“My library of today and the Lisbon of tomorrow”. A manifesto for books, bookstores and booksellers – Actualidade

In against amazon (Quetzal edition), Jorge Carrión, Spaniard, born in 1976, outlines a manifesto against Jeff Bezos’ multinational in defense of readers, bookstores and libraries, in opposition to the growing power of global algorithms. Carrión visits libraries (real and imaginary) and bookstores around the world and insists on the value of the book and its proximity as pillars of our sentimental and intellectual education. “Amazon appropriated the prestige of the book. He built the largest hypermarket in the world with a smokescreen in the form of a library”, underlines the author.

Jorge Carrión defends the figure of the bookseller and the bookstore against the impersonal world of the global bookstore, while he interviews authors and booksellers, evokes Jorge Luis Borges, walks alongside Iain Sinclair in London, shows how Tokyo bookstores reinvent themselves, as libraries resist and their memory cannot be lost, he speaks of books as an instrument of consolation in the face of the anguish of Internet – and visit Lisbon in the post-pandemic period.

The author holds a PhD in Humanities from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, ​​where he teaches contemporary literature and creative writing. He regularly writes for newspapers such as the country, The Vanguard, The New York Times It is The Washington Post. He is the author, among other novels, of Los Muertos (2014), The tourists (2015) and the dead (2015).

In against amazonwe publish the excerpt below:

My library of today and Lisbon of tomorrow.

Fatherhood, of course, changed everything. It was the middle of 2015. The rented apartment on Calle Ausiàs March, where he had built a library overlooking the first inner courtyard in Barcelona’s square history, had no elevator and made life with a second baby very difficult. A change was urgently needed.

Thanks to my two books about this city – one about its covered passages, which I was still writing, and the other about its junk bums who, moreover, often live in passages, and which I had just published –, I discovered the neighborhood of Poblenou and I got tired of walking through its triangular topography, enclosed between Rua Marina, Avenida Diagonal and the Mediterranean Sea. A peripheral and industrial fabric like that of Mataró from my childhood, with its dual personality, one classic and the other viral: near the beach it resembled a fishermen’s net and, in the vicinity of Torre Glòries, a nebula of the Internet. So on the day we visited this apartment, located opposite a car dealership and a clandestine scrap metal warehouse, in the center of an imaginary line that would unite the Nollegiu bookstore and the Clot library, very close to an office of the Amazon, I started to feel like I was at home.

We decided that the children would have the biggest room, which would have housed two desks surrounded by books in our previous life. My wife installed her desktop computer in the office. I soon realized that, in the new distribution of space, I would work with the laptop on the table in the living room when I didn’t do it in cafes or at the university.

The plan to classify my library according to the categories of friends, acquaintances It is futures, depending on the degree of intimacy with each of its volumes, never went beyond being a disembodied desire, a few lines written in an essay. As soon as we covered the shelves Billy the walls of the office, hallway and living room, a different logic was imposed, as if each architecture and each stage of life had its own bookish order implicit.

In the office and in alphabetical order, I arranged the titles of contemporary literature, from JR Ackerley or César Aira to Gabriela Wiener and Raúl Zurita. The corridor once again welcomed comic books and graphic novels, perhaps because the narrative in comics is a kind of transition between different worlds, an amphibious discourse between imagination and words. On the shelves farthest from the table in the living room I placed the contemporary art books and chronicles, the volumes on the city’s history and my many books about books, as if, with that decision, a creative stage was closed, even if my interest for them accompany me until the end of my days. The central shelf, located at the foot of the sofa, holds the classics in chronological order, from Ovid to Dante to Anna Akhmatova and Ossip Mandelstam, with the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Juan Ramón Jiménez at the top because perfection is unattainable, but it is always advisable aspire to it. And I surrounded this chair, where I continue to write ever since, with shelves devoted to the history of travel, museography, essays, science and technology. In them were, potentially, all the books and scripts that he would write in the following years. We cultivate certain interests for a long time until, suddenly, these readings begin to germinate. And so. Was always.

“A library is not a collection of books, but a living organism with an autonomous life”, says Umberto Eco in The plant memory. My library is not just my external memory, the schedule of my life, the surrounding wall where I see points that correspond to trips, readings, ideas, encounters, each with its own date and emotional charge: it is also a human being. with which I have lived for thirty years. A being that grew up at the same time as I did, in a symbiosis that benefits us both. It cannot grow in size because a mortgage has limited square meters and because I try to offer a book to every person who enters my house, but it can increase qualitatively. Our mutualism benefited us both by allowing us to develop in parallel, intertwined, ink and neurons flowing between our bodies like blood between the two Fridas in the painting.

We, the readers, are cyborgs, creatures in which biology and technology converge. Hands and eyes welcome those perfect devices called books, surrounded by shelves that, over the years, have become our artificial hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The human brain can store about 100 terabytes memories, experiences and knowledge. Thanks to the library, this capacity multiplies exponentially. Like flowers that, in order to reproduce, ally themselves with insects or the wind, libraries need us to experience movement and fertilization. They don’t live if no one picks them up, opens them, reads them.

However, I undoubtedly prefer the bibliographic resources that are integrated in the open access areas of university or public libraries. Because if someone wrote and published books, it was because they wanted to share their intuitions and their art. Because he wanted to open the doors of his mental universe, his inner world, to us. That is why I find it admirable that the city of Lisbon, the most beautiful in Europe, has converted the private collections of António Lobo Antunes and Alberto Manguel into part of its network of municipal libraries. In addition to the manuscripts of his works, the personal library of the great Portuguese author consists of twenty thousand volumes, many of them underlined or with dedications, which can be consulted in the former facilities of Fábrica Simões, in the Benfica neighbourhood. Forty thousand are the books that Manguel donated to the Portuguese capital to nourish the new Atlântida Space, on Rua das Janelas Verdes, with a navigable spirit, just like the Atlantic metropolis that hosts it. As the headquarters of the Center for the Study of the History of Reading, I imagine it to be similar to the mythical and post-true School of Sagres, where Infante D. Henrique, the browser, promoted fifteenth-century cartography, nautical and psychology. Each era must create its new intellectual horizons, its retrofuturist projects, and old books drive the Lisbon of tomorrow.

“The collection is the space of entropy”, says Borys Groys in his essay Logic of the Collection. Its latent contradictions are fascinating: “It is both a place of death and a place where one tries to overcome death”. When José María, Lobo Antunes or Manguel are no longer physically in this world, the books they wrote or belonged to will allow us to continue to access their memory, their brains. But even the most personal libraries, even monographic ones, are essentially plural. This plurality tends to chaos. An entropy that “cannot be occupied by a single work of art or a single theory”, says Groys. I suppose that’s why I digress in this disjointed essay, because I realize that no orderly discourse can really account for my own library. I clean and tidy it once a year, and this periodic rediscovery, which I adore and excites me at the same time, also reminds me that I will never fully know it, and that a few weeks after dusting it or donating two hundred books , will get out of control again. Like life itself, always.

credits: quetzal

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I intuit that only after becoming a father and having understood that I don’t need more than seven thousand books to be happy did I manage to rest.

Until that moment, my whole life could be read as an attempt to build the library I didn’t have as a kid. The urgency to fill a void. Something similar to what I thought I saw in Seoul: South Korea invests a fortune in the 21st century to create a network of libraries and bookstores that it never had in its history. I share a humble, illiterate origin with this Asian country. And the urge to fill that void. My social ascension is due to this library. It is the result of curiosity, luck and effort. But everything I did can also be explained by the few books and toys that, with much more than effort, my parents bought me. Those encyclopedias, those children’s novels, that toolbox or that mineralogy game guessed my deep interests. And they gave them, in the long term, the structure they needed to develop.

My children, who are not yet ten years old, already own more books than I do at twenty. They also traveled a lot more than I did when I was about to finish university. Naively, I think that if a child today falls in love with paper books, it is possible that in the 22nd century there will still be bookstores and libraries. I suppose I no longer feel the need to expand my library, I am concerned with other urgencies, other voids, other fears. Despite devoting myself vocationally and professionally to imagining orders, I understood that behind everything there is always chaos. Beside me, as I write these lines and at the same wooden table, my children are doing puzzles. With each passing year, they need less of my help to solve them.