Being a university bookseller is a responsibility

A conversation with Manuel Obligado about the profession of recommending 

He grew up in 9 de Julio and has been working at the National University of General Sarmiento bookstore for eleven years, turning young students into readers.

By Malena Saito

“University bookstores in the province have social potential. They democratize the right to read. Before, kids could only access certain books or publishers if they traveled to the capital,” says Manuel Obligado , who has worked for eleven years as a bookseller at the university bookstore of the National University of General Sarmiento , which depends on the UNGS publishing house.

The bookseller's trade

He grew up in 9 de Julio and was fortunate enough to start reading at a very young age. It was his grandmother who instilled this passion in him. “My maternal grandmother was born in a small town called La Niña, with a population of one hundred. She always said that the best days of her life were those spent with the man who sold magazines continuously. She was a voracious reader and my role model. The first book that fascinated me, which we read together, was One Thousand and One Nights,” confesses Obligado, who, while reading that book, also dreamed of one day writing the longest story in the world. As a teenager, he would sneak out of town to go to Buenos Aires in search of the latest books. He spent all his time in bookstores. “ I didn’t realize how unfair that was, that I had to pay for a ticket and travel 300 kilometers to access literature ,” he recalls.

For many years he worked as a bookseller in various commercial bookstores in the Federal Capital and it was a shock to arrive to work at a university bookstore where the goal was not to sell, but to be a kind of guide. Someone who would guide and help readers and books find each other. 

“At first I didn’t understand anything. Then I started to understand. The kids who come to university don’t have books at home, in general. They are mostly the first generation of university students. I started to realize that it was also a responsibility. It was the first time that many of them spent money on a novel and I wanted that novel to make them want to read all the others,” he says, adding that something that also pleasantly surprised him was realizing that the surplus value of his work was kept by the public university and not by a company. That is something that he realized was gratifying, and made him want to think of more and more strategies every day to make reading a habit for all students.

“The exercise of reading helps you to make the relationships between ideas more flexible. It expands the possibilities you have for reasoning. It helps you to understand others, to imagine yourself, to imagine. It makes you enjoy silence, it makes you enjoy solitude, it makes you not need another person to have a good time. It allows you to have less superficial, more intellectually developed dialogues. From book to book, throughout the centuries, there are dialogues between people who spent a long time alone developing their ideas, so they are much deeper and longer-lasting conversations. It exercises your capacity for pleasure through language. In short, it makes you more empathetic,” says Obligado, and his words resonate in these times where ignorance is raised as a flag and critical thinking is on the run.

A small big problem

For this bookseller, as for anyone familiar with the book world, the biggest problem in a country as large as Argentina is distribution. Distances across the country are vast, and if booksellers don't act as promoters of reading, market forces win out. Self-help as a genre and foreign best-selling authors dominate. "The government should take responsibility for creating a network so that books by Argentine authors and national publishers can travel and reach everyone," says Obligado, who also dreams, along with the REUN (Network of National University Presses), of one day organizing a university distribution network, since universities have a national, territorial, and geographical structure that would allow them to break certain market-driven logics.

It is well known that large bookstore chains buy entire runs at a discount and have priority access to new releases because they guarantee simultaneous visibility in many cities. “I think it would be very useful for us to function as a distributor. All systems would have access to the stock of other university bookstores and, if I don’t have a book, I can look for it in another one. We could open accounts with the publishers together and that would make them more interested in being in our bookstores, because we would guarantee exposure in many places at the same time. In addition, we share criteria with all booksellers. One always knows more about one subject than another. We would generate space for dialogue and training. I think it would be a very interesting way to make the work we do visible, which is important, I think we have to prioritize the profession of bookseller,” reflects Obligado. 

The bookseller is the human factor that breaks with the algorithm. He is the one who can make it possible to access readings that are not similar, but rather mark diagonals on the tastes of readers and broaden their conception of the world. “Booksellers have to stop being seen as employees of commerce, because the work they do for bibliodiversity is greater,” he adds.

The proposal she supports, along with REUN, is simple and deserves attention. Most universities have their own publishing houses. A university distribution network would be a good way to amplify the voices of university authors throughout the country and break with a certain "Buenos Aires-centric" way of writing and viewing the world—a point that students often emphasize to her at the bookstore.

More at hand

“There is a very strong construction of the Buenos Aires imaginary. When books come from a certain world, you also notice that they are written for a certain circuit and that outside of that they do not hold up as much as they think. I believe that this hegemony ends up being bad for everyone. We would be richer if we had the literature of authors from other provinces closer at hand and these are books that do not arrive because it is very expensive to send them and vice versa, books from the Province that also have no place in the capital,” he affirms.

The question that hovers over the issue is why the university bookstore plays a similar role to that of libraries, or how one structure differs from the other. Obligado has a peculiar answer to make room for reflection. For him, the difference has to do with desire. The very mundane desire to possess the material. “People want the book to be theirs, to be able to mark it, write on it, underline it. Another pleasure is at stake. The relationship we have with books is a physical relationship; for some reason they have been announcing the end of paper for years and it does not expire. It is a physiological relationship. We want to have books in our hands, take them for a walk. Read them in the bar, in bed, to those we love, to our friends,” he concludes.

In times when the house is not our own, in most cases, perhaps having a library of our own is a way of possessing something and even more so of creating a universe to our measure where books, like paintings, tempt our visitors to spy on how we are thinking and understanding the world.