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2 May 2021 2.00 h

Rosa Cubelles & Ester Galindo. LA 2 DE VILADRICH. NON-SPECIALIST BOOKSHOP WITH STOCK OF LOCAL AUTHORS

The oldest, with 260 years of history

With its origins documented as far back as 1760, La 2 de Viladrich bookshop in Tortosa is the descendant of the oldest bookshop in the country, and one of the oldest in Europe

In 2005, the owner, Jordi López, wanted to close the busi­ness, but em­ploy­ees cre­ated La 2 de Vi­ladrich.
Rosa Cube­les: I started work­ing at the book­shop in 1973. When Jordi de­cided to close, there were peo­ple who worked here who wanted to con­tinue the busi­ness. With Fina López we cre­ated a lim­ited com­pany of which Jordi López was also part. The three of us set up La 2 de Vi­ladrich. Ester Galindo: I’ve been here since 2011. We’re now prepar­ing a pub­li­ca­tion on the his­tory of the book­shop. We al­ready have a title - but maybe it’s bet­ter not to give it away - and very in­flu­en­tial peo­ple from the re­gion are linked to it.
Is being heirs to a long tra­di­tion of book­sellers and being at the fore­front of local cul­ture a re­spon­si­bil­ity?
EG: I don’t know if it is a bur­den but it is won­der­ful. I think there’s a lack of per­cep­tion that it’s like this be­cause of the pub­lic. There are very few book­shops in Eu­rope that have sur­vived so long. It doesn’t hap­pen in many places, but here we don’t let it faze us.
Your web­site says run­ning a book­shop in a small pe­riph­eral town is no small feat.
EG: It’s very dif­fi­cult. For­tu­nately, we have a loyal clien­tele and there’s an aware­ness that we all help keep the book­shop open, not just those who work here but also those who come to buy here. We have cus­tomers who look on the in­ter­net but who then come here to buy books, and they don’t mind wait­ing two more days. They value what it means to have a book­shop here and are not guided by the im­me­di­acy of get­ting a book from Ama­zon. It’s hard to com­pete with the gi­ants, who may not even charge ship­ping be­cause of the vol­ume of sales.
When the pre­vi­ous owner de­cided to close, he said the busi­ness was un­sus­tain­able and that small and medium-sized book­shops were in jeop­ardy. Has the sit­u­a­tion im­proved?
EG: No, it is worse. Com­pe­ti­tion in the book world is bru­tal. The rules of the game are not the same. For ex­am­ple, with the AMPA par­ent-teacher as­so­ci­a­tions. RC: We used to sell text­books and pupils knew that at the start of the school year they had to come here to get their books. Now the books are sup­plied di­rectly by the AMPA. There are chil­dren who don’t know the book­shop be­cause they have never come.
Out of every­thing that’s pub­lished, what cri­te­ria do you apply to choose what to offer cus­tomers?
EG: We’re a non-spe­cial­ist book­shop, but if there’s one thing in par­tic­u­lar that we have it is local au­thors and books about Ter­res de l’Ebre. We cur­rently have work from the major fig­ures of let­ters in Ter­res de l’Ebre, such as Maria Cli­ment, Laia Viñas, Marta Ro­jals, the trans­la­tor Zo­raida de Tor­res, the writer and trans­la­tor Yan­nick Gar­cia, Al­bert Roig... We have a good crop.
You’re part of the “Ebre book lobby”, with the Bassa de Móra d’Ebre book­shop and the Ser­ret de Vall-de-roures [now closed]. Is this lobby cur­rently work­ing?
EG: Yes. The Ser­ret book­shop has closed, but now there’s El Núvol, in Móra la Nova. The three book­shops share ac­tiv­i­ties, we go to the Lit­ter­arum fair to­gether, to the Cata­lan Book Week... and we put to­gether a kind of Ebre tour in some book pre­sen­ta­tions.
How has the cri­sis af­fected you?
RC: Ini­tially, we had to close. We joined some ini­tia­tives like Open Book­shops, which worked re­ally well, and Li­belista, which is a major boost. We also set up a phone num­ber for peo­ple to place or­ders and did home de­liv­ery. I think we gave a good ser­vice be­cause peo­ple were locked up at home with the kids and they had to be en­ter­tained.
Have book sales gone up since the first lock­down?
RC: Yes, they’re up from 2019. We wel­comed peo­ple back who had not read any­thing for a long time, and who re­gained their de­sire to read when they had more time. EG: It’s pos­si­ble that this trend won’t con­tinue for much longer. We’re now back in the same sit­u­a­tion as we were be­fore the pan­demic. Peo­ple no longer read as much as they did dur­ing the lock­down, when they were happy to spend more time read­ing. I think there are peo­ple who will strug­gle to keep on read­ing, es­pe­cially women, who tend to be keen read­ers.
Will the pan­demic lead to new ways of doing things in book­shops?
RC: We’ll be giv­ing more im­pe­tus to dig­i­tal plat­forms, so that if a new lock­down comes every­thing will be more im­me­di­ate. But we have to keep fight­ing so that peo­ple come to book­shops freely and talk to book­sellers.
What have been the big changes in the book­shop busi­ness since you began in the early sev­en­ties?
RC: A lot more is pub­lished now. I re­mem­ber that there used to be very few new books. The world of chil­dren’s books was also very small and it is now a gi­gan­tic busi­ness. Be­fore, every­thing was done man­u­ally: a de­liv­ery note ar­rived, you had to enter it, you had to know where you’d put the book... Lit­tle by lit­tle every­thing is be­com­ing com­put­erised. It’s harder to man­age the vol­ume of books now, maybe that’s why there are more spe­cial­ist book­shops.

book­shops

What’s La Viladrich’s history?

Ester Galindo explains: The story begins back in 1760, with the bookshop belonging to Mariano Oliveres. The shop specialised in religious texts, which was usual for most bookshops of the time. The date is quite certain because we have the documented reference that Oliveres sold the bookshop to Ramon Prades, with the latter advertising his shop in 1760 as the “heir of Oliveres”. The information we have is indirect because we have still not found the notary documentation, inscriptions, and so on, of the first establishment. However, we are now looking to see if we can find this information. At the turn of the century, in 1891, Prades sold the shop to Francesc Mestre i Noé, who owned it for a significant amount of time. When he became ill, he sold it to a person who was already working at the bookshop, Claudi Viladrich. This started the direct link with us through Claudi and his daughter, Pilar.

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