Even the title of the book is pretty, I mean exact. ‘Beauty’ is as tricky a word as ‘common’ is straightforward. The subtitle is just as forthright: ‘Spain: Store by Store.’

The content is easy to explain: on a Juan March Foundation grant, Javier Sánchez Bellver traveled around Spain during 1977 and 1978, taking pictures of storefronts, business signs, shop windows, and advertisements of old establishments in forty-seven Spanish provinces: groceries, shoestores, pharmacies, bakeries… If I have it right, from 1985 on, the architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, who knew about the project, covered the three remaining provinces. The project came to a standstill, and in 2022 Fernández-Galiano revived it, writing texts to go with the photos. They are concise, simple, very Azorín...[+]