In search of readers – and his personal libraries – Javier Vargas de Luna has toured the Hispanic city on both sides of the Atlantic. He has visited all the accents and all the frontiers of reading in our language, he has been in and out of bohemian bars on Lake Titicaca, he has frequented book dumps in Havana and he has wandered through the desolate squares of San Pedro de Atacama. In Salta he met the city's bibliopaths before strolling through the busy markets of Madrid or Montevideo, and he has become a regular at the marginal cafes in La Paz as well as at the prison libraries of Asunción, Paraguay. He walks through shelves, interviews glances and goes through covers before recognizing himself in the surprise of the common individual who has allowed himself to be defined, almost at any time of his destiny, by a leading author. As the cities and the souls found pass by, his discoveries take shape in this original collection of essays where genres intersect: BIBLIOTECAS AJENAS is a literary reflection as much as a travel notebook, and it exhales the aromas of an intimate diary as well as a journalistic chronicle. Above all, it is a treatise of anticipated nostalgia that seeks to triumph over the much-heralded extinction of the book as we have known it until today. With this first volume, its author begins an encyclopedia of readers of the Hispanic world whose second volume is already in its final stage; the third, entitled Isolated Libraries, is devoted to the reality of reading in the island-cities of our language.