Para aqueles que amam livros, vivem da palavra, bibliotecários, ou apreciadores, esse livro merece sua atenção. Ganhei de presente de aniversário do escritor e amigo Gustavo Czekster. Demorei para ler pois queria curtir sem pressa, capítulos distintos e histórias íntimas. Mas afinal, posso retornar a qualquer momento para reler esse testemunho incompleto e excelente das livrarias e seus paradoxos. Recomendo! ( )

Elegant book, very international. A true love affair with the content, aesthetics, meaning, and changing fortunes of the bookshop. ( )

A collection of meandering connected personal anecdotes, reminiscences and essays about bookshops in history, in experience, in life, in geographical location, in fiction and film.
An enjoyable browsable book about books and the experience of acquiring books, differentiating the bookshop from public and private libraries.

About books:
Stealing or buying books or receiving them as presents means possessing them: For a systematic reader, the shape of his library can be read, if not as a correlative of his whole life, at least as a parallel to his development as an individual during his youth, when that ownership is decisive. (Page 149)

A reminder to myself that before I frequented bookshops, I was attracted to the popular books section of newsagents, where, usually at the bottom of a display case, there would be a shelf or two of science fiction, which is what I read in my early teens. Also finding bookshops in towns whilst on holiday.

Chapter 8 on America (II): From North to South is the least accessible to me, as it references many South American places and authors that mean nothing to me, but the references to bookshops as places of political significance makes me remember the independent Peace Action bookshop I frequented as a student, when I was at my most political.

Having “fetishised” Parisian bookshops earlier, in chapter 9 Carrion sets out to write about Paris without its Myths, clarifying how we attach value by association; markers as he calls it.

Chapter 10 Book chains includes an interview with James Daunt about rejuvenating Waterstones (UK book chain, that started as a London independent book chain in the 1980’s).

Chapter 11 Books and Bookshops at the end of the world
If you have made it this far, you are rewarded by an elegaic epiphany of a chapter, that celebrates and laments the losing of bookshops in our digitalised age. ( )

This is a far-ranging book about books, particularly bookshops. There is a vast variety to bookstores, and Carrion has uncovered many of them. This is a personable worldwide travel to discovering books, beginning in Guatemala City and reaching to San Francisco, Merida (Venezuela), Istanbul, Montevideo, Paris, Capetown, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Bogota, Santiago de Chile, Naples, London, Mallorca and may other places. The bak was published in Barcelona. ( )

Most booklovers can probably isolate a moment from childhood or adolescence when a bookstore played a transformative role in their life. Jorge Carrión has taken that moment and turned it into a lifelong obsession, visiting bookstores on every continent where they exist and exhaustively researching the history of bookstores in general and some of the most famous and influential in particular. Carrión’s volume combines travel, history, and anecdotal recounting of encounters with bookstores and the singularly devoted, similarly obsessed and sometimes eccentric personalities who devote their lives to the retail trade in books. Much of Carrión’s book is structured this way: he takes us to a location (Cuba, England, Lisbon, Sydney, Tangiers), provides a selectively detailed glimpse into the region’s book culture, with specific reference to the people and bookstores that inspired and contributed to it, and then situates himself in the midst of it all. It is an effective narrative strategy, one that allows him to display his sweeping erudition on his subject while at the same time indulging his passion for the bookstore as a cultural institution. Carrión’s discussion includes informative sections on the bookstore as a symbol of political resistance, bookstores of striking longevity, and bookstores as paradigms of architectural beauty and innovation. Bookshops: A Reader’s History is crammed with enlightening and surprising nuggets from the long history of book production, book selling, and book owning. But, facts and figures aside, the impetus for the volume is without a doubt the author’s love of books and the establishments that stock and sell them. And though he does not trouble to disguise his affection for the crowded shelves, worn floorboards and chance encounters with bibliographic treasures that the independent bookstore can offer—and though he is not above mourning the loss of many of these and the uncertain future that awaits those that remain—he is prepared to admit that the book we desire might not always be available from the store down the street. In Carrión’s world of books, the virtual and physical will continue to co-exist, each necessary in its own way, each providing an experience the other cannot. ( )