The spectacular clutter of a secondhand bookshop | Adeus aos Livros (Goodbye to Books)

‘It’s a chaos with some order’ - step into the spectacular clutter of a Portuguese secondhand bookshop in its waning days.
Directed by Diego Quinderé de Carvalho
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Adeus aos Livros (Goodbye to Books) documents the waning days of Ulmeiro, a secondhand bookstore on the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal. Owned by 76-year-old José Ribeiro and his wife Lucia, Ulmeiro is the kind of shop that’s so crammed with books, magazines, comics and CDs that, at any given moment, one may feel as if they’ll be crushed by centuries of information if they pull from the wrong pile. And yet, Ribeiro seems to have the entire shop organised in his head, knowing if he has certain rare books in the stacks when patrons enquire.
Through the Brazilian filmmaker Diego Quinderé de Carvalho’s lens, Ulmeiro is at once a book lover’s paradise and a Marie Kondo nightmare. With his carefully framed shots, he captures the organised chaos of the space in all its anachronistic glory - complete with a dedicated store cat and an old, sluggish computer. Within the film, Ribeiro isn’t shown to make a sale, as if he’s more preoccupied with collecting and holding knowledge than keeping the store open, all the while walking a fine line between preservation and hoarding. In Ribeiro and Ulmeiro, Quinderé de Carvalho finds an apt metaphor for the nature of memory itself - precious, scattered and inevitably impermanent.

[@JM-ke8es]

Thank you this was such a nice watch. I wonder what happened to José and Salvador. So much told in this video in such a short amount of time, beautiful.

[@simone222]

I don't know how to explain it well, but bookworms have this special vinculum with books. Amidst the chaotic beauty, you know where to find the particular book/s you are searching for. And your fingertips also seem to know the exact page/s you are keen to read. Thank you, Aeon. Loving your articles ever since several years ago when you still had Disqus. Now, I'm loving your videos.

[@m.karavia3259]

The whole thing, the shop, the owners, the cat and most of all the books standing in the safe positions of chaos, is a poem of icons. Chaos gives the real positions of balance, if the books fell from chaos, they will end up in other positions of chaos. In a perfect stillness. Congratulations for the choice to be book- keepers. And many congratulations to Aeon for such a wonderful poetic documentary.

[@sachinkrishna7993]

Such a great place to be. Amongst those piles of disorder, one could run into books that longs for you to open and read. Afterwards, shuffled back yet again to some other random pile, where it awaits its next temporary owner.