In his own way, Manuel Arroyo-Stephens became (without haste) the tenant of a non-existent country. A country that he only inhabited once all those, all those, with whom he loved so much died (or fell silent). Educated, lucid and disillusioned, he set in motion a way of being an editor when in 1970 he launched a fragrant old-fashioned bookstore in Madrid, incidentally causing some short-circuits in the bacon atmosphere of the old and second-hand book of that time. The adventure did not last long because a year later he founded the Turner bookstore, then English Turner Bookshop, and two years later he added the challenge of a publisher that he kept independent. He found that making books was almost better than fiddling with them .

Manuel Arroyo-Stephens, a quarter of a liter of Irish blood from his mother, born in Bilbao from 45, with a training in Law and Economics, has died at the age of 75 in Madrid. He did so much to broaden his own life and his passion for books that he became one of the most exquisite publishers from a very young age. Neat, highly cultured, elegant, capable of living generously and with the discretion that the abundance of grace and meaning requires . He never bet on the best seller , his game table was different. In the heat of the difficult poet, José Bergamín acquired unusual knowledge of irony (which he added to his own), contempt, disappointment, vital and editorial independence, and the magic that fits in the bullfighting of Rafael de Paula, by Curro Romero , by Antonio Ordóñez, whom they followed through so many squares . De Bergamín published his last books (among them, The silent music of bullfighting ) and accompanied him in his last year with quiet loyalty. (Bergamín called him Ludovico , after his Beethonian mane ). He was also editor of Alberti. And Arroyo-Stephens also owes the first Spanish edition of La forja de un rebelde , by Arturo Barea. So many, so many extraordinary books like Stanley W. Jackson's A History of Melancholy . He brought Chavela Vargas to Spain so that others could sign up for the discovery . He lived in the US and in Berlin (such a civilized city, he said, that children do not cry and dogs do not bark), but chose Madrid as the site of his final stage . He also dedicated himself to the real estate business, among other favorable jobs .

But what he never lacked is intelligence . Not the instinct that accompanies it on the best occasions. He wrote (and published in March 1980) an anonymous, and later confessed libel, entitled Against the French , with an inflammable subtitle: On the disastrous influence that French culture has had on neighboring countries, and especially in Spain . A sarcastic, exaggerated, shrewd and defiant shake that annoyed part of the respectable Francophile by the desire to unload hooligan as it invited to think .

It took a long time to publish something of his own in Spain. For his own texts he preferred Mexico, where he edited Por tierra (1992) and Imagen de la muerte (2002), although his best book did come out of Turner's press: Pisando ceniza (2015), a miscellany of memories divided into six chapters with some extraordinary pages about his friends and teachers, about his job as an editor, or about his Irish mother ("She and I were the only ones with a sense of humor. It is not about telling funny things but about a mixture of wisdom and character, of understanding and to live life with resignation and integrity, not to take oneself seriously, much less others, to see the absurd side of life without being startled, to cultivate detachment, to be simple and natural as well as understanding and patient with the defects of others ").

Accompanied by a few friends, in a society without ways for the singularity of some beings (Manuel Arroyo-Stephens was), it is a good moment to thank him for the civic work of his editorial adventure, but also for his sarcasm, his elegance, his refined evil as an antidote and his allergy to exhibitionism. This worldly man chose to take refuge in paper and from there build a territory overflowing with discoveries and amazements, with some unusual whim. "I wish I were a simple person like the others," he once commented. It was his way of making friends smile. Which is an advantage that reading also gives.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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