The Musaraña bookstore, located in the Buenos Aires district of Vicente López, fue distinguished with the Prize for Bookseller Work of the Publishers Fair (FED) for carrying out activities that go beyond the sale of books, to function as a publisher specializing in comics, to position itself as a meeting place with the reading community and to consolidate itself as a cultural powerhouse, where those who attend can “find what they were not looking for but they needed.”
“Beyond the sale of books, we are a publisher dedicated to comics and graphic experimentation for both adults and children, with the `Musarañita´ collection”, he told Télam Alejandro Bidegaray, bookseller and creator of the place award-winning, located at General José María Paz 1530, in an old property called “Casa Florida”.
Although in the beginning Musaraña’s curatorship focused mainly on national and international comics, now features a wide variety of independent publishers such as Sigilo, Godot, Caja Negra, Chai Editora, Santos Locos Poesía, and for this aspect, among others, she was awarded the “Library Labor Award”. “It seems to us that it is a very good prize, that it is well thought out and that it returns within the same chain, so it sets all the sectors in motion”, points out the bookstore Julia Bustos.
For Bidegaray, the award is “particularly important” for encapsulating “the recognition of colleagues.” “One in the bookstore is recognized by customers every day, because many people profess their love for you or say things like ‘it’s good that you are here’. The bookstores become small beacons in the neighborhoods,” says the founder of Musaraña but “Having the recognition of authors, publishers, editorial brokers, journalists, who are people who work with the same subject matter as you every day, also gives you a lot of joy.”
A few days after receiving the prize, in Musaraña you can see at least 25 boxes displayed behind the counter. “The prize is 350,000 pesos that can be spent within the same FED with a limit on the amount of money that you can spend per publisher, so that yes or yes it is equitable,” Bustos specifies and, while lifting the flaps of the boxes full of copies, he adds: “Every award carries a great responsibility so we tried to buy some new materials and other books that we were missing from Gog & Magog, some from Bajo la Luna, others from Sigilo or Corregidor”.
in the old house, Musaraña shares the space with “Casa Florida Vinos”“a proposal for small wine cellar with the same independent spirit and Soma, a coffee shop“, according to Bidegaray.
“We opened it with my dad, Juan Carlos. At that time, my brother was giving music classes and doing events. My mother had a photography gallery. Each project grew through different branches but it is still family-oriented in an old house “recalls the bookseller about the origins of entrepreneurship. The reading public that visits the space can also find an outdoor patio equipped with tables and chairs.
Bustos, a bookstore that joined the project in 2017, provides a piece of information that she considers “important” and that is that Musaraña is from Pisces, since the opening of the bookstore coincides with the season of that zodiacal sign: “We feel identified with Pisces because we are very sensitive and also, it has something magical that is managing to take what happens to people to turn it into a book”, says the bookseller.
Also, “Shrew is the name of a small mammal”, Busts account. The Animals mole-like and excavates burrows that are lined with vegetation. “The bookstore is like a cave, a refuge”observes and adds: “People come in and immediately feel comfortable. In addition, the wood provides warmth and a very specific detail that Alejandro -his co-worker- made is that he painted it black. That makes it more of a burrow”.
“For me, it is very important that the people who enter a bookstore want to stay. Because if not, there is no way for the person to find what they did not come to look for but the bookstore has to offer. If the person enters, he wants to stay and can chat, he begins to find what he wasn’t looking for but needed”, considers Bustos about the small and warm design of Musaraña.
The bookstore, decorated with old buckets transformed into lamps that make its central table shine, also has the peculiarity of operating, according to one of its founders, as a “cultural producer”. With the aim of promoting and producing culture, Together with his team, Bidegaray carried out “a lot of parallel activities in the bookstore and outside of it, around graphic arts, with illustration and drawing exhibitions”.
In this way, the bookseller curated two festivals: the `Festival Fanzine´, held in conjunction with the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center, and the ´Sudestada Drawing and Illustration Festival´, at the Recoleta Cultural Center, together with the illustrators Ezequiel García and Ángela Corti. “Later we put together other mission activities around comics in foreign festivals such as the Ficomic in Barcelona, in Mexico with the `Grand Hall’ and other tours that brought together the national comic scene,” he adds.
At the FED, Musaraña finds “a place to hug people,” says Bustos, and defines this fair as a place where “people line up for three hours and enter in a good mood.”
about it that implies the “library work”, Bustos reflects: “The bookseller has a sensitive responsibility, because he tries to understand what the reader needs and, furthermore, it is a cultural responsibility regarding what one wants to be promoted.” In this sense, he takes up the metaphor of the bookseller as “medium”. “Being a ‘medium’ means that a person asks for something and the bookseller/ra has to transform what he/she asks of you, which is abstract, into something material, which is a book, with a cover, spine and pages”, he explains.
During the pandemic, Bustos acknowledges that this practice “was extreme” because, as the bookstore was closed, they had to go for a very limited selection of books and offer them to customers at the door. “People gave themselves up. It was great,” says the bookseller, highlighting the confidence of her clientele during this period.
“Within the culture, we were the only ones to benefit from being declared ‘essential’ so we worked throughout the pandemic. It was a big challenge because people couldn’t get in. We did not have an online store so we had to convert our way of recommending by phone, WhatsApp and Instagram. The way of working was radically transformed, it was assimilated much more to an algorithm than to the tremendous humanity that relationships in a bookstore entail,” recalls Bidegaray about the challenges faced during the health emergency.
Despite the difficulties, Mousefur grew. “Although we had a lot of clients, we added a lot more. We almost had a major stress peak, but we survived,” Bustos jokes. For her, hehe neighborhood bookstores increased in value during the health emergency.
“Many people who lived two blocks away, they met us during the pandemic by looking for bookstores on Google Maps. Suddenly, people who went downtown and visited the chains, could not or did not want to go. So, they began to move within the neighborhood Those who were going to larger bookstores realized that there was another type of bookstore they could visit,” he says.
for busts, all libraries are important but they are different models: the “chain” ones work on what he calls “the table”, they work on the novelties, instead the independent ones -such as Musaraña- do it “on the shelf, on the room in general, on the editorial fund”.
“We have the news but we also have a lot of other things, we don’t just work on ‘the book to sell this month’. We do have them because that allows us to have a cushion for this to be a profitable business, if we don’t have because it seems like crap to us”, analyzes the bookstore about the different profiles that are configured in the sale of books.
“We not only make customers or sales, we generate readers, who then go to other bookstores. That is why I consider that businesses do not compete with each other but rather form a cultural circuit with each other”, synthesizes Bustos.
