From the neighborhood struggle to presiding over the Book Fair: Fernando Valverde, Legend Award from the booksellers of Madrid

“I was very surprised, very happy. I, who have been one of the promoters of these awards, am more accustomed to giving them than receiving them.” This is how Fernando Valverde, known as “Nani” by those close to him, assimilates the news: the Board of Directors of the Madrid Bookstore Association has decided to award the 2024 Leyenda Award to this prestigious bookseller.

It was in 1974, more than half a century ago, when Valverde founded Jarcha in the Vicálvaro district. “It is a satisfaction that your colleagues recognize you,” he admits excitedly in conversation with Somos Madrid. The truth is that his career screamed for it. In addition to dedicating decades with his wife Isabel to the business on Lake Erie Street, which his daughter Rocío has run for a few years now, Valverde was president of the Booksellers’ Guild (and with it the Madrid Book Fair) between 2000 and 2003. .

The Association of Bookstores argues in granting the award that “Valverde has embodied the essence of independent bookstores, dedicating himself body and soul to making them spaces of meeting, knowledge and love for books and reading.” They highlight “his tireless spirit and his staunch defense of the importance of direct contact between authors and their readers”, thanks to which “this traditional bookseller has to his credit the consolidation of the Madrid Book Fair as a key event on the Spanish cultural agenda.”

Half a century as a book and organizational reference

Valverde reviews his career with simplicity and without fanfare, but it is so overwhelming that it speaks for itself: “I founded Jarcha when I was 21, together with a group of people who carried out social intervention and called for neighborhood mobilization in San Blas. [el nombre con resonancias al grupo que popularizó el himno Libertad sin ira no es casualidad]. We also had people we knew in Vicálvaro and the opportunity arose to manage the business in this location. Then my wife and I stayed, and then Rocío.”

Only three years later, in 1977, Valverde was already very involved in the Madrid Booksellers’ Guild and collaborated in various work groups, for example the one in charge of coordinating and improving everything related to textbooks and school books. “I was a member of many boards of directors, until in the mid-eighties when a generation of booksellers decided to organize ourselves better,” he explains.


“We created a broad action group, with many liberos and bookstores [cita establecimientos como Rumor, Pedagógica, Rafael Alberti o Antonio Machado] mobilized to lead the Guild. We met at the Naos bookstore, in Argüelles. That was a time when associations had greater power at a social and political level,” he continues. Thus the germ of the current Madrid Bookstore Association was born.

“Later, they elected me president of the Guild and therefore of the Fair, until at one point the board of directors asked me to leave the position of president and serve as general secretary, a position that I could no longer combine with the bookstore. I had to leave her and there was a very natural transition: my wife and another employee continued, then my eldest daughter joined, although she later undertook other projects and in the end my other daughter Rocío, who had already worked at Rumor, ended up taking over,” he recalls. Fernando Valverde. His resume is completed with his time at the head of the Spanish Confederation of Guilds and Associations of Booksellers (Cegal), between 2001 and 2013.

A generational change with which to continue building a neighborhood

Despite such baggage, Fernando looks to the future of Jarcha full of hope and pride placed on his daughter Rocío: “People who have mastered the bookstore have more strength to put things in order, but also in another order. It is good that there are open and knowledgeable people at the helm to face the online and digitalization process. It has been very natural, fortunately we have not had a problem that other bookstores do suffer: the handover.” He remembers two distressing cases in Madrid, although both with happy endings: “El Buscón did get some employees to take charge and Pérgamo closed, but clients and young workers with new ideas managed to reopen it.”


Valverde is less optimistic in other aspects: “Now it is more difficult to form groups and associations, the associative has lost strength in favor of the individual. I already noticed it when I retired in 2018, the enthusiasm was less than years ago. I will never understand it, because I am convinced that everything that is done collectively ends up benefiting the individual. My generation had a time when we had to fight and that made it easier to organize and meet. We have to keep in mind that when we opened Franco was still alive.”

Because the combative and collective spirit has marked Fernando Valverde and his Jarcha: “On the last Friday of each month in the bookstore we set up a gathering that is almost an assembly.” With it they have had such a great success with the public that they have coordinated with a professor who organizes another one at the Rey Juan Carlos University to divide up the attendees and some tasks.


“It’s wonderful because there are people of all ages, from their twenties to their seventies, and with very diverse views. We like to promote social activity, we have always been linked to the neighborhood movement and collaboration with schools, even when the bookstores did not do so many activities or there was so much interaction with the neighborhood,” he adds.

The neighborhood is precisely a key element to understand the way in which Fernando Valverde always understood his job: “In the south of Madrid it has taken a lot to generate habits; when we opened, the first public school in Vicálvaro had just been inaugurated a year before. For decades it was an abandoned neighborhood without services, like Villa de Vallecas. “It has required a lot of effort to make the neighborhood different, and there is still much to do.” A lot, yes, but with people like him (people who are legends) there is always a little less.

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