As he himself explained on the flap of his works, “since he was little he cultivated the dreadful habit of reading.” And writing: more than 80 essential books to know in detail the history of Barcelona and to approach some of the leading figures of Catalan culture. With this background, it is no surprise that Lluís Permanyer – how strange and painful it still is to speak of him in the past even seven months after his passing – felt at home among the shelves of a bookstore.
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La Laie was little less than an extension of the journalist’s living room who for almost 60 years delighted the readers of La Vanguardia by immersing them in a well of wisdom. La Laie wanted to honor one of its most loyal neighbors and clients by dedicating the covered terrace of the bookstore-café in what was his lifelong neighborhood, the Dreta de l’Eixample.
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Dozens of people, undoubtedly more friends than acquaintances and greeted by Lluís Permanyer, shared a warm memory this afternoon with the journalist’s family in the room that now bears his name. The cultural temple on Pau Claris street had this magnificent gesture, accompanied by the publication of a small book (Lluís Permanyer in memory) in which more than twenty cultural personalities praise with their writings, photographs, or drawings the figure of the most gentlemanly man of Barcelona, who suddenly left us last October 23. A magnificent portrait by photojournalist Roser Vilallonga presides over this terrace that somehow keeps Permanyer’s presence alive in what is his natural habitat. Definitely, Lluís stays at home.
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The Laie bookstore pays tribute to one of its most loyal neighbors and clients
Actress Àngels Bassas and bookseller Enric Aymerich officiated the tribute to this “incorrigible urbanite,” the sommelier who invited his sons Marc and Aleix to smell the aroma of books because “the smell of books shows the personality of each of them.”
Affection, consideration, esteem, and respect are words that define Lluís Permanyer’s relationship with the Laie bookstore, “his bookstore,” a relationship of loyalty but which in current terms we could also describe as open, because in it, amid an unmanageable sea of books, there was also room for healthy competition. And as his children have pointed out, it is very likely that Lluís, like Jorge Luis Borges, had always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library.
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