When Miguel Ávila found out that the emblematic Colegio Librería, one of the oldest in Buenos Aires, was going to disappear and be replaced by a hamburger restaurant, he put his hands on his head. It was 1994 and, after the news was made public, “an attack of nationalism” came over him. He moved heaven and earth to prevent that from happening and even spoke with the city's archbishopric. He managed to stop it. Today he is the one who runs the place, renamed Librería Ávila.
How could it be that a historic place that “had witnessed everything that had happened to us Argentinians ended up in the hands of a North American company?” reflects Ávila. The bookseller is one of the protagonists of the documentary series Booklovers, released yesterday on the CaixaForum platform and presented and written by Jorge Carrión (Tarragona, 1976).
“I have been accumulating photographs and notes from bookstores and libraries around the world for years. I have a lot of material and it is difficult to communicate the spectacular nature of these places only through the books themselves. That's why I thought about making a leap into audiovisuals. “I contacted various production companies and platforms, but not everyone was able to understand that we lyrical wounds are legion and that there are many of us who feel the need to visit these spaces in our cities or when we travel,” Carrión reaffirms.
The writer shows the world Barcelona, the city in which he currently lives, and flies to Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Mexico City and Madrid, to see first-hand its bookstores, libraries and emblematic cultural spaces. The viewer will be able to travel to Lisbon's Ler Devagar, Buenos Aires's Ateneo Grand Splendid, the book oasis of Rosario Castellanos or the Gabriel García Márquez library, considered the best in the world, without leaving the sofa in his house.
“I would love for there to be more seasons. I think I would then visit Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, New York and, perhaps, London, Paris or Milan. But, for these first chapters, I opted for places that were relatively close to where I live, beyond Latin America, and that, of course, were capitals of the culture and the publishing industry of the 20th century," says the author. de Librerías (2013) and Contra Amazon (2019), which in this project gives voice to writers such as Elena Poniatowska, Leila Guerriero, Alberto Manguel, Gabriela Wiener or Enrique Vila-Matas, but also to editors such as Jorge Herralde and bookstores such as Lola Larumbe.
Many years ago Carrión declared his love for books and, once again, he shows that he plans to continue doing so. “When I read Borges and Cortázar at the age of eighteen I began to write the way I write,” and when he continued reading authors like Susan Sontag and Sebald, “I saw the world in a different and much broader way.” From then on he began to put together his own library, from which he does not imagine himself separated from her under any circumstances. “It's my external memory. Each book has an associated memory of a person or the place where I bought it. Who would want to lose a friend? Of course, not me. That's partly why I think it's hard for me to lend books.”
As he demonstrates in the series, “I can't imagine going to a place and not visiting its bookstore or library.” The personal record was made in Tokyo, where he attended 23 in a single day, although the urge to publicize these places could be said to have been born 25 years ago in Guatemala, a country to which he returns these days to discover and celebrate the quarter century of the Sophos bookstore. “I never miss an opportunity to discover a new window to the world.”
