"La Española" Bookstore in San Luis Potosí, the oldest in Mexico

Carlos Morán de la Rosa pays tribute to the oldest bookstore in Mexico, in his book Librería "La Española" de San Luis Potosí (2014), a work that seeks to remind us of its origins and the mark it left on its readers. .

From textbooks to great works that fed the libraries of the potosinos, La Española, whose creator was Saturnino Sánchez Parres, is already a traditional bookstore.

In addition to introducing us to the origins of Saturnino Sánchez, this book seeks to show us the beginnings of the bookstore, its permanence in the taste of the people and its development as a publishing house.

“This work aims to contribute from the figure of Saturnino Sánchez Parres and the La Española bookstore, in the reconstruction of the bookseller past of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rescuing the relationship, or possible relationship, of the Parres with the publishing field”, says the author.

Likewise, through the documentation it even seeks to demonstrate that La Española is the oldest bookstore in Mexico.

According to the exhaustive documentary research, the author refers to the existence of Hispaniola, from February 1887.

It is through the texts "Memoria y olvidu" and "Olvido y memoria" that the author seeks to integrate a hypothetical exercise that gives voice to Saturnino Sánchez Parres. In them, evidently, they do not seek to capture a rigor appropriate to the facts; Rather, it tries to offer the environment in which Hispaniola was born.

On the other hand, mention is made of the reader, a fundamental part of the life of Hispaniola. There is an antecedent of it, that it was the taste for the European, which encouraged the fascination for reading, in those years.

“The taste for the foreign, the fashions in favor of the European, especially for the French, was another factor that promoted reading. Whoever could and wanted to be up to date with fashion, or read the authors in vogue, in books and publications, had the best means to do so”, the text states.

This, among other great quasi-biographical stories, is that this work takes us by the hand of the more than 120 years of history that La Española keeps, a space that has been in charge of providing the city and its region with countless publications.

La Española turns out to be the oldest company in its field in Mexico of those currently working”.

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