On the bookshop that was a theatre, and the particular quality of reading inside an act of preservation
El Ateneo Grand Splendid was a theatre before it was a bookshop, and it has not entirely decided to become one. The stage is still a stage. The boxes are still boxes. The books are simply where the seats used to be.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid was a theatre before it was a bookshop, and it has not entirely decided to become one. The stage is still a stage — now a café, but a stage nonetheless. The boxes along the walls are still boxes, gilded and tiered, now containing readers rather than spectators. The books are arranged where the seats used to be. The fresco on the ceiling dome has not changed since 1919.
The experience of spending an afternoon here is the experience of being inside a building that has survived its original purpose and found a second one without shame. Most cities would have demolished it. Buenos Aires found it a use.
The book collection at El Ateneo is not curatorial in the way that smaller independent bookshops are curatorial. It is comprehensive in the way of a large institution — Argentine literature, Spanish translations, international bestsellers, children's books, academic texts. The quality of the collection is not the point. The quality of the room is.
Buenos Aires has a literary culture that is not a tourist attraction — it predates the tourism and continues independently of it. The city produces writers, publishes them, and reads them in a way that is structural to how the place understands itself. Borges lived here and set his fictions here and the city has absorbed this without turning it into heritage. The bookshops are part of daily life in a way that is unusual outside of certain South American cities.
I spent three separate afternoons in El Ateneo on my last visit. Each time I bought one book and read part of it in the café on the stage, looking up at the fresco. The book was different each time. The fresco was not.