When Miguel Ávila found out that the emblematic Librería del Colegio, one of the oldest in Buenos Aires, would disappear and be replaced by a burger joint, he put his hands on his head. It was 1994 and, after the news was made public, he had “an attack of nationalism”. He moved heaven and earth to avoid it and even spoke to the archbishop of the city. And he stopped it. Today he runs the place, renamed Librería Ávila.
How could it be that a historical site that “had witnessed everything that had happened to us Argentines ended up in the hands of an American company?”, reflects Ávila. The bookseller is one of the protagonists of the documentary series Booklovers, premiered yesterday on the CaixaForum platform and presented and written by Jorge Carrión (Tarragona, 1976).
“For years I have been collecting photographs and notes from bookstores and libraries around the world. I have a lot of material and it is difficult to communicate the spectacularity of these places only through the books themselves. That’s why I thought of taking a step into audiovisual. I contacted several production companies and platforms, but not everyone knew how to understand that we are legion of lyricists and that there are many of us who feel the need to visit these spaces in our cities or when we travel”, reaffirms Carrión.
The writer shows the world Barcelona, ??the city in which he currently lives, and flies to Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Mexico City and Madrid, to get to know first-hand its bookstores, libraries and emblematic cultural spaces. The viewer will be able to travel to Ler Devagar in Lisbon, the Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, the Rosario Castellanos oasis of books or the Gabriel García Márquez library, considered the best in the world, without leaving the sofa at home .
“I would love if there were more seasons. I think then I would visit Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, New York and maybe London, Paris or Milan. But, for the first chapters, I opted for places that were relatively close to where I live, beyond Latin America, and that, of course, were capitals of culture and the publishing industry of the 20th century”, he points out. ‘author of Llibreries (2013) and Contra Amazon (2019), who in this project gives voice to writers such as Elena Poniatowska, Leila Guerriero, Alberto Manguel, Gabriela Wiener or Enrique Vila-Matas, but also to publishers such as Jorge Herralde and booksellers like 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 as I write”, and, when he continued reading with authors such as Susan Sontag or Sebald, “I saw the world in a different and much broader way”. From then on, he began to assemble his library, which he cannot imagine being separated from under any circumstances. “It is my external memory. Each book is associated with a memory of a person or the place where I bought it. Who would want to lose a friend? Certainly not me. That’s partly why I think it’s hard for me to leave 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, he did it in, where he went to 23 in just one day, despite the fact that it could be said that the desire to divulge these places was born 25 years ago in Guatemala, a country where he returns these days to meet and celebrate the quarter of century of the Sophos bookstore. “I never miss an opportunity to discover a new window on the world.”
