Luis Gallego He has been fighting for 20 years from his bookstore, La Fuga, located on a side street that overlooks the Alameda de Sevilla. His proposal has hooked a wide community of peoplenot only from the city, interested in delving into original ideas and aesthetics, own and linked above all to movements, so-called, left-wing, countercultural and underground.
The idea that has allowed him to see life go by, like in Pata Negra’s songsays Gallego in conversation with Public while attending to varied requests from its clients, from classics such as Madame Bovary even the most angry and critical news, is “being useful” to the community to which it belongs. At this year’s Seville Book Fair, La Fuga received a tribute for his career.
The sections in which the books are grouped in La Fuga are all a declaration of intent: poetry, narrative, anthropology, philosophy, feminisms, autonomy, ecologies, anarchisms, Marxisms…
“Since it opened 20 years ago the idea is that [la librería] It was political, artistic and literary,” says Gallego. “Every bookstore is political. We are continually making political decisions in our lives. For example, just because this selection is not common does not mean that the others, the most common, are not also political. “Market ideology, choosing according to what is sold, is also a political decision.”he reflects.
“It is an ideology,” he adds, “that is invisible, but it does not mean that it does not exist. It is the idea of the market, that is, the capitalist ideology. A selection is made according to sales, for example, according to ranking or according to certain things. Not all bookstores do it.
The screw idea
Gallego has not become rich in these 20 years—he laughs when asked—and it was not the goal either. The idea is not exclusively to sell books, but to build a community. “I sell books to make things. Selling books allows us to free up time to do activities or to do things.” Now he has managed to share the work with another person who comes a few hours a day and during this time he has had “very powerful” support from family and friends.
The books are the vector, but the question, reflects Gallego, is “to make meetings, activities, things that they can delve into both the books that are displayed or made visible and the subjects or tools that we believe can be useful.
In these two decades, La Fuga has become a meeting point and exchange of ideas, a fluid in which Seville, or at least part of it, converses. “That is the idea. That is what is intended. The strength that this bookstore has is the people around the bookstore. It is a meeting space and a space for making certain ways of seeing the world visible, not only on an explicit political level, it is also narrative and comic. It is a way of seeing the world, that way of seeing the world or that way of living is already politics in itself,” he analyzes.
For Gallego, it is important to highlight the idea of community. When asked if he believes that La Fuga is today, in turbulent times of change and great unrest, “a refuge” for many people, he proposes what could be called the screw idea.
It’s this: “I understand the idea of refuge, but I don’t exactly share it. I don’t have it in mind either, but above all [mi duda viene] in the sense that even the bookstore is given those ideas of refuge and there are many businesses, many spaces that are not given that epic either and they are also there. For example, a hardware store, a haberdashery, a neighborhood store, maybe it does that work of community cohesion and it doesn’t give it that epic either What if you give him the bookstore?
In fact, no one disputes the usefulness of a screw: “We would like to get to that, to be part of certain communities. Being useful is that, how we make certain communities, for example, political, literary and artistic, see the bookstore as something that serves them.”
The bookseller’s job
Diversity in the proposal is another of the keys to La Fuga. “That is the job of a bookseller,” defends Gallego: the selection of the proposal and its intention: if applicable, to be a useful tool for those searching for certain topics.
A book that one comes across in a prominent place every time one enters La Fuga is the novel Canijoof Fernando Mansillaa tour of the junky and scoundrel Alameda, edited by Sevillian Barrett. There is also a sale of badges for Palestine. The magazine The Molethe tavern newspaper, is another La Fuga classic.
There are messages everywhere, as can be seen in the photograph that accompanies this chronicle: from the painting that mimics the ‘forbidden to prohibit’ from the Parisian May 68 to the humorous “read books and ride a bike, but don’t do both at the same time.”
On the central tables, where in other bookstores the same ones appear monotonously best-sellers from large publishing groups, along with the proposals that Gallego wanted to highlight, fanzines accumulate, the most passionate, experimental and free proposals.
“In the end, every library is a selection. A bookstore makes a selection of titles and a selection of categories, how it chooses those titles and how it distributes them in the bookstore,” explains Gallego.
“To select, you work by themes as well as by authors or by forms. For example, narrative would be what type of narrative interests us in the bookstore and you work with that. You trust some publishers and ask for the entire catalog, other selections. And the authors, the same. One author takes you to another and makes you hooked on other things,” he says.
Gallego has a particular affection for fanzines. “I made them in the mid 90’s. I made fanzines too. In that countercultural line there is a thread there. Now it is different, that is, they are not the same sensibilities, they are not done now in 2024 in the same way as when we did it in the 90s. The same thing that we were not the same as those that were made in the 70s”.
On December 11, La Fuga, brings Pepe Ribas, founder of Ajoblancoon the occasion of a new book, Angels dancing on the head of a pin (KO Books). “In that countercultural thread and all that is where I feel comfortable because I have been sucking him since I was 15, 16 years old. I mean, since I was a kid before I had the bookstore“says Luis
#Fuga #years #war #Seville #bookstore #political
