Today we’d like to introduce you to Javier Garcia del Moral.
The WD are the result of a long conversation, probably not the most articulated one but always very enthusiastic, on which longtime friends Javier Garcia del Moral and Paco Vique spoke passionately about things –books, wine, bands- they loved.
These two friends were imprudent or reckless or simply ignorant enough to actually realize that 10-year beer fed thought, grown at random bars all over the cities -Madrid, Dublin, Dallas, Mexico City – their actual job as civil engineers took them.
So, The WD are now a reality and Javier and Paco, instead of endlessly preaching, intimidating and invading friends, family or stranger spaces, to talk about what people should read, drink or listen to, have now found a more civilized and less threatening way of spreading the word about those things that are really worth it.
And that is how, The WD are now at least offering to their founders, the immense satisfaction of being able to expose a local band or a small author or a remote wine to those wider audiences that The WD feel they deserve. The satisfaction of enjoying those serious pleasures with you.
The Wild Detectives’ name is a loose translation of Roberto Bolaño’s Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Detectives, 1998), from which the business takes a lot more than just the name. Our mission at The Wild Detectives is to curate all those things that matter, those serious pleasures which turn life into experience.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
When we started our business we called it among ourselves our anti-business, basically because selling books is probably not the thing to do these days to make money; however, keeping in mind that our goal was always to connect with people through the things we love, I have to say that it has been a really smooth road. Dallas citizens embraced us since day one and it´s been overwhelming the response we have been getting from our customers and collaborators. Right from the start.
Please tell us about The Wild Detectives.
Print books are surviving the ‘digital menace’ and sales have increased for the third year in a row. There is a national renaissance of the independent bookstore. Just here, in the Metroplex, 2 fantastic new bookstores, Deep Vellum (Dallas) and The Last Word (Fort-Worth), opened last year, and more will be joining this very year. We’re thrilled to be part of this ‘literary awakening,’ as local author Kathleen Kent calls it. Our city is demanding a bigger, better and more diverse cultural offering every day and we want to meet this challenge.
Over the past 3 years we’ve been selling books trying to find the right balance between the industry cycles and a curated selection, which has always been a challenge for us considering our limited shelving space. Keeping that balance between curation and a more general selection made sense to us, considering that we were the only independent bookstore in town. But we’re not anymore.
So, from now on, we’ve decided to move away from that model. And to do so, in the following days, we’ll be reaching out to Dallas Literary community –from writers to readers, from librarians to publishers and book-sellers, anybody we know involved in any way in the belles-lettres– and ask them to share a list of their favorite books with us. We’ll also reach out to friends in the literary community that we have across the globe: Spain, Mexico, Ireland, France, Australia, Chile and many other countries all over the map.
The books on all those lists will be the books we’ll be selling on our shelves. With some time, we’ll be able to say that every single book that we have in our shelves has been recommended either by us or by someone from our reading community. Luckily, we have many book-lover friends here and abroad, and this initiative will allow us to refresh our selection constantly with a never-ending combination of interesting picks.
All of the above doesn’t mean that we won’t be bringing new books to our shelves. We will still sell a good number of new releases by authors that we love, but overall, we’ll reduce the amount of them slightly in relation to our co-curated selection. We will just focus on new books that we find relevant and move away from the quick-paced, high-volume industry cycles.
We want to close the circle and have our community as both subject and object of the curation efforts that are expected from us as a local independent bookstore. A few months from now, any book you get from our shelves will have been blessed by someone that we trust as a reader, whether it’s a new release, a well-known title or those others that went overlooked by the general public; a 100% community curated selection.
In these last 3 years, we’ve programmed over 300 literary/cultural events. It’s been such a ride. But we have the feeling we’ve lacked a certain focus. Were all the events that we had interesting enough? Rich enough? Probably not. Were these events addressing the topics that are relevant to our community? To a certain extent maybe, but probably not as much as we would have liked to.
In order to improve in this matter, we’ve decided to narrow our programming and curate our events with the same level of detail that we curate our books. We´ll try to limit our literary/cultural events to one a week, and make sure that we host events that you simply cannot miss.
We want to explore new formats to talk about Literature, formats that are more playful, more engaging. We want to move away from the book-presentation format in which an author comes, reads from her book, does some Q&A and signs. We want to explore new formats to talk about Literature, formats that are more playful, more engaging. We want to open a dialogue around those topics that matter to us as a community, a constant exchange of insights and ideas. We want to invite the local talent to bring their voices to the table and join the conversation. And above all, we want our community to feel empowered, energized and engaged by it.
And in addition to all the above, we´ll keep doing music, plays and any other crazy thing you dare to propose us…
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Our main struggle is always the space but I have to say that it also became a blessing, we have to adapt all the different activities we do to the space we have, and that forces us to be very careful with everything we do and carry, from the number of events to the number of titles or even the cocktails we do. We don’t have space for things we don’t think are essential. But yet I wouldn’t mind to have a few extra hundred square foots!
Contact Info:
- Address: 314 west 8th Street Dallas, Texas 75208
- Website: wwww.thewilddetectives.com
- Phone: (214) 942-0108
- Instagram: Thewilddetectives
- Facebook: The Wild Detectives
- Twitter: @wilddetectives
Image Credit:
Kathy Tran
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
