"What peace," says the mayor Jaume Collboni, as he enters the Documenta bookstore in Barcelona this Friday morning. Documenta bookstore in Barcelona. The Barcelona City Council has announced the first support plan for bookstores, fifteen days before Sant Jordi. The global allocation of the measure is 850,000 euros for 2026, and it is expected to continue. The mayor has been clear and direct: "Buy in bookstores, don't buy on Amazon. By buying in a small bookstore you are doing more than buying a book, you are defending a model of the city, a way of relating and that the profits stay in the neighborhood. We defend the right to stay in our neighborhoods and we help people like booksellers, our neighbors, friends, people like Èric, and not a man who has yachts sailing the Mediterranean," said Collboni. His words may recall those of Anne Hidalgo, then mayor of Paris, who said during the pandemic so that bookstores could reopen.

"What peace," says mayor Jaume Collboni, entering the Documenta bookstore in Barcelona this Friday morning. Documenta bookstore in Barcelona. The Barcelona City Council has announced the first support plan for bookstores, fifteen days before Sant Jordi. The global allocation for the measure is 850,000 euros for 2026, and it is expected to have continuity. The mayor has been clear and unambiguous: "Buy in bookstores, don't buy on Amazon. By buying in a small bookstore you are doing more than buying a book, you are defending a model of city, a way of relating and that the profits stay in the neighborhood. We defend the right to stay in the neighborhoods and we help people like booksellers, our neighbors, friends, people like Èric, and not a man who has yachts sailing the Mediterranean," said Collboni. His words may recall those of Anne Hidalgo, then mayor of Paris, who said during the pandemic for bookstores to be able to reopen.

"Can you give me one last recommendation? Don't tell me the title. My mother will take the book; that way, when I get home from training, I'll find a surprise," a young man says to Cecilia Picún, who is constantly giving hugs, recommending books, and taking pictures with all the customers who came to buy a book today. She knows everyone's name. The customers and their children. Today, Friday, Librerío de la Plata closes its doors. Picún announced more than a month ago that her lease would not be renewed. She wanted to continue until her retirement in 2027, but it wasn't possible.

Although nearly 30,000 Barcelonans live there, the Horta neighborhood is one of the least populated in terms of bookstores. Until now, there were Sagitari Llibres (Vila i Rossell Passage, 10), La Font de Mimir - Ibiza (Ibiza Square), La Retrospectiva (Fulton Street, 13), specializing in secondhand books, and La Caracola (Feliu i Codina Street, 19), which has just announced its closure. "At La Caracola Casa Intercultural, we will maintain the activities scheduled for February and will be returning the books on consignment. We will continue selling new and secondhand books, but now increasingly secondhand, at least until the day of the total stock clearance, which we will announce soon, but which will be around mid- or late March," the booksellers announced.

Barcelona's historic shops are deteriorating right before our eyes. Can we do anything as citizens? Well, yes, for example, by shopping at these establishments. Or, if we want to add a touch of heroism, we could take one of them over. Like Rafa Serra has done not once, but twice. First, it was the Quera bookstore on Petritxol Street. Serra, who owns the Tiempo de Ocio travel agency and hotels, found a way to make the business viable. The bookstore, specializing in hiking, added two more pillars to its financial stability: cultural events and gastronomy. It was a success. "A case study worthy of IESE Business School," says Serra.

Moderate satisfaction, in the words of Patrici Tixis, president of the Catalan Publishers' Guild. "The publishing sector continues to post record figures. We are growing at around 3-4%," he said at a press conference at the Ateneu Barcelonès. The 2025 percentage is lower than the 10-12% of 2024, but maintains the upward trend of the 2019-2025 period, during which the publishing sector grew by 29%, according to data from the Publishers' Guild. "Spain and Portugal represent the Iberian exception in a European context where growth has stagnated," Tixis asserted. The press conference also served to announce the winners of the 40th edition of the Night of Publishing, which will be held this Monday at the Goya Theatre in Barcelona: the Atlántida Award goes to the teacher, pedagogue, philosopher, and essayist Gregorio Luri; and the Fernando Lara Memorial Prize, for Arpa Editores.

Sometimes you walk into a bookstore with no specific idea in mind, but with the desire to be seduced by an unknown author. Three elements play a significant role in this seduction, which some call marketing: the cover image, the paratexts (bands and back cover), and the title. Perhaps we'll discuss cover images another day, because there's a huge variety—we have everything from Gallimard's minimalism to the garish colors of the British—and perhaps some publishers deserve jail for their bad taste (the jail thing is just a figure of speech, but since I see some readers have a lot of nerve, I'm clarifying to avoid incredibly tiresome comments like: "You're trivializing prison," "You're the one who should be imprisoned for writing articles like these," etc.; basically, things like that, but with thirty spelling mistakes). I've already spoken about the texts on the bands before.And I'd be in favor of burning all the back cover blurbs. Today, then, we'll talk about the titles, because there are also authors who deserve severe sanctions from those who choose them. I'll talk about texts that are close to my heart so as not to offend anyone.

A man in a trench coat and hat strolls incognito through the aisles of Alibri until, when it's time to pay for the novel he wants to give to the friend accompanying him, he can no longer conceal his identity: it'sArturo Pérez-Revertewho didn't want to miss the centenary of one of Barcelona's oldest and most beloved bookstores. The author ofThe Dumas Club He ended up signing a copy of the latest Captain Alatriste installment at the Alibri team the same week they celebrated their 100th anniversary, the culmination of a long and eventful journey that began in late November 1925, when Anton Schaedel, a German bookseller trained at the Institut Herder in Barcelona, opened Herder –Alibri since the late 1990s–, which everyone knew by the nickname "the German bookstore." The establishment, located on the first floor of number 22 Balmes Street, was mainly dedicated to the import and sale of books in Spanish and Latin published by the Herder publishing house, founded in 1798 in Freiburg.

The Sant Jordi bookstore is staying on Calle Ferran in Barcelona. The establishment, which has long been threatened because the building's owners wanted to raise the price exorbitantly, put its entire stock up for sale last December, after the death of the bookstore's manager, bookseller Josep Morales. At that time, Cristina Riera—Josep Morales's widow and director of the l'Alternativa Film Festival—explained that they needed to empty the bookstore before February, when the lease ended. Riera couldn't continue running the business on Ferran Street, and to support them, dozens of Barcelona residents—neighbors, friends, and readers—waited in long lines to buy lots of books.

Last week, Nico Rodríguez (Reus, 1973) received an unexpected visitor at Fatbottom, his bookstore specializing in comics: it was Chris Ware, the most influential American cartoonist of his generation, to whom the CCCB is dedicating an exhibition until November 9. "I was doing the quarterly invoices and, suddenly, I raised my head and saw her there," explains the bookseller, still incredulous. Ware is not only the patron saint of modern experimental comics, but a very important author for Rodríguez. "I had been a big comics reader, but over time I became detached," he explains. "And one day, when I was living in England and hadn't read anything for five or six years, I went into the Forbidden Planet bookstore to browse and bought the Jimmy Corrigan Ware's work and I got hooked on comics again." A few years later, already in Barcelona, the 2008 crisis forced Rodríguez to abandon his job as a photographer, and he opened a bookstore specializing in author comics with a special focus on fanzines, self-published comics and imported comics, in other words, exactly what was missing from the other bookstores.

Last summer, Antonio Ramírez was looking for premises in Madrid to open a new La Central bookstore – which would join the one in Callao and the one in the Reina Sofía Museum – but without intending to, he ended up finding it in Barcelona. “I looked at this premises at Consell de Cent 314 out of pure curiosity and I loved it,” he admits. Ramírez visited it in July, in the middle of the heat wave, and found the owner willing to rent it to him. “I didn’t want to end up with another 24-hour supermarket being installed,” he says, referring to the establishment that is right in front of the future La Central, which is scheduled to open its doors between May and June. “Even though we couldn’t pay the price that is being asked for a shop or restaurant next to Passeig de Gràcia, the owner preferred a book.”

The festival of Sant Jordi has always been characterised by an exceptional normality: it is a festival on a working day, it is a day when we all buy books and roses as if they were objects of basic consumption, it is a day when the street is tinged with joy without completely breaking with everyday life, it is a day when life takes place more in the street than indoors, when families and friends pay special attention for each other, when smiles are the norm. Sant Jordi is, in itself, an annual collective representation of how we would like to be: for a few hours we behave and portray ourselves as a cultured, civic, friendly society. This is what we want to experience again this year.

Books of essays, in Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Galician... Welcome those who pass through the door of the new Finestres bookshop, which opens its doors this Thursday at number 249 Diputació street in Barcelona. The cataloguing is sui generis: melancholy, women with power, heretics, rebels and outcasts, everyday life... Further back is fiction, comfortable armchairs, old lamps, and a fireplace. The bookshop, if the works next door allow it, wants to be above all a space of silence, a place to read but not to work: there is no signal. Silence is not just a suggestion, it has to be obeyed: it is full of signs that light up if the tone of voice is too high.

A month after forcing bookshops to close at weekends and forcing establishments of over 400 square metres to close, the Generalitat has classified bookshops as "essential businesses". This means they will be able to reopen as normal from Monday.