Homenaje a los libreros de viejo

Este escrito quiero que sea “paying hommage to the North American Second-hand Booksellers Assoociation",la más importante asociación de libreros de segunda mano en USA y para ello repetiré el texto insertado en Octubre pasado en mi página de literatura en la red, acércate a los libros, “Los libreros de viejo”, obviamente en lengua inglesa.

Books connoisseur, a student of books, you see, it’s my only craftsmanship. Roughly each month, after a petty introduction l sort of counting the pages of the books I’ve been reading and the same as I underline them, writing down on my papers and in my memory uncertain pencil, I was realizing there is a world time ago I don’t go through, I don’t either know or enjoy it: the second-hand books word.

As a student I remember myself paying visit to the second hand bookshops, either to spare some money when buying the school books or to look at the literature that was going to get old in my hands all along the years. Till the other day, talking to a mere buyer in my habitual bookshop, we remembered those old times and how more than once we committed the minor offence of stealing some books too.

A world, that of second bookshops which is losing its essence, the worthiest of it: the person who has sold a book unwillingly because of a little money he was in need of. If you enter one of the few second-hand bookshops still open in my town, firstly you meet a true bookseller because before incorporating a book to his stock he has had to buy it, what nowadays the ordinary bookshops never do, they simply receive books packets, to give back to distributors three months later what they couldn’t sell.

The second-hand bookseller love books, he needs to have them all around and when somebody ask him for a particular one –even in a specific edition, he enjoys the satisfaction of having been able to sell it, being the profit purely coincidental.

It’s a must for us to spend at least a little while in the second-hand bookshop, to buy Proust again there, that in the Losada edition of Lorca’s Collected Works, you had to slit open its double sheets solemnly, as each book deserved, providing the pause required by its reading.

My house is full of books, some thousands of them and they are as if they were my own skin, the better half of my life. I don’t want to think of the end of all that, because my children are good readers, they got this liking bit by bit at home with nobody forcing them to in the least. They won’t have either time or room the day this house is empty of those who have brought and read them as a way of living, they will have neither time nor room. For sure.

Never mind. I’ve thought that when they end up on the shelves of a second hand bookshop, my children will be able to utterly understand why their parents got old reading them.

(Versión inglesa S.M.R.)
.