In 1860, a former labourer from the Catalan provinces founded a publishing company in Barcelona. José Espasa, who had worked demolishing the old city walls, would go on to print Spain’s first encyclopedia. “From building to publishing: that has been the city’s natural impulse,” says the former mayor of Barcelona, Joan Clos.
Today, Barcelona is widely acknowledged as Spain’s publishing hub. More than a hundred Spanish- and Catalan-language publishers huddle together in a city of 1.6m inhabitants, working closely with a rich pool of authors, translators, agents, designers, illustrators and booksellers.
Spain’s publishing industry – the third-largest in Europe after the United Kingdom and Germany – produces some 80,000 books a year. Barcelona accounts for 53 per cent of the output, while Madrid is responsible for 37 per cent. “Barcelona’s cultural identity is inexplicable without its rich publishing sector,” says Ferran Mascarell, Catalonia’s Minister for Culture.
While Madrid remains the main producer of text and reference books, Barcelona is the leading centre for fiction, design-oriented publications and comic books. Spain’s two largest publishing conglomerates – Planeta and Random House Mondadori – have their headquarters in Barcelona. They share the market with well established independents created in the 1960s and 70s, such as Spanish-language publisher Tusquets or bilingual Acantilado/Quaderns Crema.
A new generation is adding to the mix: Duomo, Blackie Books and Libros del Asteroide are just a few of the publishers that Barcelona-based fiction editor Anne Vial describes as “smart, inventive, resourceful, and looking for new ways in publishing”.
These newcomers are part of a tradition that can be traced as far back as the 17th century. Local publishers like quoting from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which the eponymous hero visits a publisher in Barcelona who is printing an apocryphal version of Don Quixote; they discuss the merits of publishing works in translation.
The city’s editorial tradition has much to do with what Jorge Herralde, founder of publisher Anagrama, calls “porosity”. Closer to the French border than to Madrid, Barcelona has always felt “more free, more European” than the rest of the country.
There also exists a tradition of people passing through Barcelona on their way to and from the Americas. In the 1960s, this link led to the emergence of the Latin American “boom” generation that included Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, who spent many years in Barcelona.
It was, says Colombian novelist and Barcelona resident Juan Gabriel Vásquez, “a place where Latin American literature was well received and well read, and which at the time was much more open, more cosmopolitan than Madrid.”
Two names commonly associated with the international emergence of Latin America’s best-known authors are Carmen Balcells, the formidable literary agent known as “la Mama Grande” to her clients, and publisher Carlos Barral, who in 1962 awarded the Biblioteca Breve literary prize to a then unknown Vargas Llosa.
The award, says Vásquez, Barral, “started a movement that took Latin American literature out of Latin America and put it at the centre of 20th century western culture”. Other publishers, notably Anagrama and Tusquets, “allowed a breath of fresh air into Franco’s stuffy Spain”.
According to Enrique Vila-Matas, a local writer, the city, as a haunt for exiled writers, has become “a successor to Paris”.
“Barcelona is an ideal city for writing,” he says. “No one will distract you here if what you want to do is write. And it lacks the oppression of capital cities, where the presence of power eats away at people’s souls.”
The unique cohabitation of Catalan- and Spanish-language publishing, an occasional source of friction, is now commonly regarded as a boon to all sides: “The more recalcitrant anti-Spanish language sentiments are receding,” says Valerie Miles, co-founder of the Spanish edition of Granta magazine and publishing director of Duomo Ediciones. “It’s obvious that if the Spanish language publishers leave Barcelona, the city would lose a vibrant element in its cultural tapestry.”
The Spanish publishing industry has continued to report modest growth even amid the recent international downturn. But, as in all editorial centres around the world, Barcelona’s publishing community now looks to the future with trepidation.
Paula Canal, Anagrama’s foreign rights manager, says the balance of Spain’s “delicate book ecosystem” has so far depended on diversity among booksellers and independent publishers, and on fixed prices.
The system is now under pressure. The entrance of Amazon, the online retailer, into the Spanish market later this year is likely to transform the landscape and put small publishers and booksellers out of business. The sale of e-books remains minimal, but concerns are growing about the effect of piracy, as digital platforms become more common.
Josep Lluis Monreal, the president of Spain’s Federation of Publishing Guilds, seems undaunted. The rise of new technologies, he says, “confirms to me the good health of books and the excellent health of the publishing sector.” Publishers, he believes, are simply creators of content: “Should we worry, then, about being offered the chance to present those contents through new platforms and transmit them through new channels? We ought to worry, instead, about being short-sighted and missing our train to the future.”
In a recent essay Enrique Vila-Matas wrote: “Guessing the future of books in the face of an alleged digital threat is like speculating about how well your favourite team will do on Sunday.” But in his latest novel, Dublinesca, he is less flippant. Its protagonist is an independent Barcelona-based literary publisher on the brink of selling his business to a foreign conglomerate. “Sometimes,” Vila-Matas writes, “he likes to think of himself as the last publisher.”
Barcelona’s book people are surely hoping that this is not a taste of things to come.