Rare Book Monthly
Bookstores in Costa Rica
Modern Libreria Antares caters mainly to students.
We left San Jose shortly thereafter to go to the deep, dark Caribbean beach and jungle town of Manzanillo. It feels like a 1930s Bogart movie set, rife with palms, mangrove swamps, flowers, and, of course, tourists. Lo and behold, we found two bookstores. One was in a Thai Restaurant on the outskirts of Puerto Viejo, about 10 miles north of Manzanillo, and was primarily English and Spanish used books, with a smattering of German, that had been collected and shelved by David, another English-speaking person who wanted to find something to read.
Just down the road a piece, we found a sign at the edge of the jungle; "Echo Books." From the sign, one had to walk about a half mile down a narrow gravel path with thick jungle on either side. We were waiting for a bus that we could not miss, or we would have gone there to see what was up; it looked intriguing. I think we may have missed the only real used bookstore in Costa Rica! I spoke with an American gal in the restaurant nearby and she said it was a really nice store, 3-4 rooms, with lots of used English books; sorry we missed it.
We were getting toward the end of our month-long journey and had heard about a really fine library that we shouldn't miss. It was in a town called Turrialba, known for its volcano and its agricultural status. Here we found another exception to the rare reader rule, a Tica named Lorena Maria Quirós Ramirez. Now, here was an interesting gal! She was, she told me, the only woman taxi driver in Costa Rica. We later found out that there are two others; one in San Jose and one in Cartago, but she is a third generation taxi driver. Her grandfather, father and brother had all driven taxis in Turrialba. Her brother died in an accident and she took over his driving job, and has been doing it for years. She was just a hoot! Lorena was a friendly, beautiful Latina, and one of the two sanest taxi drivers we rode with the whole time. When we got into her cab in the pouring rain, to head the 5 kms to the CATIE Institute, she was reading a book of Spanish poems. We yakked, a mile a minute, in broken Spanglish, all the way to our destination, El Centro Agronomico Tropical de Investigatión y Enseñanza, aka CATIE.
