Allí donde se queman libros

In the cold early morning of February 15, 1976, a young man stood in front of the window of the El Parnasillo bookstore (Pamplona). He observed the works that he had exhibited, but he had no intention of buying them, much less reading them. He broke the glass, stained the painting books, sprayed them with flammable liquid, and then set them on fire, just as the Nazis had done on Berlin's Opernplatz forty-three years before. The one that El Parnasillo had just suffered was not a rarity, but one of the hundreds of attacks that have been the object of bookstores, book fairs, kiosks, publishers and distributors in Spain between 1962 and 2018. That violent bibliophobia bore the signature of the extreme right, which had been reactivated during the terminal crisis of the Franco dictatorship, and to a lesser extent ETA and its youth entourage. Radicals of all kinds parade through these pages and dedicated themselves to hating, threatening, painting, assaulting, destroying, shooting, and burning books and bookstores, as well as movie theaters and other cultural manifestations. However, this work is not dedicated to them, but to the letraheridos, that is, to those who loved and love literature: writers, readers, editors, distributors, reviewers, translators, journalists and, especially, booksellers.