Javier Moscarola

Bookselling is an incredible way to spend your life, and selling books is only part of the adventure. My greatest pleasure is discovering books that I haven’t seen before, and exploring their different aspects. I don’t like to romanticise the work too much because it’s still a business, and you have to sell books to buy books, and attend to a lot of routine tasks. As a way of existing in the world of books, I believe it’s more suitable for me than being a librarian. I’m rather disperso, easily distracted, and I love the fact that a bookseller never knows what each day will bring. After sixteen years in the business, I’ve learnt to trust my instinct. If I don’t know the author, or the subject, or even the language, I start by looking for connections to more familiar material, perhaps in terms of the style of the illustrations or the binding. It’s a creative process that often helps me to present the book to the world in a new light.

I grew up in Bariloche in Patagonia, the so-called Switzerland of South America. It’s an area of great natural beauty, but perhaps not ideal for a teenager who loves music and books. Argentina is extremely centralised, and there is a huge difference between the resources available in the capital compared to the rest of the country. When I visited my grandparents in Buenos Aires, it was a revelation to discover a city full of book stores, of which many were open twenty-four hours a day. I’ll never forget the experience of walking down Avenida Corrientes and buying books and records at three in the morning.

In 1998 I moved to Buenos Aires to go to university, and eventually I went into the teaching profession. Although I started teaching courses in literature at university level, I soon discovered that it was much more rewarding to work with younger students. If someone in their twenties won’t do their homework, it’s just annoying. If a fourteen-year-old won’t do it, they’re just being a teenager. I loved the challenge of trying to engage their interest, and share my passion for literature and reading.  I was also working part-time in the publishing business, which has always interested me.

By that stage I had met my wife Lara, who was also a teacher and, in 2009, we decided to open a book store, which had always been my dream. Our shop occupied the garage of Lara’s parents’ house in Las Cañitas. It’s an attractive neighbourhood twenty minutes from the centre of the city. The house had belonged to an English couple who used it for their language school. When the Falklands War started in 1982, they decided to go back to England, and Lara’s father was able to buy the house. We chose Libros La Teatral as the name of our business because my wife’s grandfather owned a printing house specialising in theatre programmes.  Our initial goal was to establish a decent secondhand book store, as we didn’t have the space required to sell new books. The smaller the shop, the better the books - or so the saying goes. Limited space certainly obliges you to be very selective in what you stock.

Occasionally customers visit us expecting to find books on theatre, of which we only have a small section - but I consider a book store to be rather like a stage. When choosing books to display in the window, you’re putting them in play and creating a scene. Plenty of young people come into the shop. Sometimes they’re just walking past the window and think it looks like something in a movie. They come inside and I can tell that it feels like a bit of an adventure - almost like boarding a spaceship. E-books have been around for most of their lifetime, but for many young people there’s something ‘cool’ about old printed books.  We have some customers who only started reading in their forties. It doesn’t matter; books are patient. They sit quietly waiting to be discovered.

Some people like to come in for a chat about what they’ve been reading. There’s something about a book store that encourages people to open up about themselves in a way that would never occur to them in a bakery or a pharmacy. Books reflect the human condition. When I go on a house visit to look at someone’s books, it’s almost like entering their life. You learn so much about a person’s tastes and interests just from glancing at their shelves. A colleague told me that bookselling is as much about books as human relationships. We need to understand the material that we buy, but also the customer to whom we sell it.

Lara and I have made some good friends through our bookselling activities, including Francisco Roca who first came into our shop as a student, and is now an internationally famous graphic designer. Fran is responsible for the design of our catalogues, and we owe him a debt of gratitude. We aim to publish one catalogue a year, and put a lot of effort into presenting the material so as to make new connections between previously unrelated items. I’m not sure if the results match the effort, but it’s an important aspect of our work.

A few years ago I co-edited a book with Fran and Leandro Castelao entitled Norah Borges: Fuera de Registro, which presents a vivid insight into the creative process of the Argentine artist, Jorge Luis’s sister.  Norah illustrated some of Borges’s early poetry and fiction, but she never sought the limelight and preferred to stay in the background.  The idea for the book was inspired by a visit to the house of Norah’s son Miguel de Torre Borges, who showed us a collection of his mother’s notes and sketches that were not included in the retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires five years ago. Initially Miguel wanted to find a buyer for the collection, but we agreed that a book should be published on it first. We realised at once the importance of that collection in illuminating the depths of the artist’s soul, especially as Norah gave very few interviews and rarely exhibited her work. It was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with Miguel who wrote the preface to the book. It was published in 2022 in a bilingual edition by Flecha Books, with the English title Norah Borges: Off the Record.

I’ve always enjoyed reading publishers’ and booksellers’ memoirs, and learning from their experience of the trade. The late Frank Herrmann, who was a co-founder of Bloomsbury Book Auctions in London and wrote a history of Sotheby’s, is a particular hero of mine. He writes very well, and always brings out the part that chance plays in our lives. I’ve read your two books of conversations with the antiquarian book trade, and found them helpful in my development as a bookseller. I particularly enjoyed reading about Helen Kahn, the Canadian bookseller known for her gentle approach, and not ‘going for the jugular’. Helen’s comment that you run your business according to your personality is wonderful advice that I try to follow.

The Asociación de Libreros Anticuarios de Argentina (ALADA) was founded in 1952, and one of its functions is to organise our annual book fair. We have thirty-five members, including four associates in Chile, Uruguay and the States. ALADA is rather a pompous name but we’re a friendly bunch and enjoy doing things together, especially as bookselling can feel rather solitary at times. As an association, we’re keen to participate in the international scene, but  I believe that there’s some work still to be done on our part.

When friends and colleagues from abroad visit us, they can’t believe the treasures and cultural life that we have here, but I’m told by older booksellers that it’s a fraction compared to forty years ago.  It’s partly explained by Argentina’s history of receiving a large number of immigrants from Europe. In Buenos Aires you could find English, French, German and Italian bookstores. There was even a Russian bookstore.

Actually I’m planning to publish a book devoted to old booksellers’ labels, of which many are typographic works of art in miniature. Although the manually-operated machines for foil-stamping and embossing those labels can still be found, hardly anyone today knows how to use them. Most of those bookshops have disappeared, but Buenos Aires is still considered the most bookish city in Latin America.

The Spanish Civil War was an incredible time for the publishing industry in Argentina. Some of Spain’s leading publishers moved here, and the first editions of several Republican poets  and Spanish authors with anti-fascist views were first published in Latin America. During Argentina’s period of prosperity between the two world wars, many great libraries were formed of important antiquarian books largely acquired from booksellers in Europe and the States. It was a time when a lot of émigrés arrived in Buenos Aires, escaping from the  turmoil in Europe. I’m fascinated by the mysterious life of books, and love the thought that items on my shelves were printed, say, in Tucumán 300 years ago, found their way to Europe, and are back here again.

When God created Argentina, He gave the country great natural beauty. In fact the inhabitants of other countries complained that it was not fair to give so many good things to one part of the world, but God replied, ‘Just wait till I create the Argentinians’ - or so the joke goes. I can only say that every year brings a different challenge. We need to obtain an export licence for anything over 100 years old, which involves a trip to a government office, which is often closed. Due diligence on provenance is of course important, but it’s not always easy to establish it for a book that has been in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic for many years. I can understand why some booksellers prefer to deal in punk flyers from the 1980s.

The world of the printed word has so much treasure to be discovered, and so we continue to work with passion and learn to adapt. In Argentina there are many talented graphic designers, publishers and typographers, whose work will stimulate the interest of future collectors. I believe that the rare book business will always find its way.

Interviewed in January 2025