There’s an old-world charm to bookshops in Mexico City. Of course, not all of them: there are your generic spaces, neatly ordered by genre and alphabetically by author. There are the modern, design-oriented vendors too. But it’s those librerías that appear to have happened almost by chance – they’re the ones that catch my eye.
In these shops, books are piled high to one side or lie supine along shelves, as though they’ve been forgotten. Sometimes they are priced, sometimes ordered, and more often they are not. You wonder if the owners could guess what’s buried in those stacks of paperbacks. How could they could know the value of those leathery volumes, gathering dust behind desks? The booksellers wander not-quite aimlessly, though rarely with a clear purpose, through the narrow valleys that interrupt the reams of text.
The photographs below are of these spaces. These images can’t capture the smell of ageing paper, the sense of claustrophobia when squeezing between rickety metal shelves, or the stillness that impresses onto you after any real stretch of time in them. I’ll ask you to imagine those elements yourself.
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