Passion, Innovation and Determination

The Big Book­shop

There are two mod­els. The first has big cap­i­tal in­vest­ment, big premises in a cen­tral lo­ca­tion and big pub­lic­ity. The sec­ond model is the smaller neigh­bour­hood book­shop, based on long, hard work by ded­i­cated book­sellers.

There are three big shops in the fif­teen: Ona, on Pau Claris op­po­site Laie, pro­mot­ing books in Cata­lan; Byron, backed by the pub­lisher Huy­gens, “a dy­namic cul­tural cen­tre,” with a café and multi-use Shel­ley room in the Eix­am­ple; and Finestres at Diputació 249. Finestres is some­thing to be­hold. It has six sofas, nu­mer­ous arm­chairs, wooden shelv­ing and floors, car­pets and a fire­place. It has no cov­er­age for mo­biles and a rule of si­lence, with no­tices that light up if the noise grows – and 45,000 books in many lan­guages. “It is try­ing to im­i­tate the air of a Lon­don club,” the cul­tural jour­nal­ist Car­les Geli wrote. A dan­ger­ous am­bi­tion, per­haps, as Lon­don clubs are, one hears, full of lazy aris­to­crats and bankers, mainly men. Finestres is a major in­vest­ment by the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal busi­ness­man and cul­tural pa­tron Sergi Fer­rer-Salat. Ona, Byron and Finestres, like Obama’s mem­oir, make you think that books are not nec­es­sar­ily a ru­inous busi­ness.

The story of the Costa Brava town Ca­longe falls be­tween the two cat­e­gories. Here there is in­vest­ment (pub­lic, not pri­vate) and big pub­lic­ity, but small book­shops. In Ca­longe’s old quar­ter, seven book­shops, each on a dif­fer­ent theme (comics, ori­en­tal, travel, chil­dren’s, es­o­teric, and two gen­er­al­ist) opened on De­cem­ber 10, 2021. The town coun­cil had of­fered tax in­cen­tives and chose the seven out of sev­enty ap­pli­ca­tions. “All Cata­lans must come here once in their life­times,” an­nounced Nor­bert Botella, the town’s Coun­cil­lor for Cul­ture. The aims are to re­vi­talise the old quar­ter as a “Book-Town”, a cool refuge for “all Cata­lans” and those over-heated tourists on the Sant An­toni de Ca­longe beaches.

Loyal cus­tomers

Sit around in Finestres, but to buy a book, please go to a local shop. La Car­bon­era (Car­rer Blai 40) opened in Oc­to­ber 2017, well be­fore the coro­n­avirus pan­demic began. The two young part­ners had done their re­search: there was no other book­shop in Poble Sec. Their ex­pe­ri­ence is typ­i­cal of the vast ma­jor­ity of small book­shops that have sur­vived. You have to be ac­tive, in­vite the neigh­bour­hood in. If you just sit be­hind a cash reg­is­ter and wait for cus­tomers, you’re sunk. From the start they made La Car­bon­era a space for cul­tural events: their Sun­day morn­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, ‘ver­muts lit­er­aris’, pulled in crowds. Their dy­namism meant that, when the pan­demic brought si­lence to the streets, “Many peo­ple were sure they didn’t want us to go under,” Laia of La Car­bon­era told me. Jaume of Sag­i­tari (Pas­satge Vila i Rosell, 10, Horta), a gen­er­al­ist book­shop with a rad­i­cal pro-in­de­pen­dence line, said the same: “Our cus­tomers showed sol­i­dar­ity with us.”

Laia and her part­ners are young. I asked them whether young peo­ple read. “Of course they do. Young peo­ple read a lot, but they read dif­fer­ently. We’re sure cheap pa­per­backs are going to die out. Young peo­ple want an ob­ject, a book that’s an ob­ject, they’re look­ing at the out­side, not just the con­tents.” Jaume agreed, but added a nu­ance: “It’s not true that young peo­ple don’t buy books, but it would be de­sir­able that their in­ter­est in read­ing in­crease.”

The for­mu­lae for local book­shops are gen­er­ally the same. As El pati blau, opened in Cor­nellà in March 2019, told me: “Hav­ing a wide va­ri­ety of books, treat­ing peo­ple well, han­dling or­ders rapidly… ba­si­cally, form­ing a loyal cus­tomer base in the neigh­bour­hood through chil­dren’s events, pre­sen­ta­tions, read­ing clubs, so­cial media, al­low­ing other groups to use the premises.”

Some shops, not to be named, de­liv­ered books by stealth dur­ing lock­down.

Re­si­s­tirem!

Con­scious­ness is grow­ing of the harm done by plat­form cap­i­tal­ists like Ama­zon: low wages, ex­ploita­tive con­di­tions, de­struc­tion of local busi­nesses. Sev­eral book­sellers de­light in telling of cus­tomers who browse Ama­zon, then come into the shop with the de­tails and order the book off-line.

Jaume was clear. “Ama­zon, Ama­zon, fuck, fuck, fuck. The fu­ture needs to expel Ama­zon, just make it dis­ap­pear… Dis­gust­ing cap­i­tal­ist mon­ster!” The three co­op­er­a­tivists of El pati blau were ro­man­tic:

Against Ama­zon, the human fac­tor is our biggest asset. Book­shops have be­come meet­ing-places for the com­mu­nity, refuges to slough off the day’s stress, and small oases where you can find what you’re look­ing for.

Most neigh­bour­hood book­sellers have ide­al­ism and a clear sense of vo­ca­tion. Jaume ex­plained:

“We started out 35 years ago with a ro­man­tic, in­gen­u­ous per­haps, spirit to­wards books and their world. We hoped to grow till we could earn a de­cent liv­ing doing what we liked, with­out suf­fer­ing. Well, we’re still here, de­spite suf­fer­ing, in per­ma­nent cri­sis and with­out ever reach­ing a de­cent in­come. Però re­si­s­tirem! We’ll keep fight­ing.”