PALINURO'S READ BOOKS

Virginia Woolf said that second-hand books are wild, homeless books that have a charm of their own that the domesticated volumes of the library do not. I wonder if what she meant by that is that the visitors of the old bookstores possess, in some sense, the strident spirit of the undomesticated, of the savage, of the morbid seeking the word underlined by the reader that preceded him, or of the one who plays find a book that was once his, as one who tempts fate and its terrible devastating mission.

Near the Fourth Brigade – a division of the Colombian National Army - in the city of Medellín, the myth of Aeneas resonates to then escort behind the collection of read books that fifteen years ago gave shape to a rescue, which still seeks to rescue us from tedium, save us from shipwreck.

Whether it has or not a wild spirit, that may be behind the words with Luis Alberto, our Palinuro bookseller. The past, still present, has the capacity to satisfy the curiosity of the shy reader, the proud reader, the voracious reader, the virgin reader, the untamable reader.

It is Palinuro's read books in the city of Medellín. If the read book and the bookseller share its nature of indomitable spirit, the loneliness of the orphan book, and if all this converges so that the myth is updated and renewed over time, perhaps that means that in the collective sense in which we are all one, you have an appointment in the city of Medellín, with a man who, seated in his generous office, pilots the ship that will make us take a break for moments from our own Trojan war, which is going on as this is being written, while this is read, and even when the book is not enough, although sometimes it is everything.

So, as José Emilio Pacheco wrote, in the book of illustrious visitors of Palinuro: "All time meets in this bookshop."