🖋Matías Siebel BBC

In the past 30 April, Marçal Font, at the bookstore “Phoenix” in Badalona, Catalonia—one of the well-known hubs for buying and selling used books—was faced with an unexpected request.

The poet and professor of comparative literature at the University of Barcelona told BBC Mundo: “I’ve been working selling used books for 20 years. So I’ve seen millions of odd purchases, and I’m no longer surprised.”

The order came from a company based in Canada, but this was not the first time that this bookstore had shipped books in Catalan abroad.

Marçal Font says: “We even send books to Japan and that isn’t strange, but the pattern of the purchase was unusual.”

When a new batch of orders arrived in early May, Font decided to investigate for fear that the matter might be a kind of scam.

Flip through the album and read the rest of the story from the link below on the BBC Persian website.

📷 Getty/ GENTILEZA MARÇAL FONT/GENTILEZA MIGUEL ÁNGEL ORTEGA