Approaching Showtime, Our Mexico Bookstore Faces Another Hurdle
Chapter 28: Where the rubber meets the road
Hola Amigos! Sitting here in limbo, watching days fly by on the calendar, and well aware that high season, Christmas, would be with us all too soon. Now we needed to get those gorgeous red cedar shelves made and installed. If you’re just reading our saga now and want to catch up on early chapters, see the menu at the top, Where the Sky is Born.
Our books miraculously cleared customs within three weeks which completely amazed me after meeting the rudest bureaucrat I would ever encounter, Antonio, our customs broker. After telling our customs from hell story to Joe Marino, he communicated directly with the broker, paid him for us, and told us to sit tight.
Remarkably the books, which sat on the Puerto Morelos dock most of that time, were easier to release than our household goods. The cost wasn’t as high as I feared. We were told used books are taxed at a much lower rate than new books when clearing customs. Our bill, including storage at the dock, three hundred USD. A steal, if you don’t count the days taken off our lives by worrying and wondering.
In the meantime, we busied ourselves with painting and decorating the store plus measuring for shelves and scheduling time with Arturo to build them while we awaited the books.
We had a lot on our plate, including setting up corporation papers and getting green cards or working permits. In Mexico these are called FM3s and are a requirement for all foreigners working in the country.
We also needed import-export documents so we could continue to receive books in Mexico. In retrospect, how we managed to to have 15,000 books cleared without an import license and not much more documentation was truly a miracle. Maybe the dock needed the space taken up by all those boxes. We’ll never know.
Our storefront faced the town zocalo with a clear view of the low-key square and basketball court. Oftentimes the only proof of life was one of two lanky Weimaraners sprawled every which way that belonged to the owner of Pepe’s store.
Our bookstore’s outdoor porch had a palapa roof and large accordion-fold windows allowing ample sunlight. We opted to make this area a children’s reading room once things got settled.
Next we picked paint colors and I chose a bright mustard yellow called chabacano, or apricot. It brightened the walls and added a Mexican flair. The indoor windows opened onto the palapa covered porch and were made up of small panes with a wooden trim. We decided to paint these and the doors turquoise blue, called Maya Azul.
The combination blue and mustard was colorful indeed. Having the ceiling painted was our next project and we opted for white. We also realized we had to figure out the number of track lights and ceiling fans the store required. Plenty of each. Good lighting—a necessity in a bookstore.
Arturo dropped over one afternoon while we were painting and we talked about the shelves and helped him measure, letting him know size, depth, width. We also asked if he could create a few display cabinets for special books. As a master carpenter, whatever we needed, he could supply.
Arturo had not yet acquired the red cedar for the bookshelves but told us he planned a trip to Chetumal for his buy and would leave that week. He could finish construction on our shelves within four weeks. We checked the calendar and asked him to promise us that completion date, as we hoped our green cards and corporation papers would be ready within the month.
Once we received them, we could legally open for business. Already time had flown and it was early November. We were learning quickly that red tape was an intrinsic part of the Mexican landscape and that was something we were obliged to accept.
While waiting for Arturo to finish our custom-made shelves, we talked to the electrician. Track lighting would require additional electrical junction boxes, we were told. Did we want to reconsider and use regular lighting?
We insisted on track lighting as it would accentuate the books and displays; we told him he could start any time. We also confirmed the number of ceiling fans to hook up—old reliable VEC fans would keep our store cool.
Surprise delivery
Several days after the books cleared customs at the Puerto Morelos dock where they’d arrived weeks earlier, the broker’s truck dropped off two hundred plus boxes at our doorstep, unannounced. Luckily we were at the store working away, getting the store prepped as much as we could, sans books.
We marked each genre box by box, and knew the next step would entail alphabetizing by author—a hellish chore, but of course, an essential one. Our book guru said this task would be horrendous (he was right) but it was not fair to the customer to not alphabetize by author. We had seen one sloppy bookstore in the Haight where books were randomly sorted, lying all over the floors and shelves.
Also, without sorting, it would be impossible to find any book in the store, and as mentioned, I’d been in bookshops where this freeform method was used, totally impractical.
We assumed it would take a few days to sort and alphabetize the lot. After nearly a week we were still not finished—the task was horrendous, The guru was right about that. All the books were stacked in neat, long rows along the walls throughout the store. Orderly chaos.
Red cedar shelves
When Arturo showed up the next day we were ecstatic, expecting to hear good news about our shelves. We desperately wanted them finished so we could pick up the books from the tile floor and deposit them properly in place. But Arturo was apologetic and seemed hesitant about when he could actually deliver finished shelves. We couldn’t figure out the exact reason for the delay.
When pressed, he explained there had been unexpected torrential rains recently and our wood had been stacked outside his warehouse. Unfortunately the wood became water logged and he felt it needed more drying time before he could fashion our shelves. Our disappointment was obvious. He paused a moment, then said he would try to cut the wood over the weekend and bring us shelves the following Monday. We figured we still had a few more days of alphabetizing to do, so we said we could work with his timeline.
Our biggest surprise in working at the store those many days before we actually opened for business was how anxious people were to see just what we would be selling, and when we would open. After years in the Bay Area, we had grown accustomed to not going overboard with being neighborly. Well, here in Puerto Morelos, it was time to shift gears. Everyone we met was friendly and seemed anxious and excited about having a bookstore in town. It just never occurred to me, after Joe Marino said no one in Mexico reads, that a bookstore, our bookstore, might be popular.
Arturo showed up that weekend earlier than expected. He had the bookshelves with him in his truck but told us there was one little problem. The shelves were still a bit damp, so to absorb any possible moisture, we should first place a piece of cardboard down before placing the books on the shelves. We agreed to this and began cutting up empty book boxes as templates for the shelves.
That very afternoon, after his workers carried everything in, the installation process was completed. We began stacking rows of books from the floor onto our brand new book shelves. The wood was a soft caramel color and looked beautifully in sync with the mustard-colored walls.
Work begins!
Since fiction was our largest genre, we decided to tackle that first and get those books properly placed. Then after seeing how much space was needed there, we’d have an idea where to position our other 19 genres.
As night fell we decided it was time for a break and dinner. I stepped back from the rows and rows of books we’d placed on our brand new varnished shelves, admiring our handiwork.
“Aren’t they beautiful, Paul?”
He nodded in agreement. One row looked a bit askew and I grabbed onto the cardboard underneath to straighten it. It was then I realized in horror that the cardboard underneath the books was soaked!
“Paul!” I screamed.
“What?”
“The shelves, they’re soaking wet! And they’ve completely soaked through the cardboard!”
“What do you mean?” In a flurry he checked the cardboard I was pointing at. “You’re right! The books!”
“We’ve got to start pulling them off immediately, before they get wet. We can’t let them get musty!” Next to fire, a book’s worst enemy is water.
“Don’t panic. We have to be orderly about this,” Paul insisted.
“Don’t panic, don’t panic,” I muttered in a Ricky Ricardo voice, feeling way too much like Lucille Ball at that moment.
“Damn,” I cursed, as I began my descent into hell, pulling all those carefully placed books back off the shelves and onto the floor below. “Will this never end?”
We arranged the books in a somewhat orderly manner. Again the floor was a pile of books, just when we thought that part of our work was at an end. I felt defeat with each shelf that came back down, after having had it so finely displayed—for about half a day.
Within one hour, everything was back on the floor. Not a moment too soon. When we looked at the cardboard we realized how wet the shelves had actually been and how much water had soaked into the cardboard. How had we not noticed? If we’d allowed the books to remain on the shelves overnight, we would have come back to a disaster.
“So much for Arturo’s idea about the shelves and the cardboard,” I pouted.
“Let’s come back tomorrow. I think I’ve taken all I can take for one day,” Paul said.
We were both tired of stacking and shelving and this was certainly an unexpected nightmare.
What next?
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Backstory—Puerto Morelos sits within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. By living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland we pyramid hopped on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids, the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them, not to mention meeting archeologists, tour guides, and local Maya who popped into the store. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’ll never stop being enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here in Mexico Soul. Please share this post if you know others interested in the Maya. Thank you!
This is where the already interesting story of moving down to the Yucatan becomes fascinating. You two were so intrepid and brave to start a bookstore!
Hey Jeanine - This is an amazing adventure full of twists and turns to launch a bookstore in Mexico. Bravo to you for having the courage and stamina to make it happen. BTW, the only two English language bookstores in Guadalajara closed during the Covid pandemic. One sold new books and was a long-time business operating in a modern street-level building with lots of space and great lighting. The other sold only used books with wooden bookshelves jammed full of interesting titles, but it was not well-lit and was in a cramped space on the upstairs level of an old shabby building. The aged owner died and I don't know what happened to the books. Sad.