Do you want to restore the story your parents read to you?

A book may have negligible economic value but incalculable sentimental value. A story from when you were little that you want to tell your children today. But not another copy of that story. No, no. You want to tell them that same story, open the cover, and turn the pages of the same volume your parents told you decades ago. There's a small problem: the spine has come loose, the cover is worn and torn from so much use. You could buy another one; it's a classic of children's literature, and you'd find bargain-basement editions. Would you rather spend a little more and fix it? Relligats Olivé is your place.

At 13 Berga Street in Barcelona, ​​they have it all: the long-standing workshop and, for the past ten years, the shop. The historic business is bookbinding, started by Antoni Olivé in 1975 and continued today by his daughter, Georgia. Antoni still comes to work some mornings. The father-daughter business is the art of papermaking. First, for many years, the art of adding covers and rebinding magazines and newsstand issues. Bookbinding is a craft, of taking care of the margins, spines, folds, chiseling, and guillotining the paper with care and precision. Of choosing the right colors with good taste, of opting for one font or another, and, since Georgia took over the business, of being as creative as possible. And how does it show? Well, in the number of products available for purchase in the shop, all of them made in-house. Mainly notebooks—of all sizes—and notebooks, decorated with Barcelona motifs—the essential panots and hydraulic mosaics—or with imagination to appeal to all types of customers. "Those who come here to buy do so because they prefer a special notebook to one bought at a bazaar, because they have a special sensibility, because they are a retailer." They opened the store because, with the 2008 crisis, they needed to reinvent themselves: rising paper prices, falling customers, and publishers with diminished budgets.

In addition to the shop—the most striking—Relligats Olivé maintains a very good volume of book restoration requests. From the sentimental ones we mentioned at the beginning to the bibliophiles who want to reconstruct the covers of an 18th-century copy, including papyrus inserts, if necessary. And what about dignifying the obsolete binding of the dictionary at home, worn from so much use? Georgia can't count on the fingers of both hands the number of Don Quixotes that has been rebound, nor of Bibles, nor of Divine ComediesWhat could this restoration be worth? About 30 euros. "It must be important to you, it must have sentimental value."

A personal footprint

And all this without losing sight of the diverse types of bookbinding-related orders. From companies looking to produce a limited run of, for example, notebooks with a corporate vision, to students looking to give a fine finish to an important project, including personalized gifts to celebrate milestone birthdays, special dedications, collections of photographs and love letters, and so on. "Everything I sell has my mark on it; I can recognize it immediately; it's like a kind of imprint, a personality imprint," Georgia emphasizes. Sales volume was generous during the Christmas season, so it's also necessary to replenish stock, and that means putting in the effort, diversifying between the restoration and binding of materials with history and the creation of new stories that someone will take home.

Georgia remembers how, during the pandemic, she worked harder than ever. We were all locked up at home, and everyone was looking for distractions, new activities, and escapes from the monotony. There were months of writing diaries and journals, of daring to organize memories and see what came out, of organizing millions of trips and family gatherings. And like a conspiracy against digital times, many people opted for analog tangibility: publishing it on paper and binding it with subtlety and good taste.

If Relligats Olivé isn't a hundred years old, it's close to being one. Georgia's grandparents had a dairy and a farm. Today, it's a joy to contemplate the old machinery—bookbinding, stitching spines and folds, rebinding, paper pressing—which is not only decorative but works like the first day. And the smell of freshly cut paper—ah, what a smell!