All photos: Jerome Weeks
The Wild Detectives is a a woodframe house renovated and turned into a bookstore called The Wild Detectives. It is the perfect venue for readings and lectures, browsing and buying with offerings of coffee, wine, beer, food and vinyl records. It’s on 8th Street in Oak Cliff, less than a block from the Bishop Arts District.
Source:KERA’s Jerome Weeks
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.
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.
Vique says there are a dozen bookstores that work like this in cities like Madrid. “We thought there might be room for something like that here. You know, books, as much as we love them, they’re not going to be the item that sustains the business.”
Despite the name, The Wild Detectives is not a mystery bookstore. Nor is it a Spanish-language one, though it does carry Spanish-language books. The store’s name derives from The Savage Detectives, the celebrated novel by the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano. And that gives some idea of what their inventory is like. It’s literary and sophisticated, it’s ‘multi-national.’ The handsome interior of the store is not wall-to-wall books — it doesn’t have the great mass of bestsellers and remainders found at the typical chain store. This is a small, thought-out selection.
Nowadays, it certainly helps independents that chain stores have been seriously retrenching. And Vique sees his own store as part of a wider trend for the small, the local, the independent, the neighborhood-based – over the big, the corporate, the digital. It’s a trend he sees even in Dallas
“There’s a lot of good things going on here,” he insists, after a list that includes the Texas Theatre, the Arts District, Oak Cliff in general and On the Eve at Theatre Three. “But it takes time to find them. So I said, it’ll be easier to open this place in Barcelona or Madrid — or Austin, actually.
“But,” he adds with the friendly laugh that seems to punctuate half of what he says, “I like a challenge.”
The Wild Detectives
314 W 8th St
Dallas, TX 75208
Bishop Arts District, Oak Cliff
Get Directions
Phone number (214) 942-0108
Source : KERA’s Jerome Weeks
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