We continue at a good pace with virtual visits to specialized bookstores in the country. Today we take the suitcases to move with the imagination to Badajoz and chop at the door of the magic The Dagor Mines Library.
We are welcomed into his den by the charming Michelangelo, who decided 15 years ago to open a business despite being very young and inexperienced in business leadership, although he had in favor that reading had always been one of his passions.
Its history is full of overcoming, difficult challenges and inventiveness: They told me that the first years would be very bad, even more so for a specialized bookstore in a small town in Extremadura. After three or four years and without having consolidated a decent salary, the crisis of 2008 came. This led to the journey over the years, with marathon days and projects like those of an online store. And, of course, thanks to the help of a mother who provided me with a roof and plate on a daily basis, it was possible that the business was still open and even the increase in stock. More moderate in the first years, greater in the last. And so we finally reached a modest consolidation, thanks no doubt to a loyal clientele from which so many friends have earned. And then … a new tsunami came from Wuhan dragging some of what had been accomplished down the hill like a Sisyphus curse. Anyway, because that, we will take the stone and with new tools such as the Youtube that I just opened we will go back up the slope.
The name of the bookstore also has a history: It is the one that we had a group of colleagues when we were just in high school. Name for the group and for the place where we met, Minas Dagor. Friends united by love of literature, in particular Tolkien's worlds. Dagor mines are words taken from the Tolkien imaginarium. And they became the capital of the kingdom of some kids who barely reached adolescence. Endless kingdom thanks to the masters of literature.
Miguel Ángel has transformed his premises into that special place where he can get lost and his clients into friends with whom to share hobby and preferences: There is everything, it is not a question of idealizing, but there are many customers who are now friends. And it is that an assiduous client ends up undressing emotionally before his bookseller. Every time he chooses a title, he talks to you without knowing himself.
The type of public that visits Dagor Mines is varied, From that kid who puts candles on the Virgin of Fatima to get him out of the turkey age, to octogenarians with such brutal baggage that they give you a bath of humility for my thirty years of compulsive reading and my fifteen years of bookseller.
Your favorite series or comic published by Planeta is…
Here I could put an endless list, from Fahrenheit 451 from Ray Bradbury to Saga from Brian K. Vaughan but since he is well born he is grateful I choose The Lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien published by Planeta under Minotaur.
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Address: Ana solo de Zaldivar nº 22 Local Baj. Don Benito (Badajoz)
