Sant Jordi, Catalonia’s day of books and roses, the day when Cervantes and Shakespeare died 404 years ago, World Book Day—this April 23, 2020, will be one of the strangest in our lifetime. Because the books and flowers given as gifts, the bookshops spilling out onto street stalls, and the fiestas energizing bodies and cities belong to the shared world of the senses, the world of hugs and crowds. And April 23, 2020, will take place on webpages and social media, cell phones and computer screens. Some of us will be fortunate enough to kiss and exchange books inside the same house. But many will be physically isolated. Anyone intending to use a messenger service to obtain their book or rose should ask themselves, before clicking: do I really want to remember that this came to me via a man wearing gloves and a mask, a man compelled to endanger his life in exchange for a pittance?
My response was that I didn’t, which is why I have already bought my books directly from my favourite bookshops. I’ll collect them as soon as confinement ends. I imagine I will always remember that moment: re-encountering my booksellers, as I will always remember the first time we returned to the park or beach. Both libelista.com and todostuslibros.com are two good tools for making those purchases, investing today so that the bookshops will be there tomorrow.
Now that this force majeure has closed bookshops, all the players in the book industry have reminded us of their importance. The best support initiatives for booksellers have come from publishers like Comanegra or Nórdica, on whose webpages you can buy books and indicate which bookshop you want to receive the 30 or 35 percent of their cost. The Barcelona publishing house calls the program “Adopt a bookshop”; Nórdica’s Madrid bookshop adds, “Bookshops, we miss you. And we want you to return. Every single one.”
Less successful are the #LlibreriesObertes projects, from the Mortensen design studio and Som publishing group, and #YoApoyoALasLibrerías (“I Support Bookshops”), from the Penguin Random House group. Both campaigns are palpably suspect. While the llibreriesobertes.cat page has helped many small Catalan bookshops sell books in advance and gain small amounts of liquidity, the Mortenson and Som initiative retains half of their income until the shops reopen and holds onto all data from the transactions. Under the guise of storytelling (the central theme being altruism) the companies have obtained a substantial injection of capital and Big Data from thousands of Catalan readers.
And the giant PRH group, while organizing a generous special distribution service so bookshops can sell titles from lists like Lumen, Reservoir Books, and Grijalbo, has at the same time boosted the direct sale of books through its webpage. The contradiction is obvious. When you find a book that interests you at megustaleer.com, you’re given six purchasing options: via that website, todostuslibros.com, amazon.es, casadellibro.com, Fnac, and El Corte Inglés. Perhaps that’s because all those conglomerate options are equally valid in the eyes of the corporation; although it is currently distributing coupons for a 10 percent discount in bookshops once they reopen, it has removed the hashtag #YoApoyoALasLibrerías from Twitter. It has, however, retained #YoMeQuedoEnCasaLeyendo (“I Stay at Home Reading”), which is undoubtedly closer to the truth.
Llibreries Obertes could have directly supported Catalan bookshops that have webpages set up for electronic sales. PRH could have done the same with pages like todostuslibros.com, which assemble the information necessary to buy directly from thousands of Spanish bookshops. At the moment of truth—the moment of this pandemic—neither large enterprises nor the people responsible for cultural policy are reacting adequately to the situation. Nor, I fear, are bookshops, which aren’t organizing or uniting at a time when their existence is truly threatened. Some dispatch books to private homes and others don’t; some are still communicating with their community through Instagram, or have digitized their educational courses on Zoom, like the Rafael Alberti in Madrid or Nollegiu in Barcelona, though many haven’t. A few, like 80 Mundos in Alicante, have ventured into crowdfunding; others, like Caótica in Sevilla, have advertised for financial partners in order to survive, but most haven’t done these things.
Although the pandemic hit Spain two weeks before it reached the US, the few Spanish bookshops organizing fundraising campaigns or issuing calls for help did so after City Lights had already started to do just that. The legendary Beat bookshop, founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who turned 101 on March 24) quickly amassed half a million dollars. At the end of last year, Lam Wing Kee, the Hong Kong bookseller, crowdfunded 180,000 euros in order to launch his new bookshop in Taiwan. Lam was one of the five booksellers arrested by the Chinese government in 2015 in Hong Kong for selling and sending out banned books. Thirty police burst into his shop, Causeway Bay Books. On April 25, he will launch the new base for his project in Taipei. There will be no party; the Taiwanese government advises against social gatherings.
Why do people donate money to Caótica, 80 Mundos, City Lights, or Causeway Bay Books? Because they believe in the key nature of their brands and narratives. Design studios, media agencies, and marketing departments use the word “bookshop” in their campaigns because it is an excellent brand. Corporate promotion experts know you must never associate your brand with a less prestigious one, that all alliances must be based on equality or aspiration. The moment you link your brand to the word “bookshop,” you harness positive attitudes from many, many people and automatically grab the attention of the mass media and social networks. Bookshops are part of our heritage, but they can also go viral.
Amazon was the first to appropriate the legitimacy, importance, and significance of books and bookshops, exactly a quarter of a century ago. What Jeff Bezos identified in the mid-nineties as a niche market, a sales space that hadn’t been picked up by any electronic trading enterprise, was—conversely—the culture and intellectual and emotional fatherland for millions of individuals. Ten years later Google Books arrived on the scene with the same eagerness to appropriate that extraordinarily valuable symbolic cultural capital. Despite the proliferation of books and films about booksellers and bookshops; despite photographs of bookish spaces and reading moments going viral on social media; despite the transformation of several bookshops around the world into tourist icons, bookshops don’t seem to have grasped that their brand is extremely powerful, and much more so than those of the giant publishing groups and distributors supplying them, or the political institutions regulating them. Much bigger, even, than Google Books or Amazon. But they have to react. The huge tech companies are earning vast sums of money in these catastrophic times, which they are investing in strategies to render themselves—they hope—even more indispensable. Every day more brains are monopolized by Jeff Bezos, whose aim isn’t to be the prime, but the only option.
Obviously there isn’t the same structure of grants for supporting culture in the Hispanic world as exists in Anglo-Saxon culture. The Book Trade Charity has been helping booksellers for 180 years and has just raised over £50,000, to be distributed in the form of scholarships, for those affected by the pandemic. On March 23, 2020, three London publishers created a crowdfunding project to help bookshops. Their aim was to reach £10,000, a figure that rose to £100,000 in just a few days after they received the support of the Booksellers Association and—voilà—of Penguin Random House. But I refuse to accept that structures of solidarity, creativity, or innovation don’t also exist within our culture.
The renowned Chinese actor Yao Chen shared with his 83 million followers on the Weibo social network a moving post by the director of the OWSpace bookshop chain, who confessed that they might go bankrupt in six months: “Our hope is that every individual and bookshop will finally emerge from this solitude and embrace the Spring.” And the bookshop lover Aakanksha Gaur, owner of the Shelfjoy Instagram account, has created the Save Your Bookstore app, where you can find thousands of bookshops across the world, and purchase their gift tokens with one click.
In these times when millions of us are under house arrest and missing our bookshops, millions of isolated, masked readers who—though communicating via WhatsApp, working on Skype, and devouring stories on Netflix and HBO—have found ideas, escapism, and above all consolation, in our excess of books, bookshops need to react vigorously. They need to re-appropriate the culture of the book. Become conscious of their prestige and power. Ensure their brand and story are valued. What’s at stake is their future, which, to a considerable extent, is our future, too.