Rare Book Monthly
Bookstores in Costa Rica
Typical bookseller's cart in San Jose; the "bookstore" in Rope Americana.
We stayed the first week at the Hemingway Inn, which we picked because of the literary reference, and because it was so damn cute. It, like many buildings in C.R. was rife with bougainvillea, palms, helinconia, and other tropical flowers and plants, inside and out. We figured it must have been the home of Ernesto Hemingway when he lived in C.R., but as it turned out, E.H. had never been to Cost Rica -- there probably weren't enough big animals to murder! It seems that the person who originally owned the house had a Hemingway fixation and there was Hemingway paraphernalia all over the place.
The Inn was a nicely remodeled, 1920s affair, right in Barrio Amon (the city is split into barrios or neighborhoods), really close to downtown where the action is. It was very reasonably priced and came complete with outdoor patio, complimentary breakfast area, hot tub, very independent on-demand shower heads, and two shelves of "take one, leave one" books in all languages; I took one and left one.
Right across the street was another hotel in a former residence. Beside the hotel was a door on the outside gate that had a beautiful book carved into the top of it; the house was the former residence of the Minister of Cultural Affairs.
All along the brick wall of this yard, were colorful tiles set into the wall depicting scenes from Don Quixote. We thought maybe this was a good sign for finding bookstores, but it didn't turn out that way.
After our first week at Hemingway's, we moved a few blocks away to what turned out to be our major (much quieter) home away from home. Kap's Place in San Jose was a charming little guest house hidden behind a big, red garage door, with the security of Fort Knox. It was a place we could park our extra luggage and the laptop when we went off for a week to some other part of the country, then come back, spend a night regrouping, and bus off again, knowing our stuff was secure.
Bookstores in C.R., which has a population of a bit over 4.1 million (most of whom live in the larger cities), can be anything from a shelf in a clothing store littered with tattered used books to a rare, almost Barnes & Noble-like affair in a mall; well lit, and well stocked. As we strolled along the narrow streets of downtown San Jose, we only found two or three real bookstores. Mora Used Books is touted in the newspaper as a good used bookstore, but it was mostly well-used paperbacks, CDs, rock music, DVDs, comic books, and not very good hardbacks. I found a lot of the same commonplace books that we see here in every thrift store. It was rather dingy and books were stacked in total chaos all over the place. The store seemed to be full of English speakers, looking for new mysteries or romance novels to take along to the beach. I scanned a few shelves and most of them were quite antiquated while not being antiques. We didn't really find anyone to talk to except the clerk, who, though very pleasant, didn't speak any English, and did not know much about the store itself.
