Atlas of the Unnecessary: Livraria Bertrand
First chronicle of the most bibliophile of flâneurs. Today, on the streets of Lisbon.
Bouquiphiles
Rafaelo Doménico della Mora
A bibliophile flâneur, chronicler of literary dust, emotional dissident of underlining. He was born on a warm dawn in 1973 in El Vedado, Havana, in an apartment filled with more books than optimism. The son of an exiled Neapolitan typographer and a Cuban paleography teacher, Rafaelo grew up among yellow papers, bread lines, and official speeches that sounded like bad translations of Sartre. At 19, fed up with communism and compulsory enthusiasm, he traded slogans for a plane ticket. He left for Europe with a notebook, a book by Lezama Lima, and the vague hope of finding a bookstore where he wouldn't find copies of the speeches of the supreme leader or diaries of guerrilla fighters with writerly pretensions. Since then, he has wandered through cities as if they were notepad margins: looking for hidden libraries, quiet bookstores, and cafés where the waiter won't take offense if you stay reading for five hours with a single espresso. He writes chronicles that are part essay, part covert poetry, and part reckoning with reality. His style mixes irony with encyclopedic manners and a nostalgic tenderness for useless things, that is, for everything that matters. In the bookstores and libraries he visits, he leaves his mark on books that still have no owners. He maintains his digital existence at almost mystical levels (he can only be contacted by letter, but no one has his address). He is currently working on a volume that no one commissioned, entitled ‘Atlas of the Unnecessary: itineraries without an index through bookstores and libraries’.
