And all for a tuberculosis that had it, at age 22, away from the world. "It lasted a year and I spent it dedicated only to reading (to Sartre, among other authors), which gave a turn to my life and where I think is the root of the creation of the publishing house."
Jorge Herralde , son of a "sensible industrial metallurgist", was dedicated to follow the family tradition, which for that he had studied industrial engineering. He could also continue to win prizes as a rider by jumping obstacles. But the effort to read and spread what he had discovered crossed his mind .
Passionate about writers 'diaries, the first book he had in his hands, "probably shaking", was L ' Ofici de Viure (The Office of Living) by Cesare Pavese, in a short-lived collection in Catalan. It was April 1969. "The narrator Pavese did not excite me excessively, although I read it eagerly; it seemed subtle, yes, but somewhat cold. Instead, I was excited about his daily tormented, corroded by his difficult love relationships, which they finished with the last notes before the suicide: "All this disgusts me. Enough of words. A gesture. I will not write more".
Pavese was followed by Baudelaire , by Jean-Paul Sartre. And Details , by Hans Magnus Enzensberger; Laclos. Theory of the rake , by Roger Vailland and The Judgments of Moscow , by Pierre Broué. A declaration of intentions. Today, at 84, he tells La Esfera that he got into the trade "for sharing enthusiasm, to change, naively, the world; to make it less unfair." A spirit that was deeply rooted in the late 60s, with the recent echo of May 68, the claims of black athletes at the Olympic Games in Mexico that same year, the protests against the Vietnam War ...
Jorge Herralde has not yet gotten off that carousel, where words like passion, enthusiasm or indestructible vocation are repeated.
What are you reading now? I've been excited by Martin Amis's latest book, The Touch of Time , or The Friend of Sigrid Nunes. I read and reread them. And I'm starting a very promising manuscript of Román Gubern, a movie buff in the Vatican. What do you reread? The memories of Esther Tusquets , Confessions of an old unworthy lady , and those of Román Gubern, One Way Trip . And I am about to reread the three extraordinary memoir books of Carlos Barral gathered in a volume and published by Peninsula. Don't miss it. The author who couldn't hire Borges. I had some iron contracts. Isn't it edited too much? You can't ban it, right? The editorial drive is inextinguishable. Jorge Herralde retired, in his own way, in 2017. He left the publishing house in the hands of Silvia Sesé . Two years earlier, Anagrama had become part of the Italian group Feltrinelli, but he continues to go to the publishing house every day, as António Lobo Antunes continued to go to write to a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon where he had worked as a doctor although he already charged the pension. "I go every day, except when I have some editorial trip: Frankfurt, Mexico, frequently Madrid and this week Formentor." Anagrama publishing house, and others like Tusquets or Lumen, were born when there was hunger and thirst for something different , need for color before the grayness of Franco, when Barcelona was the cultural reference of Spain, where García Márquez and Vargas Llosa lived, and Marsé and Vázquez Montalbán, and Gil de Biedma and Terenci Moix, and Eugenio Trías, and a good part of Castellet's Novísimos, with a young Pere Gimferrer of helmsman, many of them having drinks in Bocaccio. Some were members without a card of the brotherhood of a Gauche Divine that offered by the new times. "Barcelona was the cultural capital of Spain. Madrid was strangled by the regime. It was also the cultural capital of the Spanish language. By a strange conjunction, they were splendid times for culture, despite the fierce censorship; although perhaps it was also a stimulus the exultant sensation of struggle against the Absolute Evil, Francoism, without forgetting the dire and most holy Catholic Church. "Between 1968 and 1969 censorship advised against 39 titles. "The usual procedure at that time was to submit the original manuscripts, or untranslated foreign books, to the so-called voluntary consultation. The Ministry authorized the publication, advised against it or provided a list of passages to be deleted," Herralde wrote in One Day in the life of an editor (Anagrama). "I found that there were a number of particularly taboo subjects: the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, the French May, the urban guerrillas and, of course, any non-canonical allusion to the Civil War, its antecedents and its consequences. Although the range of prohibitions It was as extensive as it was multicolored: we were also banned by the Songs of Maldoror , Lautréamont, or About Hashish , by Walter Benjamin. "Five books of which you feel most proud. Of five extraordinary authors, already deceased and very friendly, are: Love uses of the Spanish postwar period , by Carmen Martín Gaite; Trilogy of memory , by Sergio Pitol; Diaries of Emilio Renzi , by Ricardo Piglia; The wild detectives and 2666 , for me inseparable, by Roberto Bolaño, and Crematorio and On the shore , by Rafael Chirbes. What has changed in these 50 years in the world of publishing? Except that it continues to be published on paper, so many and so many things largely unsettling. What qualities must an editor possess? First of all, an indestructible vocation. Against all odds. A happily inevitable drive. What do you regret? If the publishing house had not started before, but it was very complicated. Let's open the Anagram catalog, which has just been published, at random . For the letter B, for example. They appear, among others, Alessandro Baricco, Djuna Barnes, Julian Barnes (with 20 titles), Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Baudrillard, Jaime Bayley, Samuel Beckett, Frédéric Beigbeder, Thomas Bernhard, Harold Bloom, Roberto Bolaño, Jane and Paul Bowles , Malcolm Bradbury, André Breton, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Gesualdo Bufalino, Mikhail Bulgakov, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski ... Bukowski. Jorge Herralde visited him and the meeting was watered with eight bottles of Rhine wine. "Empty containers", Juan Gabriel Vásquez has written, "used the editor to bring water to his poor reheated car". Throughout this medium century, Anagrama has published, until last April, 4,049 titles , if the co-editions are added. The best-selling book is Silk , by Alessandro Baricco: 600,000 copies. It is followed by The Conjure of the Fools , by John Kennedy Toole, with 400,000 (whose rights, by the way, were acquired by Jorge Herralde for about a thousand dollars). And, very close, Blind Sunflowers , by Alberto Méndez, with 370,000. On this book and the work of the publishing house, the film director, novelist and language scholar Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón has written in the catalog of this anniversary: "I have always thought about that primal moment in which someone in Anagrama opened a manuscript in which he said: "We now know that Captain Alegría chose his own death blindly." This journey along a line that had previously only been traveled by the author, and which was now read by new eyes, that moment, I say, is unique, and like the passage of a kite that only shines once in a lifetime, one would have liked to be there. " Jorge Herralde also has time for another passion, football . Or Barça, which is not the same but he still thinks so. Legend has it, through the oracle Jorge Gabriel Vásquez, that soccer player Josep Guardiola finished the novel Bella del Señor , Albert Cohen's exciting novel of almost 800 pages of small print, 10 minutes before the Cup began in Wembley in 1992 from Europe that won the culé team. The now Manchester City coach seems to have commented: "I went to the field with goosebumps, excited for the end." You always looked abroad, that those first years was not usual ... From the beginning I was subscribed to the best literary magazines of France, Italy, England and the United States. His excellent critics were often, say, involuntary contributors. I have also traveled a lot in Latin America, not forgetting the constant presence at the Frankfurt Fairs and the Paris Book Fair. And frequently, but with less intensity, in Torino and London. I read in French, Italian and English, and in the publishing house we have always had excellent readers in these languages and some in German. Thus, a catalog has been growing, its own book, which was synonymous with quality for several generations. What books or authors have not been understood / understood by readers? As has happened in all literary publishers, too many excellent authors who, for mysterious reasons, have not found the public they deserve. It is not exactly new; Stendhal, little read in his day, said he wrote for the readers of the twentieth century. And he succeeded. How far is this image: "I remember my father's dumbfounded face when I told him that I was going to launch an editorial. I would tell the young aspirant to ignore the unanimous advice not to undertake such nonsense and prepare for the marathon. " One might know why he has not written his memoirs where he detailed anecdotes of one and the other, what is the formula for having managed to sell 300,000 copies of The God of Little Things , by Arundhati Roy; 280,000 of The Reader , by Bernhard Schlink; 220,000 from Brooklyn Follies , by Paul Auster; 200,000 of En el camino , by Jack Kerouac; 180,000 of Lolita , of Nabokov or 150,000 of 2666 of Roberto Bolaño. Perhaps because, as André Gide wrote, one of the functions of every newspaper is to be an informer, and he is not.According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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