Llibreria Geli

The Lli­bre­ria Geli is lo­cated in the old quar­ter of Girona and is one of the old­est book­shops in Cat­alo­nia. The book­shop it­self re­sem­bles a nar­row pas­sage that goes from Ar­gen­te­ria street to Cort Reial. It has a col­lec­tion of over 200,000 books, which is con­stantly up­dated, in­clud­ing spe­cialised sec­tions on Law, Psy­chol­ogy, Art, Com­put­ing and Phi­los­o­phy. Ac­cord­ing to Girona leg­end, if you can’t find a book in Lli­bre­ria Geli, you can’t find it any­where.

The book­shop was founded by Francesc Geli Geli in 1879. In its be­gin­nings, it adopted an out­look that was both re­li­gious and pro­gres­sive, but had se­ri­ous prob­lems with local rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who saw it as being more re­li­gious than mod­ern and eclec­tic. Al­though Can Geli sur­vived the war, it had dif­fi­cul­ties re­cov­er­ing from the dev­as­tat­ing River Onyar flood in 1940. In 1945, Pere Rodeja Pon­satí, aged just thir­teen, learned how to run a book­shop and took charge. The Lli­bre­ria Geli was ul­ti­mately to be­come his in 1988. He turned the chaotic ware­house into a dif­fer­ent book­shop sell­ing books of all kinds, and at the same time man­aged to at­tract young peo­ple look­ing for of­fi­cial lit­er­a­ture, and even for­bid­den au­thors, while Catholics started to stay away.

Nowa­days, the book­shop is very pop­u­lar with vis­i­tors not just in Girona, but from other places around Cat­alo­nia.

1. Books. We can’t work with­out them. Books are the most im­por­tant thing in our work and thanks to them we can es­tab­lish re­la­tions with our clients and also make friends.

2. Com­puter. Our main source of in­for­ma­tion about books, au­thors, and every­thing re­lated to books. We also keep our stock list on here.

3. Lad­der. We use it to reach the books that are on the high­est shelves, be­cause we aren’t that tall!

4. Phone. To talk to clients who make or­ders or just want to ask about some­thing, and also for us to make or­ders or chat with clients.

5. Pen­cil, rub­ber and paper. Nec­es­sary tools to write down the or­ders from our clients or any­thing we need to re­mem­ber.

6. Water. It’s al­ways good to have some water ready.

7. Paper bags. Some­times our clients want a bag to put their books in for more con­ve­nience.

8. Poster. To ad­ver­tise some of the books we are sell­ing and make them at­trac­tive and in­ter­est­ing.

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