Cafés de Madrid que nos dejaron huella

• Available for collection only at Café Central Madrid – Pl. del Ángel, 10, Centro, 28012 Madrid, Spain *
• Available in Spanish only *

Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas (Editors)
Juantxu Bohigues (Direction and coordination)

Back Cover
I like cafés. I like the cafés of Madrid. They are the legacy of your grandparents, the memory of those smiles, those words you never dared to say, those farewells that—without you knowing—were final, those phone numbers you never dialed, those crossed notes for a revolutionary book you never wrote, those faces that disintegrated like grains of sand on the soles of your shoes. When a café closes, I feel that I have failed at something, that there is a part of my life I will never recover.
Those concerts at Café Libertad and those young people who recited their first poems with insolence and wisdom; that Café Lyon, half French, half Spanish, half from nowhere, where you could sit and drink water without ordering anything; that Café Parnasillo, where they served a pepito de ternera at four in the morning.
Fifteen writer friends have gathered here to pay tribute to our cafés. The past walks with us all, but books and stories remain, passed along as if we were minstrels from parents to children.
Let us toast to the cafés that remain. To the Central and its jazz; to Gijón and its writers who passed through, still pass through, and will continue to nourish minds; to the Comercial, where I spent twenty-four years of my life and attended the gatherings of the aviators of the Civil War, which at first were marked by defeat; the last of them still came, raising a glass to his friends, even though all of them were gone and we kept reserving the tables for him. And the Café Real, Café Berlín, Café Manuela, Café di Roma, Café Varela, Café Viena, Café Galdós… Let us pay homage to those places that, for the price of a coffee, gave us so much.

Juantxu Bohigues