Paseo de Recoletos. Madrid. Photography (c) Mariola Díaz-Cano.
One more year the Autumn Fair of the Old and Ancient Book of Madrid. It started last Thursday September 27 and ends the October 14. It is already the Edition 30 and is
in the Paseo de Recoletos. Its 38 posts from bookstores throughout Spain. I usually spend all
years that I can. This is the chronicle from my visit a few days ago.
Autumn Fair of the Old and Ancient Book of Madrid
Traditional appointment in the first half of October, is organized by the Viejo Booksellers Association, LIBRIS. Non-profit, it was founded in 1988 and currently has 37 booksellers from all over Spain. Every year it publishes a book of bibliographic interest and this one is A trip through Spain, by Saturnino Calleja. It's an edit facsimile from the original edited in 1922 and that includes engravings, photographs, sketches and maps that make it even more attractive. Undoubtedly, a very appropriate title to decorate or make a nod to the current scene.
But there is much more between Half a million of books contributed from the bibliographic funds of bookstores throughout Spain. So we find first editions, incunabula, original manuscripts, etchings and rare editions. And of course also comics, sticker albums, old magazine issues, recorded, lithographs, artistic bindings, Post o advertising and movie posters.
Walking among jewels, survivors and memory
Two years ago I started my journey on this blog y one of my first articles It was for this annual literary event in the Madrid autumn. In 2017 I could not pass, but this year I have gone. It was Thursday 27, the day of his inauguration, in mid afternoon. I was doing time just before going to a seminar on book publishing and took a general look. But it was enough.
The sensations are the same every time: pleasure, nostalgia, smells, memories, experiences and fascination. For those old books or old books. For their lived lives that they do and have made others and others live. Because of what they can mean and inspire by looking at their covers, touching their spines and, perhaps above all, breathing in their smell, that so characteristic of yellowish paper, of already faded inks.
That one over there, when he touches his paper, has more hand than this other one. Those are made of cardboard with relief. Those, those of the famous flexible blue cover of Editorial Aguilar. On the shelf at the back are the large volumes with gold typeface and rough leather spines. The enormous volumes of encyclopedias, those of cartography, those of art.
And then there are the ones you are afraid to touch because it looks like they will turn to dust just by putting your finger on them. The most battered and traveled, or those who have had less luck with their owners or their resting places. The mutilated of a hundred battles, to which they add their age rolling through the world between careless or evil, irresponsible or ignorant hands. Some survived the fire and ignominy, others were abandoned, but found a new owner.
Among those less fortunate the most fragile are the old comics. With worn covers of bent spikes, faded. All with the more or less sepia tone of merciless time between its pages of infinite fun and with which many of us learned to read. Some limp from missing staples. Others hold the type and are hardly preserved with wrinkles.
Those pocket editions have also passed their thing whose milling almost sounds when you open them. You are instantly afraid that the pages are going to spread out. The paragraphs in single line spacing are then crowded together. The cuttlefish can change to yellow, light brown, or cream. Just like touch. What does not vary is the smell.
Everyone, without exception and despite so much ailment, mix in this great meeting that brings them together from many bookstores in Spain for a few days. They have come from Barcelona, Granada and Seville, from Pamplona and Salamanca. They also speak other languages coexisting without problems. And so there is a unique edition of The Antichrist by Nietzsche, in German, next to an almost incunabula from the Bible. And there they are together with the most traditional of that Paseo de Recoletos. Madrid could only lend you the place where your heart beats the most.
But it is the least they deserve. They carry inside the stories of all the cities, countries and characters of the whole world and they continue to show, teach and share them. In a thousand shapes, colors and sizes. And they are at a bargain price, although in truth none has a price anymore. Or is it too much to contain so much about them and about ourselves.
So if you are in Madrid ...
… You can't stop going. Of course If you are a bibliophile without a cure, the appointment is mandatory and unforgivable only for reasons of force majeure. But you don't have to be to walk around and dedicate a few minutes of our fast, stressful and chaotic lives to them. to these long-lived sages of paper.