pending the sky… and inflation

Concise and resounding: «Wet». This is how the Isabel Sucunza bookstore, from Calders, in the heart of the Sant Antoni neighborhood, foresees this first Sant Jordi without a mandatory mask. Although without losing a smile or hope, there it is the fear that the announced rain will tarnish this long-awaited day. In fact, farsighted, they already changed the plans they had to install, as in previous years, the book stand in the courtyard of the Antic Teatre: on Thursday they were told that the ground, made of earth, was muddy. And they have been lucky with plan B: a place right next to the bookstore, in the Pere Calders passage, gives them space, and yesterday they received signatures from authors.

“We come from a week of rain that has been super lazy. And of a Holy Week in which few people have also come. Hopefully it doesn’t rain much and people do cheer up. Although it falls on a Saturday, I think the tradition weighs heavily. I hope that if when everything was closed with the pandemic, people went crazy buying books, now they continue to fill the bookstores, “says Sucunza.

La Calders, which is committed to moving away from the typical media book, boasts of “a very loyal clientele.” «We have people who are already readers and a lot of background books with proposals for a type of client who buys regularly and who does not only do so on Sant Jordi or Christmas, so it does not condition us so much that in Sant Jordi they stay at home or come. We play all year. Although Sant Jordi shows a lot, of course», he admits.

Sucunza is clear: «If Sant Jordi ends up being weaker than desired, we will get our batteries in May and June with full activities to save it. Not with the typical presentation but by bringing together two authors who may not have anything to do with each other. It is a way of attracting diverse audiences who end up being interested in each other’s book». An example: the writer Sara Mesa and the translator Dolors Udina talking about Alice Munro. One way, she concludes, is for people to buy more than one book.

There is a moment on April 22 when booksellers scan the sky trying to predict whether Sant Jordi is going to behave well climatologically speaking. After two years of pandemic, this 2022 it’s time to forget about the bad times and live the party with normald. This is how Èric del Arco, the Documenta bookseller, faces the party, a human-sized bookstore that has historically always guaranteed the loyalty of its customers, who not only helped financially for its survival in 2013 but also for its transfer from the Gòtic to the current location in Pau Claris. Del Arco is concerned about cumulonimbus clouds, of course, but with his characteristic joke he relativizes: “At the Gremi de Llibreters we are always aware of something that we cannot control, the rain in Sant Jordi, but in recent years we have been very upset by the technology that allows us to have not one but three applications on our phone that give us contradictory predictions. How many times the storm is in the application and if you look up from the screen you see a splendid sun & rdquor ;.

This Saturday, the bookseller will get up at half past six to prepare his designated position on Passeig de Gràcia and he will be what he has to be. In front of the Documenta he doesn’t usually set up any “parade”, and this year it won’t be like that either, because the sidewalk of his street is not wide enough for the occasion. Inside there is space for those who prefer to go there. Bad weather is worse for those neighborhood bookstores that the regulations of their respective districts do not allow to set up a tent, since in this there is no unitary criterion on the part of the city council.

Del Arco notes that the waters have returned to their course after the boisterous reader overflow that occurred in 2021the miraculous year. Something similar to the Netflix phenomenon has happened with the book during the pandemic: “Then everyone signed up for the platform, but to the one that has been able to go out to dinner or go to concerts, the boom has been lowered & rdquor ;. However, in Documenta there is an important fact to take into account and it remains to be seen if it can be extrapolated to the entire sector in the future. The first three months of this year compared to the pre-pandemic 2019 have had comparatively higher sales, which implies the consolidation of a greater reading mass not mediated by the fact that little had to be done during the running of the bulls. These are good expectations that Del Arco takes with caution, entrusting himself to ‘senior’ Esteve. “Let’s see how current inflation affects us in the future. At the moment it is not noticeable, but as a good ‘botiguer’ every day I raise the blind thinking that no one is going to come to buy & rdquor ;.

When, on March 13, 2020, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced the closure of shops and the confinement of the population, Xavier Vidal thought that the adventure of the Nollegiu bookstore (Pons i Subirà, 3) had come to an end. The end. “I had no hope of holding on. And less considering that only three months ago we had made an investment to open a new bookstore in El Clot [València, 608]”. But the Nollegiu endured, thanks to the “phenomenal response & rdquor; of a clientele who did not hesitate to order books through the web even knowing that she would not receive them for a few months. “I suppose that if we had that response it was because we had been working for years to create a community of people who felt the project was theirs”, says Vidal.

Those days of hardship and uncertainty were followed by a time of prosperity – “2021 was a spectacular year of sales & rdquor; – which perhaps inflamed the expectations of the sector excessively. “I I have always been well aware that the party, if you can call it a party, was going to be short-lived, because in this country the readership rate is what it is & rdquor ;, points out the Nollegiu bookseller. The reality of the numbers reveals that at the end of last year, “when competition from restaurants, leisure, travel, etc. entered again, reading returned to its usual level”. And in the first quarter of 2022, adds Vidal, things have gotten worse, as a result of inflation and the economic effects of the war in Ukraine. “As always, when they are badly given, the first place from which it is cut is the culture. I think that the inflationary crisis is going to be harder for the sector than the pandemic crisis & rdquor ;, he sentences.

In bad weather (the metaphorical one and, perhaps, also the other), a good face. Vidal faces the new old Sant Jordi with a mixture of skepticism and enthusiasm. That yes, from the Nollegiu once again stands up to the uneconomic imposition of the discount. “No one lowers the price of shrimp on December 24 & rdquor ;.

The Finestres bookstore opened in 2021 with its first Sant Jordi, still with pandemic restrictions, and it opens in this second year with double premises, one opposite the other on Diputació street, between Balmes and Rambla de Catalunya (the second, specialized in all the arts). They will do so with a 12-meter stand for book sales and 8 meters for author signatures in front of both stores. They are not in the delimited area of ​​Passeig de Gràcia but they don’t need to either: they are located in the heart of the city, within the perimeter of the superilla that the Barcelona City Council has established, which today is practically closed to traffic.

“We prefer to stay in our space. It is a way of maintaining our commitment so that people are comfortable in the bookstore, which invites them to read and reflect”, emphasizes Àurea Perelló, one of those responsible. For this reason, today they will maintain a capacity limitation, to avoid the usual public madness of the day.

The fear: the rain. Plan B? «Carps and plastics». they have no alternatives. «I have the feeling that despite the weather forecast, many people will come from outside Barcelona, ​​who will take the opportunity to visit the city and enjoy the atmosphere of Sant Jordi».

During the pandemic, both book sales and reading rates have grown. «I would like to think that this trend will continue. Reading has been very present in the media these two years and that has helped -he thinks-. I hope that now reading is news beyond Sant Jordi and Christmas, that it normalizes ».

Among the most demanded these days, he explains, there is no shortage of books on Putin and Ukraine. And in the recently opened second location, where a large part is dedicated to comics, they detect “an audience that is not usually a comic reader and that, being well positioned in a generalist bookstore, is getting closer to it.” They still do not have data with which to compare with pre-pandemic Sant Jordis. The year they will be able to do it.

Byron, the Casanova street bookstore that opened its doors in November 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, is enthusiastically preparing its first Sant Jordi in full normality, despite the fact that it has already glimpsed the desire to party that readers exhibited in the perimeter Sant Jordi of 2021. “We had a stand on Passeig de Gràcia and we quickly caught the atmosphere, within the particularity of the moment, with masks and entrance shifts,” says the bookstore Mariana Sàrrias, who has opted to make her premises a place of recollection and knowledge rested.

Sàrrias certifies that sales have fallen in recent times, but that verification, he says, needs an explanation. “I would say that it is not that they have gone down, but that in 2021 they went up, something very different, because people in their confinement were looking for alternatives to television and screens and found the old resource of the book.” What he confirms in these last days of international uncertainty is something more intangible: people’s need to understand more. This is perceived in the type of books that she asks for at Byron, chronicles by journalists who know Russia well or essays by political analysts on the war in Ukraine. «People have realized that reading gives answers or helps you to ask yourself the specific questions and that, at a time like this, has a lot of value. That is why I am convinced that the boost that the pandemic gave to reading will not be lost.

Sàrrias has the proof in her clients who have been warming up their engines for a few days now in her bookstore, looking, browsing and even picking up readings, while she lives with satisfaction the possibility of launching cultural activities such as a course with the University of Barcelona on topics margins of the History of Art or a cycle on human rights in collaboration with the European Parliament. Welcome old normal. Welcome old Sant Jordi.