I remember the glory days of Emma Rodger’s Black Images bookstore. So many notable authors over the years appeared for book signings at the treasured store in the Wynnewood Shopping District. It was a sad day for black book lovers when they Emma and her partner closed her doors. We lost a nationally renowned landmark and a community touchpoint.
Even I recently joined the ebook community this year but still love the joy of discovering new books in a BOOKSTORE. The good news is that lately small bookstores are making a comeback. The newest entry in Dallas is The Wild Detectives. It is not an African American centric bookstore but let’s hope it succeeds and maybe eventually one of us will get brave enough to open a Black Images for the 21st Century.
Jerome Weeks visited The Wild Detectives recently for Art & Seek:
“[Paco] Vique and his business partner, Javier Garcia del Moral, are both from Spain. They work for a multi-national construction company based in Madrid. They both came to Texas several years ago. And Vique and del Moral are not experienced book industry insiders. In fact, they’re civil engineers.
“Yeah, roads and bridges,” he says with a grin. “So we are partly the ones to blame when you are sitting in traffic because of that construction going on. There’s a good chance that we had something to do with it.”
Yet here we are, sitting on the porch of a woodframe house the two have renovated and turned into a bookstore called The Wild Detectives. It’s on 8th Street in Oak Cliff, less than a block from the Bishop Arts District. It’s Saturday afternoon: Children play down the street, people drive by slowly in cars, looking for places to park as close to Bishop as they can get. Vique and del Moral live nearby, and the bookstore wasn’t their first culture project in the neighborhood: Two years ago, they started the Pata Negra Spanish-film series at the Texas Theatre.
But their new bookstore has been a fantasy of theirs. It’s another attempt to bring something a little more cosmopolitan, a little more European to Dallas. It’s a bookstore that serves coffee, a little food, but most notably: beer and wine. And it’ll present concerts, maybe even screen films.”
See more at: http://artandseek.net/2014/03/14/going-after-the-wild-detectives/#sthash.Yo3DaOf4.dpuf
