The Librería Anticuaria Rafael Solaz occupies a stone-arched shopfront in El Carmen — visible from the street by its carved wooden sign and the warm light of its interior through the glass. The stock is antiquarian: leather-bound volumes on dark mahogany shelves floor-to-ceiling, a mezzanine reached by an iron spiral, loose lithographs and maps laid across a central table, a Valencian ceramic vase with dried flowers beside a globe on the counter. The browsing here is unhurried not by policy but by the nature of the stock — old books require a different attention. The glass door opens to the arcade street; in the afternoon, the light from outside illuminates the bindings on the lower shelves. A bookshop of the kind that no longer opens in cities that have not maintained the infrastructure for them.
El Carmen, Valencia, Spain