And regarding transnational circulation, the Spanish-language publishing industry achieved an unprecedented feat: its books traveled like those in no other epoch before it. A transatlantic publishing circuit reached its peak. Writers in Latin America, aware of the prestige and larger distribution available by publishing their work with a leading Spanish press, began to do so. Thanks to this circuit, on the one hand, Latin American writers exported literary ideas and manuscripts to Spain. And, on the other hand, publishers in Spain turned them into books sold nationally and in Latin America. Under these favorable conditions, Spanish publishers produced thousands of cheap paperbacks that were sold in Spain and Latin America. A center of this transnational circuit was not in the region but in a different country and continent: the city of Barcelona. By the mid-1960s, this circuit was in full swing and readers in Spain and Latin America faced an avalanche of Latin American literary works.5
A DIVIDED AND LOCAL PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
Small print runs, few new literary titles, rampant piracy, and local circulation made it impossible for most authors to live off their writing in Latin America until the 1960s. The situation of the publishing industry was so negative that it reduced the achievements of the region-spanning intellectual class that emerged in the early twentieth century.6 The audience for most literary works was mainly fellow writers, friends, literary salon attendees, and readers of local periodicals. Rather than a full-time professional, the typical author was a weekend writer. And rather than books, writers wrote for periodicals, since they were the dominant form of publication for new literary works, including novels, which often appeared in installments. Publishing with a regional press that could reach a transnational audience was a dream only within the reach of a minority of senior writers. García Márquez had to wait two decades to attain his dream of finding a Latin American publisher. As he wrote to a critic, “I was distressed to see my books in local editions, and scattered across different publishers,” which hindered their regional circulation. Despite the initial success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, newspapers in Peru and Colombia described readers’ difficulties buying copies, due to poor book distribution or hefty importation tariffs.7
Given the state of the publishing industry in the region, it is not surprising that the most widespread literary form until the 1960s was the short form: poems, essays, and short stories. This state of this industry shaped what writers in the Short Form, Hybrid, and Novel Generations produced until then—each generation defined by the format of works by its most influential members. Writers had to adapt to see their works published in serial format, printed in small numbers, circulated locally and, if sold abroad, pirated. Borges, a member of the Short Form Generation, published his first book in 1923. It was a collection of poems entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires and was printed by a local publisher. Its print run was three hundred copies. Recalling his experience, he said, “It did not occur to me to take a single copy to bookstores, nor to newspapers, and there was no talk of success or failure.” It took years to sell all the copies, mostly bought in Buenos Aires. Several of the poems in the book, for which he received no royalties, first appeared in newspapers and magazines in Spain. The debut book by Julio Cortázar, a member of the Hybrid Generation, sold two hundred copies. It was a collection of short stories entitled Bestiary (1951) and included “House Taken Over,” a short story previously published in a small local magazine in Buenos Aires run by Borges. A decade was necessary to sell the initial print run. Another member of Cortázar’s generation, Juan Rulfo, said, “I was frustrated” because “the first editions [of my short stories] were never sold. They had print runs of two thousand copies [and the ones] that circulated did so because I had given them away. I gave away half of the print run.” García Márquez, a member of the Novel Generation, did the same with the copies of his first book, Leaf Storm. And the second, No One Writes to the Colonel, was originally published in a Colombian magazine, and he received no royalties for it.8
Although an analysis by word count would be more precise, the publishing output in number of pages by members of each generation confirms the popularity of short forms of literature before the 1960s. For the Short Form Generation, the average length of the works published between 1923 and 1959 was 151 pages. In the 1960s, when the New Latin American Novel rose, the average length went over two hundred pages, since members of this generation published more frequently and wrote longer books. Asturias, for example, published four novels, one novella, and three books of essays. Carpentier published his longest novel until then, Explosion in a Cathedral (423 pages). And José Lezama Lima, who for the past three decades wrote mainly poetry, published his monumental novel Paradiso (617 pages). In the Hybrid Generation, Ernesto Sábato, who until 1961 had authored a novella and a book of essays, published his first novel, On Heroes and Tombs (417 pages). And Cortázar, known as a short-story writer, attained international recognition in 1963 with the publication of his novel, Hopscotch (635 pages). Likewise, the most successful members of the Novel Generation were those who adapted to the new demands of the publishing industry: long works of fiction.9
All three generations produced more pages because the modernization of the Spanish-language publishing industry in the 1960s motivated writers across generations to imagine longer literary works. In reality, no generation was more skillful at writing novels than the others. Before this modernization, the regional publishing industry gave more incentives to short-form writers. Those who did not conform to the industry’s standards faced obscurity. The case of Leopoldo Marechal’s Adam Buenosayres is paradigmatic. This member of the Short Form Generation dared to publish in 1948 a 741-page novel, which was the Argentine response to Ulysses by James Joyce. Adam Buenosayres had a small print run and most critics ignored it. After that, it was dormant for decades. Yet this novel became a national and Latin American best seller after the release of a new edition of ten thousand copies in 1966 by Sudamericana. Additional printings of ten thousand copies followed in 1967, 1968, and 1970.10 Of course, this success is linked to the fact that, in between the 1948 and 1966 editions, the industry published more long forms of literature, especially novels. Thus, when in 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude came out at 352 pages, it was just part of the new normal in publishing.
POLITICS, PRINT CAPITALISM, AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The efforts from Spain to control the Spanish-language book market helped Latin American literature succeed commercially in the 1960s.11 These efforts were politically engineered by the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco. In 1959, the government approved the Stabilization Plan to improve the country’s ailing postwar economy and to end international isolation. Three consecutive plans of social and economic development followed. These plans initiated the so-called Spanish Miracle. Book publishing, along with tourism, was deemed a priority industry for national growth, and government officials considered Latin America a key market. As an official report on foreign trade stressed in 1963, “THE FUTURE OF THE EXPANSION OF THE SPANISH BOOK INDUSTRY rests upon the situation in the Ibero-American market, precisely where this industry is now threatened.”12 To achieve its goal, the government reformed the production and supply of raw materials for book publishing, introduced fiscal incentives for book exports, and adopted a protectionist policy against book imports from Latin America.
The Spanish government, however, had a long way to go because in 1936, when the Civil War began, exports collapsed. Publishers in Latin America filled the gap left by Spanish companies. The main beneficiary was the Argentine book industry, which boomed during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1937, it produced 817 titles and 3 million copies. By 1944 it produced 5,323 titles and 31 million copies, of which two-thirds were exported. Average print runs of nonliterary books increased from 3,500 copies in 1936 to 11,040 in 1953. (Average print runs of literary works were smaller.)13
Spain’s book exports recovered slowly after World War II. The rate of annual growth in exports between 1949 and 1959 was 16.69 percent, and it grew to 36.73 percent by 1973. The average numbers of titles also increased. The weight of books shipped to the region reveals an even