Luigi Amara is a prolific Mexican poet and essayist. He is editor-in-chief of the magazine Paréntesis.
JC: I have no idea why over time I started to prefer bookshops that sell new books. The fact is I grew up in the suburbs of a small city, where there were no bookshops. Only kiosks, stationery stores, a tobacco store: I remember how I was fascinated by new popular-science and video-game magazines, and the new Marvel comics. At some point I began to go to the big bookshop in the city centre, and a second-hand bookshop, closer to home, in an area they called “the garden city.” So the new books were on a shopping street in the centre (the bookshop, Robafaves, has since closed) that was on the way to the only public library in the city of Mataró in those years, whereas the second-hand bookshop, Rogés Llibres (which now only sells online, but is connected to the NGO that came to my place to collect the thousand books I had to get rid of when my son was born), was in a residential street, quite off the beaten track. I now see those two poles as if they were two scales of a balance. I’ve no idea, as I said, why I was more attracted by Robafaves. Perhaps it was the new titles, the launches, or simply because it stocked the books that most interested me as an adolescent: role-playing books.
LA: Although almost any kind of bookshop fascinates me, I confess a real weak spot for the second-hand kind. There lies the thrill of imminent discovery you’ll not encounter elsewhere. It’s true that in an ordinary bookshop you don’t always know what you’re looking for and that there too you must explore its aisles hoping for that blind date you never agreed to, but you must nearly always do it swimming against a tide of self-help manuals, zigzagging between towering columns of bestsellers. As Virginia Woolf used to say, when we cross the threshold of a second-hand bookseller “a sense of adventure fills us”: unlike the rows of more or less tame volumes on a library’s shelves, or the ones highlighted by the marketing techniques of the big chains, used books are “wild and homeless.” Even though they’ve been gathering dust for years in some corner, you could say they’re still in transit, and that their place on a shelf is only a stopover on a much more random pilgrimage. That’s perhaps what I most like about them, the quite electric possibility of an encounter, of a sudden surge: that at the end of a broken, whimsical line of owners and re-sales, of enthusiasm and scorn, the book that we didn’t even know existed awaits, and suddenly ends up in our hands.
JC: I’m not sure whether the author of a history of wigs should use the expression “highlighted”… In a way, I think we’ve both developed the same idea: the genealogy of an object or place, wig or bookshop. A library would be to the bookshop, in the collective imagination, what natural hair is to fake or artificial hair. On the other hand, I don’t know what bookshops you go into, but the ones I visit don’t have piles of self-help manuals. There are so many current titles, recently published or from the last thirty years, that they too offer adventures and encounters (just as when you travel, an encounter is a source of fresh experience). I remember, for example, the moment when I saw on a shelf in La Central in the Raval a first edition of Urban Voodoo by Edgardo Cozarinsky, published by Anagrama with prologues by Susan Sontag and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. I had read the Argentinian edition (which I bought in the Athaneum in Rosario), I never imagined that the Spanish edition hadn’t sold out…
LA: Perhaps the situation in Mexico is more extreme—hence my somewhat disenchanted tone—but I do think we are witnessing our once emblematic bookshops being transformed into book supermarkets, into large stores dominated by the profile of a book as commodity, and that clouds the horizon, where what matters is a quick sale and where self-help manuals and the most predictable coffee-table books have displaced some genres (including poetry and essays) to poky back corners. I remember, for example, how the Ghandi Bookshop used to be an unofficial school for booksellers in the south of Mexico City. You could converse and learn so much there! Not long ago I went there to find a copy of the Alianza edition of Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, and the shop assistant not only had no a clue where the book might be, she also asked me what the author’s surname was so she could look it up in their online catalogue… can you still call a place a “bookshop” where a computer has replaced knowledge? If today—and I’m referring to Mexico City—you want to find an old-style bookseller, one of those with a wealth of links and connections who knows how to locate a title in the broader picture, you have to cross the threshold of a second-hand bookshop: visit Enrique Fuentes in Librería Madero, Agustín Jiménez in La Torre de Lulio (“Lulio’s Tower”), Max Rojas in El Burro Culto (“The Cultured Donkey”). Of course, ordinary bookshops can give you a sense of adventure, but I’m afraid they have banished their old sea-dogs.
JC: Conversely, elsewhere, megastores are on the retreat. Just think of the United States and the debacle that is Barnes & Noble, and the closure of Borders; or Spain, where I believe the economic crisis has boosted smaller establishments and put a question mark over big ones. On the other hand, I always felt at a loss on Calle Donceles in D.F.: there were no online computers or booksellers who knew what they were selling. I felt quite dizzy at the sight of all those books that might be of interest, buried by a huge, anonymous, drab, out-of-date mass. I prefer order and a computer to chaos, dust, and that feeling of impotence.
LA: Book supermarkets are growing here and collapsing over there, while neighbourhood bookshops prosper and fade at the speed of mushrooms; Amazon dominates the horizon like the unblinking eye of a cruel god, and second-hand shops are experiencing a fetishist euphoria in the midst of the digital era… It might seem foolish to point this out to the author of Bookshops, a book that is also an infectious journey, but in this motley, everchanging landscape, perhaps everything depends on what we want from them, on the expectations that lead us to visit a particular bookshop. (Obviously, when the parameter is simply “vast areas,” I much prefer the chaotic, shapeless, out-of-date mass of Strand to the neutral, impersonal, philistine order of Fnac). Disorder and dust in a bookshop—and this from an allergy maniac—can only be justified by its rewards or, to be more modest, by the potential finds there. In “Poor Collectors,” Walter Benjamin doesn’t boast about his talents as a detective or his strokes of luck, as they couldn’t easily serve as guidelines or useful advice for those infected by bibliomania. However, as I’m not driven by any didactic ambitions, I’ll tell you now, I hope as modestly as possible, how I came to find my greatest bookish treasures. When vertigo was beginning to turn to impotence in a second-hand bookshop in the centre of Mexico City, a shabby, dismal, book-cum-sweetshop I had entered because the combination on offer was so unusual (because that’s what it was, an offering and not, as it might seem at first sight, despair incarnate), and while I was buying for twenty pesos—because the shop assistant had made my day by theorizing about the complementarity of sugar and reading—“An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad, I saw them: two beige, rather aged volumes that were nevertheless in perfect condition and that were calling out, like Alice’s little bottle of potion: “Drink me.” Each one cost seventy pesos and I had less than a hundred and twenty in my pocket, but the bookseller agreed to let me take all three for that amount. Once I was home, I consulted the internet and confirmed the suspicion that was making my heart flutter: they were French first editions of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1952 and 1957 respectively) treasures priced—the first in particular—in the thousands of dollars and God knows how they had ended up in that dubious book-cum-sweetshop in the centre of D.F. at a knockdown price… Had some unerring chain of chance led them to illuminate, half a century later, the unexpected boons to be found in the dust and disorder?
JC: It’s well-nigh impossible that that could ever happen now. Until quite recently, hunters used to exhaust (that word again!) second-hand bookshops, seeking out valuable first editions. Now they’ve given up because booksellers always know what they have in stock, because almost everything is properly catalogued and priced online. Though some gaps do remain… And not only in the sweet-toothed bookshop you mentioned. I’m thinking of Havana, where people still sell off the family library without really knowing what they own. And not only in Havana, because everywhere there are families who haven’t a clue about the goods that great-grandfather acquired. Last year I went to the Mercat dels Encants flea market in Barcelona, just before it was demolished and moved, and saw how at 6 a.m. half a dozen book-hunters were scouring the various lots of furniture and crockery to see whether they could find a jewel among the three or four hundred books for sale. I agree with you on one point: it’s a world that is dying. That’s probably why I’m more interested in the world of shops selling new books: that’s where the future lies.
LA: A dying world also acts as a safe haven, as a reference point, and sometimes it’s necessary to protect yourself from the thunderous avalanche of new titles—each one heralded as a “festival of language,” as “the greatest must-read ever”—and seek out an older volume. In a way those dusty, worm-eaten books also hold the future. In fact, the division isn’t so stark—in none-too-choosy second-hand bookshops you find piles of garish new titles that nobody should miss but that everybody did, in the same way you’ll find the usual Chesterton and Lucians in the others; but those fragile, yellowing books, which have survived the shipwreck, also embody an idea of a book in their material reality and typographical style, which act as double protection against the rampant meanness in publishing today, like that counterpoint or sideways move that allows one to see the darkness of the present and head in other directions. What’s more, if we move from books to a consideration of bookshops themselves, to the pleasure of visiting them as ritual spaces (you yourself practice and defend pilgrimages to those magnetic precincts imbued with culture and history), I believe one should defend second-hand bookshops not only for what they sell, but precisely as enclaves, as “erotic topographies” (now I’m quoting you), as hospitable zones in big cities that, like ancient cemeteries or archaeological ruins, allow us to find our place in the world in the long term.
JC: I often think that bookshops have been for me what churches represented for my mother at a particular moment in her life: both the safest haven for an anxious spirit and a place to visit as a tourist. In fact, sometimes when I’ve been on my travels, I have tired of churches and cathedrals, and even temples, but I’ve never tired of bookshops. They are places with an aura, though, of course, the aura is in your gaze. Relaxing places too, where order breathes tranquillity. Naturally, an endless place, in much the same way that libraries that house over a thousand volumes are. When I lived in Chicago, because of the snow and solitude, I spent lots of time in the university library and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Perhaps for the first time in my life I was radically systematic in both places. I mean that I came to consult, one by one, all the books in the travel and history of travel literature and tourism sections, all the books written by Saul Bellow or J M Coetzee, who taught at the university, or by Juan Goytisolo and W G Sebald, always accompanied by a huge secondary bibliography. That’s to say, I read many and bought a few, and took notes not on dozens but on hundreds of them. Any library or bookshop has the potential to make an extreme demand on your time. You almost never choose that, but the option is always there. In a way, the strength of those places, their enormous power, depends on that possibility, that you could cover all the knowledge on a particular subject and explore something in such depth that you could make it almost your own.
LA: I share that idea of the bookshop as a haven, and as an excuse to spend outrageously long periods of time in them. Although I generally like to walk around them in silence—like churches or ruins—I have also enjoyed the most unexpected conversations with total strangers in second-hand bookshops, and that’s made them even more enjoyable. I remember how, a long time ago, I started looking for books by Léon Bloy and J K Huysmans like a real treasure hunter; that was after I’d overheard someone who was looking for “anything” by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and who recommended them to me in the tone of someone who belongs to a sect; I’d probably have come to them anyway, pursuing the thread of associations that usually entwine books, but I’m not sure they would have meant so much. Something similar happened to me once in a new bookshop in Buenos Aires, where I sensed that people were snooping around, looking at others’ book choices and debating in the aisles. Once, a woman, who noticed rather obviously that I was looking for traces of Witold Gombrowicz in the Argentina Bookshop, came over to offer guidance (no! to unleash a harangue!), and in the process invited me to a documentary on Gombrowicz that was going to be shown not far from the bookshop that same night, thanks to which my quest for the Polish writer opened up a new horizon I was totally ignorant of, and ushered into the bargain an unforgettable night.
JC: This conversation reminds me of how I started out as a reader. And it’s a start very much linked to new books. My father bought them for me mainly in Pryca, now Carrefour, a big supermarket. I think that’s where all my copies of The Happy Hollisters and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators came from. I remember that, while my parents went up and down the aisles collecting the week’s groceries in our cart, my brother and I played in the plastic ball area (there was a massive cone full of balls: you had to collect them from the bottom of the cone and throw them four or five metres up into the top of the cone; it was a kind of huge hourglass whose grains of sand were brightly coloured balls printed with figures of Barça players or characters from Dragon Ball), or looking at books in the bookshop area (in a corner plastered with posters, mostly of cars, but also two or three of Sabrina or Pamela Anderson in the skimpiest of swimsuits). Later, when my father began to work as a representative for the Readers’ Circle in his spare time, other new books started to come my way, by Agatha Christie for example. Now and then my father would come home with some of the old books he’d found, as he constantly moved around working for Telefónica in a nearby town, but I never fell in love with those books, I can’t remember a single title; perhaps I was put off by the fact that they’d been read and enjoyed by other children, like second- or third-hand toys. Consequently, my humble origins (lower-middle class, as my parents said) were mostly connected to new books. If you think about it, shops that sell new books are perhaps more democratic than second-hand or antiquarian bookshops. For starters, there’s a single price, you can’t bargain, all customers are on an equal footing, (even those, like myself, whose parents didn’t bring us up as book fanatics); while in second-hand shops, though most books are cheaper, not only can you haggle over the price, you also find bibliographical jewels, books that are worth much more. In the same vein, I’ve never liked a book of mine to be signed by someone else, dedicated to someone else, let alone annotated by someone else. This morning, when I was reading Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician, by Stefan Zweig, I heard the sound my pencil made as it skimmed across the paper (I always read holding a pencil, usually from Ikea, for me a visit to Ikea is an excuse to steal pencils, which often double as bookmarks, for reading: years later, I sometimes take a book from a shelf and realize there’s a pencil buried in its pages, which reminds me where I stopped reading), and I realized that this is one of the reasons I don’t read on my iPad now, because there are reactions in your underlining, tactile movements, textures, a series of stimuli to your memory that don’t exist in digital space (or at least that don’t work for me: I read to remember and think, not to escape, I need those memories of my reads).
LA: In my case, all those “physical” aspects around the act of reading that make it “more real”—if that actually means anything—contribute to my fondness for second-hand bookshops. I have to confess that part of their attraction comes from the morbid delight I find in the fact that they are selling books that belonged to other people: the sense of expectation and perhaps of doubleness at owning a book that belonged to someone else, a book that, to judge by its battered binding and unkempt pages, was once loved and revisited by that person who, for fascinating reasons I’d love to discover, perhaps a sudden death, was forced to get rid of what he owned and never see it again. A second-hand book, not only the book that looks used, with yellowing pages, but the one that has effectively been read by another person, whether in sorrow or pleasure, is in reality two books: apart from the printed story, there is the involuntary story the reader added as he or she turned the pages: a private, intimate story it’s possible to glimpse through traces the book preserves like a secret, coded text. The turned-over corner of a page, an over-the-top or frankly ridiculous dedication, pencilled underlinings, specks of blood or sweat or whatever, mosquitoes or other insects embalmed between pages, the almost always circular coffee or Coca-Cola stains, the book dividers, the torn-out pages, the cigarette ash, the paragraphs crossed out in rage—as if there was something serious to be censored—the comments in the margins… All that (which would be intolerable in a library book) acquires a suggestive quality, every trace is a critical nod, an elemental or biting comment; here and there you find evidence of boredom, grief, or bliss, which help us reconstruct the reading experience that preceded ours, and then to enjoy and sometimes doubly understand the book itself, just as when you’re in a side box at the theatre, you’re tempted to engage in the art of squinting; namely, keeping one eye simultaneously on the stage and the other on the audience’s every reaction.
JC: I love the idea of the reader of second-hand books as interloper, as spy, as voyeur. But that’s exactly what I don’t like about used books: the fact they have another life which isn’t mine. In a way, a book implies the fiction that you can find access to a world, to a life, to a gaze, without mediation, simply by opening it (a book opens like a door). Although an infinity of walls and frontiers exists between you (the reader) and the narrative (the writer), I am attracted by the idea that you have more or less direct access. If a book has already been fingered and underlined, that impedes my reading. On the other hand, I must confess that when I’m looking at second-hand books in a flea-market I like to look for books that are heavily underlined: books that have drawings in the margins, dedications, postcards, or photographs in their pages. I really like these books that are like chests, that are miniature museums. I’m also fascinated by the different kinds of annotation. How do you annotate, Luigi? I use a system that comes from my years as an amateur chess-player: I put a question mark in the margin to comment on what I’ve underlined if I don’t agree with the author or the style seems clumsy, that is, a negative response, and an exclamation mark when I like or am excited by an idea, or when the style seems original or remarkable in some way. If there are three or four exclamation marks then the fragment must be astounding. It might be good to make an anthology of twenty years of reading based on such passages. I was once in the Sebald archive in Marbach and discovered, to my surprise, that he also put question marks and exclamation marks in the margins. I found it was also the case with Julio Cortázar’s personal library in the Fundación March in Madrid. It must be more common than I thought, and not simply stem from annotations and comments on chess games.
LA: And do you use the checkmate sign for paragraphs that scintillate? I’ve simplified my method of underlining over the years, reducing it to a series of geometrical figures: rectangles for paragraphs that inspire new thoughts, triangles with the top pointing out for what’s valuable and pointing inwards for what I consider to be questionable, circles for what I feel is crucial and the odd asterisk for something really cosmic, for sentences or paragraphs that are really out of this world. When I reread these paragraphs, I underline conventionally: a pencil line under the words. Like you, I’m fascinated by that critical paraphernalia in other people’s books, a genuine seismograph of reading as an experience that can be earth-moving; everything that, in honour of Poe, could be summed up by the term “marginalia” (and which has transferred to the internet, whether in blogs, in fleeting comments or collective underlining, as happens on Kindle). Naturally, I like to dip into annotated books of authors I know, but also of writers who are totally unknown. I recall that Charles Lamb talks about this in an essay about books that are returned to him “enriched” by friends, by writers who leave traces of their readings. But this custom of making notes in books has its problematic side. At home we’ve sometimes had to buy two copies of the same title because I’d already underlined one and my wife wants to read the book, not the copy marked out by my responses…
JC: And what’s your own personal library like? I experience a very contradictory relationship with mine. Although my emotional bonding with it is strong, it’s true that I have only managed to exert control over it twice in my life: the two occasions when I moved house as an adult and discovered what books I owned and where they were located. I always feel tense and frustrated by my lack of control and inability to know what is really in my library. I imagine that all writers constantly think we shouldn’t write so much, that we should read more (or vice versa). I also think I should invest more time in ordering and caring for my books. I envy the mechanics of a bookshop, where several booksellers constantly work to maintain an up-to-date catalogue of their stock. Mine, which is so influenced by my life and emotions, is much dustier and more disorderly than I would like. I want to ask you why our books originate in our purchases in bookshops. Do we need to reflect on the umbilical cords linking tens of thousands of bookshops to several million individual libraries? Do you value in your own library the disorder you like to find in second-hand bookshops?
LA: I will admit to a degree of chaos in my library, though I try to maintain order. I divide it by genres or disciplines (philosophy here, poetry there, etc.), and within those shelves I adopt an order based on chronology or nationality: French novels are all together, as are English essays starting with Bacon, Addison, and Steele. Like Georges Perec, I’d have liked to decide on a fixed number of books (let’s say 666) and not buy a book until I had conscientiously dispensed with another. But over time I’ve become a bibliomaniac—one who has barely any money, but who, like all collectors, is incorrigible, and despite the fact that every now and then, for reasons of mental hygiene rather than space, we go on a book “diet” at home, a few months then go by and we soon lapse back into our vice, and start to stack two rows on a shelf or get more bookshelves made. Fortunately (or unfortunately), apartments in Mexico City are on the large side and allow this kind of uncontrolled accumulation. But your idea about the umbilical cord linking the purchase of a book to the individual library where it will come to rest is illuminating and suggestive: it is the function of the bookish cosmos that making another purchase takes on meaning, like accepting the presence of a new planet in the solar system; otherwise, as happens with some books you receive as gifts or buy in a rush, they run the risk of becoming mere shooting stars in the sky that is our library.
JC: I’ve been thinking about what we were saying about the element of surprise. It’s strange that we lovers of literature, whether we like new or second-hand bookshops (or both, or better still, hybrids, because if the literary bookshop model in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the one shaped by Beach and Bonnier in Shakespeare and Company and La Maison des Amis des Livres, the legendary bookshops on the Rue de l’Odéon, the platonic idea of that space would entail the coexistence of the bookshop selling books and the lending library), we know we can consult online catalogues before we go to a bookshop to see whether they have a copy of what we want in stock, or can order one, but most people out there don’t know that. Which means that for the majority of the population, who see a bookshop as an alien space that’s not all that appealing, there is the possibility of surprise. But that has all changed for us. On the one hand, we have the classic kind of surprise that comes from meandering, from the thinking with our feet and eyes that is typical of what happens in a bookshop, where we might find something we didn’t know existed (and that, consequently, we couldn’t find online), once the pre-digital element of surprise is no longer part of the bargain, of the first edition at a knockdown price. Conversely, we have the new kind of surprise, the digital one, the one we get from a different way of thinking: Google, from our fingers (on the keyboard, on the mouse) and our gaze, which wanders or surfs across the surface of the screen. That’s how we, too, find the unexpected. The ideal is then to go and look for it in person, instead of enduring the dystopia of Amazon drones coming in through our windows. I’m not sure, but I was wondering whether that complex thing known as an algorithm might not be the new form of predestination, of objective randomness. Whether the whole tradition of surrealism, reformulated by Cortázar—whether that erotic experience won’t end up metamorphosing into Google Books or Iberlibro.com.
LA: I’d prefer to think that we are more fluid and unpredictable than a machine can anticipate, that our likes and interests are beyond the most sophisticated algorithm, but I must recognize that one new thing that has surprised me is book recommendations made by cybernetic engines… And despite my caveats, despite my resistance to becoming easy prey to customized publicity sent out on the internet, I have clicked on it time and again, and maintain a more animated epistolary relationship with Amazon or independent bookshops in other countries than with my siblings… In that sense we are extremely fortunate: the opportunities to be surprised (and for book-loving to be nourished) have multiplied enormously. That’s why I think of myself as a gratefully promiscuous reader rather than as a fundamentalist believer in second-hand shops, or an opponent of the great cyberspace monopolies: I read everything, from photocopies to coveted first editions, from blurry PDF files to airport novels. Amid that promiscuity or eclecticism, I single out, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, second-hand books, those books where I can glimpse the shadow of someone else’s hand, a tacit companion who got there and turned those pages before I did.
JC: As everything comes afterwards (not always late), it was while flying back from Rome today that I really grasped what I’d meant to say in our conversation about shops that sell new or second-hand books, etc. I found the answer in Hope Against Hope, the brutal memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam from 1938. They imprison her husband, Osip, and the first thing she does is pawn his books, the books he so loved, in a second-hand bookshop in order to to be able to send him money, provisions, his basic needs. In return, she receives a short message that’s also very basic: the poet has died. Everything is there. In her gesture and in their reply (the bureaucracy, the Cheka, and Stalin). That’s what second-hand bookshops are. They are death. They are readers who have disappeared, inheritances that have been wasted, poverty, emptied houses whose libraries have been sold by weight, or looted. What you find in second-hand bookshops, in one volume after another, are the sad, tragic, genocidal, dictatorial histories of the last two centuries. The dark side of bohemia is also linked to second-hand bookshops. The most lamentable form of the picaresque. You sell your books so you can eat. You buy second- or third-hand books because you can’t buy them new. I know that’s not always the case, but I think I’ve already said that I can’t recall a single significant find, one really essential read, that came from a second-hand bookshop. Yesterday in Rome I was thinking how there are two kinds of antiquarian bookshop: the one selling books (and maps and etchings) that you can’t afford to buy—luxurious, snobbish, collectors’ items—and the one selling books I probably don’t want to buy, pure bargain-basement, knock-down offerings, where you invest lots of time for an unlikely return. I believe that’s why I opted for bookshops that sold new stock when I was very young, that are a midpoint between bibliophilic luxury and bargain-basement items. And that are consequently more democratic? Who can say whether I also opted for what was new as a commitment to the future, to a level of optimism and hope rather than for what was old, past, and surviving against all hope.
LA: Second-hand bookshops certainly have a whiff of death about them. They aren’t mausolea, properly speaking, because things stir within them and change hands and even make people happy, but they aren’t far removed, both in procedure and atmosphere, from the desecrating of graves: displaying and selling off the library (if not the mind) of someone who is no longer here involves a degree of sacrilege, and, in any case, the whole operation is shrouded in gloom. I discovered that in Mexico, and probably elsewhere, the figure of the book scavenger exists: a lugubrious fellow who wears black every day, whose work consists in reading the day’s obituaries and confronting the family with the horrendous phrase: “I know these are difficult moments, when you are faced with many expenses…” I’ve often fantasized about interviewing him, but a sense of restraint or genuine horror has distanced me from that genuine scavenging vulture I could easily have contacted. But the fact is that death is ever-present in the books piled up in those bookshops, which, furthermore, are always gloomy; ruination and misfortune impregnate their pages and the transactions entered into there, which I think put into perspective the dreams of immortality that usually surround literary enterprises: there is something in the dust sticking to their spines, in the inscriptions from inkwells now gone dry, that mocks the idea of posterity, and that, perhaps, is the source of their attraction as a counterpoint to hope, to the optimism embodied in new books, with their still dazzlingly white pages. The value of a first edition, of a signed copy, finally depends on the way they reduce one’s distance from the author; although they are often seen as a fetishist mania, they are also a lethal counterweight to a deceptive abstraction, to a name that has become hallowed: those books are prized because they have survived, but, above all (I believe), because they reveal the undeniable presence of death where we usually expect to find life and intensity.
JC: I love this urban legend. The Book Vulture seems so plausible. I imagine him on the doorstep of the deceased’s house, alongside the Art Vulture, the Crockery Vulture, the Antique Furniture Vulture. There must be a novel here in this network of men sentenced to wander daily through the obituary pages and the homes of the dead. A very Mexican novel, of course, given your very special relationship with death. In fact, the antique-books hunter is something of a scavenger in his status as collector. Hunting and strolling could be two different and opposed ways to walk through the city and its bookshops. Tense or relaxed. Concentrating on his prey, a rare, valuable book; or open to the street, the marketplace, graffiti, magazines, new books, and old stock. I’m fascinated by the relationship between a journey through a city and abroad. I prepare my journey over months and years, revisiting my own library and salvaging volumes that might be of interest (right now, with the prospect of a visit to Rio de Janeiro in March, I found the Letter on the Discovery of Brazil by Vaz de Caminha, in the Acantilado edition, which I’d forgotten I owned) or else, above all, exploring bookshops. In Barcelona we have Altaïr, which specializes in travel books that are classified by country, not only maps and guides, but also novels, stories, essays, and poetry. I never go on a journey without paying that shop a visit. And so books to read pile up on my desk, the reads I’ll pack in my suitcase. For example, The Armies, by Evelio Rosero, waited there at least four months, until I went to Bogotá. Yesterday I read that Mandelstam prepared for his journey to Armenia in second-hand bookshops, where he found old chronicles that interested him. I do the same in La Central, in Laie and Altaïr. I’m more interested in wandering through book markets when I travel than when I’m at home. Purely as a browser, not hunting for anything in particular.
LA: It’s true, there’s a glint in the eye of a stroller when he’s hunting down a find. But equally in second-hand bookshops one has ample opportunity to merely meander, with no thought of the hunt, and that’s what I like to do (although sometimes, when I’m opposite a shelf, my eyes are a lynx’s and my canines are ready…). As for the book vulture, he’s much more than an urban legend, though he’s certainly waiting to be turned into a novel. As you can imagine, in this country they don’t wait for death to come: the vulture, or, in this case, the falcon or bird of prey, is usually in cahoots with removal firms and, in the time it takes to reach the new house, he’s inside the removal lorry, already having niftily purloined the ten or twenty most valuable books from the library in transit. Apparently, they always have the houses with valuable collections in their sights. My bookseller friends have invited me to a clandestine, early-morning book market where these spoils, the fruits of looting or scavenging, get “laundered.” I really must go one of these days.
JC: The more I think about our absurdly polarized conversation, the more polarized I feel. I’m now wondering whether the second-hand bookshop, with its crypt mystique, isn’t a link to the old god of the Book and Capitalism. Because if you look ironically at our dependency on cultural objects, our worship of particular novels, films, or records, it’s obvious that it’s as absurd as Sunday worship is to the eyes of an atheist. I’ll be arriving in Mexico City at 5 a.m. one day in March. Let’s meet in that clandestine market.