Above business, activism

It opened on Feb­ru­ary 13, 1965. Like oth­ers that sprang up in the coun­try at that time, it was the re­sult of sev­eral part­ners want­ing to cre­ate a dif­fer­ent book­shop, one com­mit­ted to Cata­lan cul­ture. So a group of in­vestors de­cided to open the shop, which is still the same today. When it opened, it was even smaller, be­cause part of it was ded­i­cated to an art room. My fa­ther [Isidre Fonts] was the per­son they chose to put in charge. He was not a part­ner but ran the book­shop; after a cou­ple of years it be­came clear that it wasn’t work­ing. So fa­ther was left with the busi­ness and all the debts. He kept it going, with my mother [Maria Pal­lach], until he re­tired. He’s now 90 years old: he’s from 1931, he was born on April 11 and the Re­pub­lic was pro­claimed on the 14th! Now my sis­ter and I run the book­shop.

Yes, we were in the midst of Fran­co­ism. My fa­ther was very much an ac­tivist and many things that were hid­den in the un­der­ground and the anti-Franco strug­gle hap­pened here. It was com­pli­cated, be­cause he had in­spec­tions. Some­times it was tricky for the peo­ple in the book­shop, who talked be­cause they thought they were in a free space, but my fa­ther knew there was al­ways an un­der­cover po­lice­man right out­side the door, and he used to re­ally worry about it.

Yes, there was often an un­der­cover po­lice­man mon­i­tor­ing who came in and out.

He’s al­ways be­lieved in his coun­try and al­ways done every­thing for it. He re­fused the award be­cause he didn’t want a medal that cer­tain fig­ures had been given but who he be­lieved did not de­serve it.

This is our main com­mit­ment, but we have to be re­al­is­tic. Cata­lan lit­er­a­ture is su­perb, but when you leave lit­er­a­ture be­hind, you get a bit stuck: art, psy­chol­ogy, such basic top­ics as par­ent­ing or moth­er­hood, na­ture... If you want to stock what the cus­tomer needs, you also have to have books in Span­ish.

The one-on-one and know­ing how to ad­vise the cus­tomer is the same, but the way of man­ag­ing has changed a lot, both due to com­puter tools and pub­lish­ers. Re­ceiv­ing or­ders has changed a lot. Years ago you had to have a lot of stock be­cause it took a long time for or­ders to ar­rive. Every­thing’s been stream­lined now, both in terms of com­put­ing and lo­gis­tics.

We’re very pleased with how our cus­tomers have re­acted. We par­tic­i­pated in the Open Book­shops cam­paign, which was fab­u­lous, and we were also one of the ones against peo­ple or­der­ing books on big and lit­tle plat­forms, so as not to ex­pose the rid­ers to the virus. When we re­opened on May 11, the book­shop was full of boxes of books that peo­ple had to pick up. And, aside from being fi­nan­cially good, it was morally im­por­tant, be­cause we felt we had sup­port.