Your Perfect Day of Book-Hunting in Mexico City
Biblio File used bookstore guide
This is simple. Number one: feed yourself, here
at the Meson de Allende, it’s just off Donceles, the best street in Mexico City for used bookstores. Food tastes great, and it’s cheap, plus the music is sweet and mellow, mostly piano; good for digestion.
Go with the spinach omelette. The service is good too
and the WIFI.
Number two: There are five or six shops at least along a three block stretch of Donceles starting at Brazil, near the Centro Historico (Zócalo). Hang out here.
That’s your day. That’s the advice.
***
Now for some observations: 1) The shops here, unlike in Istanbul, don’t rotate their stocks much; inventories are pretty static, so it’s a question, on return visits, of looking a bit harder, uncovering stuff that was in front of you in the first place but unseen. It’s worth it. Sort of.
I’ll give you a for instance: after we scored these Vanity Fairs (see below) at this shop:
we returned, and found this
and several others like it stuffed away in a dusty plastic bag sitting hidden on a shelf down at ankle level near the front counter. We were jazzed. The staff couldn’t price them. The boss would be in at 3.30pm. Okay I said, we’d go for a bite and be back shortly after that.
We arrived at 4:10pm. “You’re late,” the boss said, looking annoyed. He didn’t speak English. Nor did any of his employees. I tried to clarify that I’d meant we’d be back after 3.30pm not at 3:30pm, but to no avail. “How much for the magazines?” I finally asked. “1000 pesos each” he told me with a steely, sadistic glint in his eye, gleefully reveling in the disappointment of others. This was ten times what I’d hoped to pay, and more than three times what we’d paid for the Vanity Fairs. I can only guess that his ego had been injured and that this had factored into his pricing.
Fuck you I thought (like a typical alpha) as we strode out of the store onto the noisy street.
2) Based on close to half a century’s worth of visiting used bookshops all over the world I can tell you that at least half of the booksellers I’ve encountered weren’t friendly. Here in cdmx, we’re up around the 80 percent mark. Maybe it’s that I’m a Gringo. Maybe they think I’m an American, unable to discern the origins of my obviously more refined mid-Atlantic accent. Perhaps it’s my disagreeable face? Who knows. Regardless, be prepared.
{Should mention here that if I ever buy a shop and get into selling vintage magazines I know that there will be many times when I’ll be unfriendly as hell - everyone trying to get a discount, beating your prices down - yes, it’s a very emotion-laden business.
***
Now, a bit on the criteria for judging what is and isn’t a good used bookstore. Straight off: every store is a good store. They all hold the possibility of yielding something you might want, you just don’t know until you’ve checked out the shelves for yourself. That’s a big part of the appeal. The possibility, big or small no matter, of finding treasure.
Your criteria for a good shop is, of course, going to be different from mine - it all depends upon what you’re looking for and whether or not the shop has it.
I, for example, am currently looking for vintage magazines: the best magazines ever published. The best content. The best design. Best flow. To my mind this best category includes Ladies Home Journal during the Edwardian era, Vanity Fair
from the twenties (and in the 1990s under Graydon Carter), Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue from the thirties and forties, designer Cipi Pineles’s Seventeen, Charm and later Mademoiselle magazines in the forties and fifties; Otto Storch’s McCall’s. Esquire and Playboy from the fifties and sixties; the illustrated picture magazines VU and AIZ in the twenties and thirties; Life magazine of course; Flair magazine in the early fifties. Herb Lubalin’s Eros magazine in the early sixties, and Avant Garde; early Interview magazine; Colors magazine a bit later on, and Fred Woodward’s Rolling Stone. These, and their kind, are the high-water marks, the touchstones, as Matthew Arnold put it, against which I measure everything else; the dictators of when I do and don’t pull the trigger. Plus, when a cover “astounds” me, I’ll green light it.
If I happen to land on any of these gems, then the bookstore I find them in is classified as a good bookstore.
***
Finally, at the fear of sounding like Drif, here’s a look at some of our acquisitions, where we found them, and a bit of commentary:
Adding to the erotica collection, we picked up a stack of
stunningly-covered men’s, or is it women’s, magazines from the early 50s here:
plus, we also found these little titilators
Here’s a shot of the young woman who sold them to us
This is called deliriously happy in Mexican bookseller circles.
There was a 20 percent off sale on revistas (40% on books) after Christmas, so we returned to buy a bunch more.
***
We bought this splendid likeness
here
where you’re not allowed to take photographs. Any cover that belittles Hitler is an automatic go.
***
An eye-glazing, nostril hair-singeing sulfurous stench of cat piss pervaded this shop. We hurriedly looked at some scuffed up mags in the back, then beat a hasty retreat. You’ve been warned. Enter here at your peril.
We visited this sweeter smelling shop close by,
and asked to look at some early editions by the mysterious author B. Traven - about whom, more later. Took a couple of photographs. This clearly irritated the staff
CDMX is a haughty little dog town.
Bookstores are a last refuge for cats.
After you’ve scoured all the shops on the street, I’d recommend stopping in here to check out the art books
and then continuing on through to the back and around the corner where you’ll find yourself in a relaxing oasis. Great place to sit down
and admire all your new loot.
