cafes, cafe-bookstores, bookstores part II

a few more cafes for reading books, cafe-bookstores, and bookstores:

camarín de las musas .. mario bravo by córdoba, more or less. In the back there are rehearsal/class/performance spaces for modern dance and yoga, in the front tables and a few couches .. the food is good, the coffee is at least drinkable, and they have all handmade pottery to serve things on.  Very comfy.  Deserves special notice because it has a bookshelf with books if you forgot your own .. mostly in spanish, but a fair number in english as well.

the aroma (forgive me!) in recoleta by the cemetary – if you want a nice outdoor cafe in which to watch people between pages, this is right next to la biela, and when la biela is full this sometimes still has space.  they also have some pretty cozy couches downstairs in the basement lounge area when I’m in the neighborhood and it’s cold or rainy.  it is however the corporate aroma chain, so forgive me!

gandhi: I don’t care for it that much as a cafe, but it should still have made the other list being that it has a bookstore.  on corrientes.  a famously progressive/left wing intellectual bookstore that now has a small cafe in the front.  the problem is that the cafe feels very much the afterthought.  the selection of books is great, but the tiny little cafe in the front really doesn’t feel like a place to lounge in.

crack-up – also nice, very near plaza serrano in palermo, i don’t recall the exact street.  good selection of books in the bookstore, friendly sort-of-indoor-patio cafe in the front.

a bookstore I like that hasn’t a cafe, and whose name I’ve forgotten .. on callao between santa fe and cordoba, on the side of the street away from the center, is a little shop right next to a men’s clothing store, close to the corner, that specializes in philosophy, history, lit/cultural crit, unusual literature, etc. a rather large percentage seem like books translated from french/english/german/etc into spanish, which doesn’t appeal to me as much, but there is a decently selection written originally in spanish as well.

librousado.com – there are scads of used bookstores in BA, but most of them are pretty depressing .. lots of crappy unappealing books in really low quality editions that are falling apart already, and with a very tiny selection.  this site seems to be part of a network of quite a few used booksellers in BA, and when i did a search for a book I couldn’t find, including a “notes” type field where I could be more specific about what I wanted (this is all in spanish, btw), I got answers from half a dozen booksellers  from all parts of the city who had a copy of what I wanted.

also found some more bookstores here

http://lalectoraprovisoria.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/postal-de-buenos-aires-17/

and here

http://argentina-taxis.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html (warning on popups)

with some bookstores I hadn’t tried

oh, for english books, the usual selection is what you already foudn in the airport on your way here .. big bestsellers in cheap paperback .. go to walrus books in san telmo, a mostly-used bookstore that buys and sells english books, mostly I think from travelers .. you can get a lot of things you’d never otherwise find here, or unload the ones you brought with you and have already read

I was told of a bookstore near cordoba and callao that has a wide selection of books in french, but never foudn it.  if any of you know of other foreign language bookstores, do let me know!