On the literary street, the 24-hour bookshop, and what Buenos Aires means by reading
Avenida Corrientes does not sleep. The bookshops don't either — which is the kind of civic arrangement that requires a city to have decided something.
Avenida Corrientes does not sleep. This is not a metaphor. The pizzerías are open at midnight, the theatres let out at two, and the Librería Ávila — at the Teatro General San Martín end of the strip — has, depending on the version of the story you believe, been open continuously since 1968. Buenos Aires has made the 24-hour bookshop a civic institution, which tells you something about what the city thinks literature is for.
The street is known as Buenos Aires's Broadway, but this is the American import version of its identity. The deeper version is literary: the tango bars and the pizza counters and the late-night print shops exist in the service of a neighbourhood that reads. The bookshops on Corrientes are not tourist destinations. They are neighbourhood infrastructure, and they operate accordingly — irregular hours, uneven stock, a particular expertise that varies by owner and cannot be catalogued online.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, on Santa Fe rather than Corrientes, is the one that appears in the travel writing: a converted 1919 theatre, the stage now a café, the balconies shelved with books, the painted ceiling intact. It is correct to visit it, and it is equally correct to acknowledge that it is a beautiful building containing a bookshop rather than a bookshop that happens to occupy a beautiful building. The distinction matters for what you are looking for.
The smaller shops on Corrientes operate differently. They are arranged by the logic of the owner's enthusiasms rather than by genre or alphabetical order. The used-book stalls under the avenue are a different economy again: the collector's economy, where a first edition of a minor poet appears between a water-damaged mystery and a 1980s medical textbook, priced for someone who knows what it is.
What Buenos Aires understands about books that other cities have partly forgotten: that they are social objects. The bookshop is where you find out what your neighbourhood is reading, what is being reprinted, what has been recovered from out of print. Corrientes at midnight is proof that this particular understanding is still operative.