When Andrea Arbide opened Libreria Gallina de Guinea in Mexico City a year ago, he didn’t imagine that the biggest challenge he would face would be finding books on the country’s gastronomy, the fulcrum of this small neighborhood business. “I entered this world with very little, if any, knowledge of the publishing world. One of the first surprises was that there are very few cookbooks or books about food distributed in Mexico and the imported ones tend to be very expensive,” explains Arbide. After months of struggling on the market, his bookshop has become a meeting point for those who want to better understand what we put on the table, but Arbide has gone further and organized Comestible, a culinary book fair to promote reading and enhance the gastronomic heritage. “The idea is to harness the transformative power that books have to enjoy that universal language that we all know and appreciate, which is food,” he says.
Arbide is the director of the fair which from 7 to 9 November will bring together 26 exhibitors – including publishers, independent projects, artists, illustrators and authors who have self-published a book – in the San Ángel neighborhood, south of the Mexican capital, and will develop a program that includes conversations around cookbook publishing. It is an opportunity not only to acquire these volumes most often relegated to the dark corners of bookshops, but to understand how an industry works that produces so little in Mexico.
The bookseller says 80% of its trade catalog is imported, mainly from Spain and the United States. “I inevitably have many books in English. I would like to be able to reverse the numbers. I have nothing against what is imported, because it enriches us a lot, but I cannot understand how in this country, with such a rich and extensive gastronomic culture, we have so few books,” he says. “What I’m looking for with this fair and with this effort is to strengthen ourselves, create a meeting point for creators and readers and expand the conversation,” he says.
The fair includes a public program organized with the Novo publishing house which will present three days of talks and workshops to learn how to talk about food, because “it’s not just about recipes, even if I absolutely don’t want to diminish recipe books, but cuisine is also told through photography, memories, poetry, literature”, explains Arbide. This wide range is what visitors find at Gallina de Guinea: a variety that goes beyond simply knowing how much salt to put in a broth. “When people come to the bookshop they find poetry books for children and they are very surprised, because it is something they don’t expect at all”.
The pleasant surprise for Arbide is that when people visit his bookstore they become passionate about what they see and buy his books. Not bad considering that when he planned to open his business the response he received was that the book was almost an object from Gutenberg’s time. “I had two surprises that ultimately add up to something very good. I’m struggling to find books, but I’m also selling way more than I could have imagined, the response has been incredible. This is also something that neighborhood businesses have, which are like microuniverses that resist global trends,” he explains.
Searching for titles, interesting books, finding new publications, new authors, dealing with distributors has become a full-time job for Arbide, but his idea is to encourage interest in the world of gastronomic publishing. And that’s why he now promotes Edible, a beast that promises it will be a feast to devour this kind of literature.
