Brief declaration of love to bookstores

Last Monday, after almost two years without entering a bookstore, I took this luxurious tour to a newly opened bookstore. I walked through the shelves, smelled the new books - perhaps opened for the first time -, leafed through several of them, made a small pile to look at them more calmly at an available table. Even though I didn't have all the time I would have liked to spend scrolling through the books, I can say with certainty that the time I spent there was invigorating, a real balm. I returned home with three new books, but more than that, I returned with a renewed spirit, with the assurance that the world holds many other worlds and that I can know them. Right now, I'm not in the bookstore, but thinking that it's there, where I know it is, comforts me.

One of the books I bought was Boxing My Library , by Alberto Manguel. I had seen the cover somewhere on the internet, but I didn't know anything about it and had never heard of the author. When I saw it on one of the huge book tables, my hands went straight to it, for its aesthetic aspect, its graphic design. Royal blue cover, arabesques in gold, orange letters, approximate size of a hand and the detail, which did not go unnoticed, of the rounded tips of the pages. Okay, I was the one who was already in the hands of the book. I was already his. I read the first two pages and flipped through reading loose sentences. I read little, leafed through little, but I was already captured, convinced of the success of our relationship.

It is always risky to say that we are enjoying a book, a movie or a series when we are still at the beginning, because we may be surprised. But I take the risk here, because I started reading it and found myself physically reacting to some passages, smiling genuinely, an accomplice of the author, as if to say "Knock here, Alberto!" or "We're together!". Freud would call this phenomenon identification, a subject that I have briefly dealt with here .

Undoubtedly, it is no coincidence that Manguel's book is perfect to deal with what he wanted to say today, the love of bookstores, libraries, books; what this brief walk through those newly installed shelves represented for me. The author states in a passage:

When I'm in a library, any library, I have the feeling of having been transported to a purely verbal dimension thanks to a magic trick that I never understood at all. I know that my complete and true story is there, somewhere on the shelves, and I just need time and luck to find it. I never succeed. My story remains elusive because it is never the definitive one (p. 17).

In the excerpt above, Alberto won me over almost completely, because this subject is very dear to me; the way we constitute ourselves, the fiction we construct to tell ourselves someone. This topic yields many discussions and was the subject of my master's thesis. He constantly returns to me, alive, effervescent, asking to be further investigated. It is a sign that it will once again be the subject of other reflections, just as Manguel's words will certainly appear again here.

Ps: In my haste, I recommend the book. Lovers of reading, books, libraries, bookstores, will enjoy "Boxing my library".