The Lemus Bookstore will celebrate this Friday 50 years of its foundation in The lagoon “resisting” since those beginnings, in 1973, in which he had a back room where restless readers could find the prohibited works for him Francoismfrom Neruda and García Lorca to one hundred years of solitude.
They are part of the memories that Francisco González Lemus, co-owner of a bookstore that was born as a small family business, a stationery store located on Heraclio Sánchez de La Laguna street, and that 20 years ago opened in the Trinidad Avenue the largest technical bookstore on the island.
“He is a hero”, the mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, has described him, since having a bookstore implies “effort and sacrifice” but, in addition, in the case of Lemus, it means speaking “of history and essence”. of the city and as such, the City Council will soon give it a plate for its identification as a historical business.
Francisco González Lemus has admitted that the celebration of this anniversary means proclaiming “we are still here, resisting”, since society is evolving and, if before 50 copies of the Labor law, today there are five because readers download the works online.
“You have to recycle and move,” González Lemus specified, something that the bookstore encourages with writer signing acts and promoting readings that are not exclusively textbooks, such as comics.
A situation different from that of its beginnings, at the end of the Franco dictatorship, when the bookstore became a meeting place for students, writers and people with political concerns who went to its back room to look for “forbidden books”.
There they could locate poets such as Neruda, García Lorca, Gabriel Celaya and “everything” politics, since everything related to the ideology of socialism, communism and anarchism was prohibited, González Lemus recalled.
This was possible thanks to the distributors that imported the books published in South America and that, currently, have also disappeared. Curiously, the “morbidity” created by reading the readings prohibited by the regime disappeared in the Transition when the law that allowed censorship was abolished in 1976, the co-owner of Lemus has specified.
Proof of the establishment’s adaptation to changing times is that this week, on the occasion of its anniversary, it has programmed at its main headquarters, in addition to a meeting this afternoon with the 2023 Nadal Award winner, Manuel Vilas, the presentation tomorrow of the comic dedicated to Juan Negrín and on Wednesday another edition of the same genre, “The third act”.
On Thursday the bookstore will host the presentation of the books critique of fucking reason and Sex work with rightswhich will be followed by a discussion with the author, Paula Sánchez, and Kenia García, from the Collective of Prostitutes of Seville, which will be moderated by the professor of Sociology at the University of La Laguna, Marta Jiménez.
The celebration of the establishment’s half century of existence will be officially held on March 17, before which the mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, has proclaimed a “long life to Lemus!”.
