For five days, while some celebrate the Catholic liturgy of Holy Week and others enjoy their vacations, avid readers meet their favorite authors at low prices at El Gran Remate de Libros y Películas de la Ciudad de México, which began on Wednesday, the 5th and ends this Sunday.
Text and photos: Kau Sirenio
MEXICO CITY.- The halls of the Grand Auction of Books and Movies in Mexico City are abuzz with people looking for their best childhood friends, youth advisors and life teachers: books.
“Look, I read this book when I was a kid,” says a boy, flipping through a copy of Moby Dick. This is how his tour of tent F begins. Then he must navigate his way through the corridors of the 11 tents set up around the esplanade of the monument to the Revolution, where the reading community plucks each table in search of something new.
The Great Auction of Books and Films in Mexico City began on Wednesday the 5th and ends this Sunday, March 9. For five days, readers meet their favorite authors at a low price. There are about 350 publishing labels distributed in 11 tents, which add up to 315 stands with tables where lovers of letters can rummage until they find a novel, poetry or music.
“This is a book auction, we ask publishers, distributors and bookstores to open their warehouses so they can sell it at auction prices ranging from 10 to 150 pesos,” explains the coordinator of the Brigade to Read in Freedom, Paloma Sainz.
save the book
The purpose of the Great Book Auction is to get the books out of the warehouses because they are saturated for two years of the pandemic the books were not sold.
“The purpose of the auction is to save a book, because the warehouses fill up, what they do is shred the books, especially the big publishers. That is why we are creating these spaces so that readers can buy their books at low prices, there is a section in the book law, publishers have to pay taxes for donating books”, explains Saiz.
According to Paloma, the publishers prefer to shred the books because it doesn’t cost them and they sell the remaining bagasse by the kilo for three pesos.
We tell them instead of shredding them, we put a place for you to sell them at a low price”.
The origin of the great auction
The idea of the “big auction” began 15 years ago, when Paloma Saiz was a worker in the Ministry of Culture of the government of Mexico City. The first vintage of the book was in 2009, recalls the cultural promoter. She later founded, together with her husband, the writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the civil association Brigade to Read in Freedom. From there they have continued with the promotion of the book, through fairs and publications.
During the pandemic there was no budget to organize the book auction, so they made an agreement with the Ministry of Culture to do them jointly.
“We talked to all the teammates to see how much it costs us to put all the logistics together and we divided it among all of us, that’s how we did it to leave last year. The truth is that it is much cheaper than we thought”, he says.
Everything happens at the fair. It is not missing that a reader pockets a book or publishers that sell books at a higher price than what was agreed with the organizers.
At the stand of the Brigade to Read in Freedom, people arrive to denounce that in such an outlet they sold the book for more than 150 pesos. The organizers have no choice but to go with the complainants to verify. After striking up a conversation, the sellers agree to return the money.
“There is always some ragtag who, no matter how much we ask for and signed a commitment letter to respect the price, they do not comply. Some believe they are very alive, and put a price on their convenience, even though they were told that it is an auction here, but they pay no attention. If they want to sell more expensive, that’s what fairs are for. Because they all signed an agreement in which they were going to respect the price of 10 to 150 pesos, and if they don’t comply then they will have to hand over the space”, says Paloma.
However, most honor the agreements and people enjoy access to low-cost books. Readers find out that there should not be changes in book prices because a worker from the Mexico City government’s Ministry of Culture walks through the corridors with a megaphone in hand: “The price of a book is 10 pesos to 150”.
Ñuu savi journalist originally from the Costa Chica de Guerrero. He was a reporter for the newspaper El Sur de Acapulco and La Jornada Guerrero, host of the bilingual program Tatyi Savi (voice of rain) on Radio and Television of Guerrero and Radio Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero XEUAG in the tu’un savi language. He is currently a reporter for the weekly Trinchera.
