Mexico City 7 : Bookstores

It’s a feast for the bibliophile on Calle Donceles in the Centro district. Located in one of the older sections of the city, Donceles is only about a block from the Zocalo, and it has imposing old buildings, cobblestones and wrought-iron lampposts. Happily, the book shops are clustered together as is the fashion in Mexico City -- there’s a street for perfumes, a street for jewelry, a street for lighting and electrical fixtures, and so on. Even more happily, the Bookstore area on Donceles Steet was not very far from our hotel, maybe ten short city blocks.

These are my kind of bookstores [1], i.e. they are stocked with old, used and musty books, which are varyingly piled on tables; spilling out into the streets; or stuffed onto very high shelves, some which take a 12 foot tall stepladder to reach. The ones piled on the tables are my faves because they are the cheapies!.

But the pick of the lot may well be a little store in a location not on Donceles Street. The bookstore is the Méjico Viejo, and it’s smaller than the typical used bookstore in Mexico City but much tidier and with a classier, more professional look with two floors of tightly packed antiquarian volumes. Its unlikely location is the Pasaje Iturbe, a commercial indoor mall that runs from one street to another (there’s a Starbuck’s nearby at the corner of Gante and Madero and that was our point of reference which eventually led us to the Méjico Viejo). 

Librería Méjico Viejo. Pasaje Iturbide local 11, sobre calle Gante 6, entre Madero y 16 de Septiembre, Centro Histórico, Del. Cuauhtémoc, México D.F

See also : Kurt Hollander, “Mexico City's Literary Circle,” L. A. Times, 8 Nov 2009; and Browsing the Bookshops on Calle Donceles.

  [1] In Mexico, at least in Mexico City, the bookstores don’t seem to have much of an online presence, not yet, anyway. A few spot searches in ABEBooks limiting the results to a Mexico location yielded nothing. One of the happy results for the collector is that there are bargains to be found in certain specialty areas like pulp fiction and (non-Mexican) antiquarian.

Statue of Augustine de Iturbide

Pasaje Iturbide shops. The Mejico Viejo is 
about half way down on the left.