the bookstore, being in a bookstore, being in this space where conversations are offered, meetings are offered, being attracted by a cover, by a name, by a title, how not to buy a book that called Dostoevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and starts to cry, how can not he buy this book … But instead, at Amazon I can not get more than what I already know, I want. It's like some kind of prostitution. That's the relationship you have in a brothel. The romantic encounter … looking through a room with a stranger happens only in a library of paper and ink.
There are cities that have unfortunately lost a part of their soul with the disappearance of bookstores. New York is no longer New York. They are reborn in a very curious way. In New York, there are some handles, some of the Barnes and Nobles chains, which do not interest me. They were resurrected in the form of street vendors. In the corners sometimes you see them there, and find beautiful things. Maybe there is hope. It's not just something that people do not want anymore, as a bodice shop has disappeared … People still want books, they still want conversation with the bookseller … That's it proved in Buenos Aires where bookstores continue. Especially the bookstores of old books are beautiful. And also some bookstores with contemporary books. Excellent as Guadalquivir, which is my favorite bookstore in Buenos Aires. Others, like El Ateneo, which has so much prestige, is nothing more than a showcase. It's a very beautiful facade where they have nonsense, games and things, there's almost no bookseller who knows what's in it, they have an abominable choice. So good …
But I trust the survival of bookstores because, if the industry decides that it wants to sell in supermarkets, there will always be a grocer who says "but I get the best apples "and people are going to go The bookseller who started, for example, to authorize the sale of spaces in the bookstore for the book that the publisher chooses, morally I think that c & # 39; is an abomination, he is a sinner for whom there is a special circle in Hell. Because, to say that the bookseller with whom we trust, with whom we agree or not, gives an opinion that sells, it is like selling his vote. It's like selling your ethic. I have no respect for these people.
EL LIBRERO
– I entered at the age of fifteen when I was a reader. I already had my library. I knew what I liked. I liked talking about books. The first year, the owner told me: "A bookseller must know everything in the bookstore and where is there in the bookstore", because now I go to a good bookstore and I say "The metamorphosis, Kafka". And they say, "I'm looking for it on the screen." How he does not know where he is, if he? S there, in what editions! It's an irresponsible thing. If they tell me, I'm leaving. I am not staying. I'm going to another bookstore.
To know where were the books and what books he had put to put the rag to the books for a year. I had to clean them. I did it and I saw where they were. Then I realized that one must control his pbadions as a bookseller. I like to talk about books, I like to recommend books, I like doing this by badociation and it tempts me a lot, if someone chooses a book that I do not like Say, "No, that's crap." I quickly realized that we can do it with some people, can not tell the person who just bought the latest novel from Paulo Coelho "But please!" . I respect booksellers who do that. In a novel that I wrote, El Regreso, I described a bookseller I liked, who was on Florida Street in an already closed bookstore, who did that. A very grumpy man who was impatient, gave his incontinent opinions, if one wanted to buy something that he did not like, he would not sell it. I did not sell it.
The only reason I could not be a bookseller is that I do not want to get rid of the books that are there. I would spend all the money to buy the books that are on the shelves. I would not arrange to sell them. I was a bookseller for three years: from fifteen to eighteen years old. Then I went to work as an editor in a small publishing house that had been created a year, then I went to Europe and I worked as a reader and others. I did it once again in a bookstore specializing in the art of Africa and the East which was in Paris. Then I opened a bookstore for Franco María Ricci that I then left to go to Tahiti to be publisher.
A Pygmalion came to buy books Borges, Mallea, Mujica Láinez, Bioy Casares, everyone … I knew them. And then, when I started reading Borges, he took me to these people. The relationship I did not say was friendship, by no means, but a boy who is allowed to sit at the big table. There were also people who were not well known but who were great readers. They've taught me They've said "I'm going to buy that … it's a big book … you should read it …". These conversations that I liked. Alberto Girri told me to read Ezra Pound … Thanks to him, I discovered him. Of those, there were many. Anonymous people who enter the bookstore and begin to say why they will buy such a book. How important is such another. What is the meaning of this and then we learn. It's a receiver and communicator job. The memory and the experience are shared. And love … The bbad phrase of "a friend of my friend is my friend" in the case of readers is absolutely true. A Conrad reader who already recommends me a book, I know I will love him. Recommend a book, give a book, it's a way to tell the person that's what I think you are.
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