“Hi! I’m the one signing the lease to open a bookstore.” Lola Consuegra thus presented her new project on Instagram, the social network where five years ago she opened a profile in which she reviewed the books that had come into her hands. It was a task that began after his studies in Law and after having embarked on the preparation of an opposition to the Military Legal Corps, that is, in the little free time that his studies left him. This was the case until May 16 this year. That day, a month before the exam, he left everything. Lola spoke to her coach and her family and told them she was leaving the opposition: she wanted to be a bookseller. “Far from feeling frustrated, sad or distressed, I was very excited because I had the project,” she confesses in her publication. “I decided to make my big dream come true: to open my own bookshop with a cultural space. Specifically, the first independent with this concept in the heart of Murcia”, he concludes.
Then, a few meters from the cathedral, El Faro de Lola was born, an independent bookshop that attracts the attention of anyone who passes by its large windows thanks to its literary offering and the numerous cultural activities it has organized since its opening on 8 September. Like Lola, Judit Pino was in a life crisis when she was offered the opportunity to take charge of Zamora’s Semuret bookshop, which recently turned 125 years old. “I had just returned to Zamora after about nine years of absence. I was between going to Australia and taking exams, considering life like that, and the opportunity came up to take Semuret. In the end, life had something much better for me, which was this space,” he told digital media a few weeks ago. Approach to Zamora.
They are not the only ones who have decided to open bookshops in recent years. This same Thursday, Verbena was inaugurated in Madrid, run by four cultural worker friends who decided to undertake it despite the strange looks and warnings of their circle: “Two are the most common statements: ‘You are very brave’ and ‘you are completely crazy’. But we like to see ourselves as four friends going through our particular revolt of the 1940s. We have more years of gray hair working with books and culture and, obviously, we love living books”, they wrote on their Instagram profile on the 11th October.
Also this week, Monday, the influencer Ariane Hoyos has announced that she will soon open her own in Madrid: “This bookshop hides a big secret. And it is… that it is mine”, she revealed in a video in which she showed the process of renovating the premises. Hoyos has nearly half a million Instagram followers on his main profile and nearly 22,000 on a second account, @aquinohayquienlea, where he and friend Beñat Azurmendi share reading guides to books, films based on novels and organize a book club.
It is striking that bookshops with cultural spaces are booming at a time when everything seems to be moving towards exclusively digital, where the immediacy of purchasing a book online or the convenience of receiving the package at home is premium for many. Perhaps we are facing a cultural revolution against the algorithm: faced with the coldness of the click, the request for personal and close treatment by booksellers and their recommendations. Or maybe it’s just a nostalgic trend. In any case, having more bookshops could serve to improve reading rates which, according to the latest barometer of reading and book purchasing habits, improve compared to previous years: in 2024, 65.5% of citizens read for leisure, more than half of the population (51.2%) do so frequently and the most widespread purchasing channel is the traditional bookshop, followed by the internet and chains. Let’s celebrate new bookstores and their booksellers; I hope there are more to come.
