AT THE BEGINNING WAS THE PAPER
To modernize its publishing industry, Spain faced a major obstacle: paper production and supply. Research on cultural production has often overlooked the importance of raw materials, as if resources were plentiful in general. But their scarcity constrains the production of cultural goods.15 In Spain, a chronic shortage of paper between the Civil War and the early 1960s threatened the viability of the national publishing industry. Furthermore, paper shortage remains an understudied factor in the reduction of book exports to Latin America. By 1958, the problem was so acute that the lack of raw bisulfate, a chemical needed for making paper pulp, forced Papelera Española—Spain’s main paper mill—to cut its production by 50 percent. At that time, the paper-related economy was responsible for 1.2 percent of Spain’s commercial income, and 55 percent of this income came from paper used for publishing. Paper, indeed, had become a valuable commodity, and its importation for publishing purposes was taxed at an exorbitant rate: 42 to 47 percent. Given the high taxes on paper importing, publishers had to adopt a conservative publishing agenda. They refrained from printing innovative novels and new authors because those ventures were risky and unprofitable.16
The solution to paper shortage came from an outside agent of cultural production, the government, which adopted measures that made an immediate and long-lasting impact on the rapid modernization of Spain’s book industry. To ensure that publishers bought paper in favorable conditions of quality and price, the government began to sponsor loans for paper importation and to offer tax breaks for paper used in the publishing industry. In addition, a 1962 ministerial order approved tax refunds of 5 percent for publishers to cover importation tariffs on paper. (Publishers had been asking for these refunds for almost two decades.) These fiscal incentives on paper production and supply made it possible for existing and new companies to imagine literary publishing as a profitable business. The positive results of these measures were immediate. Months after the 1962 order, The Time of the Hero by Peruvian writer Vargas Llosa became a best seller. It sold sixteen editions in nine years. Such sales were materially impossible in literary publishing until then. Seven years later, when One Hundred Years of Solitude was printed in Spain, the paper industry easily fulfilled under short notice the publisher’s requests for multiple reprints of this novel; each reprint being thousands of copies. By then, paper supply and prices were no longer an obstacle to promoting new novels by little-known authors.17
PROTECT AND EXPAND
To support its publishing industry, the Spanish government removed another obstacle: the high cost of book distribution abroad. The government reduced postal rates, which dropped to about three and a half Spanish pesetas per kilogram for shipping books overseas, and also assumed the deficit caused by reducing the price of postal rates for book exports. Soon, the gains of Spain’s book trade with Latin America exceeded any deficit the government incurred for lowering postal rates. By 1969, 82 percent of the books published in Spain were exported to Latin America. Half of them shipped to four countries: Argentina (18 percent), Mexico (13 percent), Venezuela (10 percent), and Chile (10 percent). Spain’s publishing industry adapted so well to the needs of the Latin American publishing market that hundreds of books, including literary works, were printed in Spain solely to be exported and sold in Latin America.18
At the same time, the Spanish government restricted book imports, especially from Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina. Government officials regarded these countries as competitors because their books could impose their publishing agenda and vision of Hispanism on book markets in Latin America, Europe, and especially the United States. (Government documents described the United States as the future market of the Spanish book.) In 1959, sales for books exported to Argentina, Cuba, and Chile, including literary titles, amounted to 557 million pesetas (US$9.2 million). By 1962, sales had more than doubled: 1,200 million pesetas (US$20 million). Profits increased after the publication of most titles of the New Latin American Novel, which appeared from 1963 onward.19
Again, the publishing trajectory of writer Vargas Llosa exemplified the commercial success of Latin American literature published in Spain. His first book, The Leaders (1959), had a print run of thirteen hundred copies. More importantly, it was published shortly before the Spanish government started to reform its national book industry. The situation was quickly changing by 1963, when publisher Seix Barral released his novel The Time of the Hero; it had a print run of four thousand copies before becoming a best seller. His 1969 novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, had an initial print run of ten thousand copies. And in 1973, one hundred thousand copies were first released of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. These numbers show a 7,600 percent increase in the copies printed of Vargas Llosa’s books in barely a decade.20
This surge in sales touched other Latin American writers such as Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, and, for the first time, even young and unknown writers like García Márquez. Thus, their commercial success cannot just be explained in terms of their works’ aesthetic beauty or captivating stories. Government subsidies and tax breaks for publishers in Spain made it possible in two ways: first, to produce at a low cost large-scale paperback editions destined for both the domestic and the overseas market in Latin America; second, government actions kept average book prices low. According to UNESCO statistics, between 1959 and 1976 the number of titles published worldwide increased by 77 percent. In Latin America, the two leading publishing countries, Argentina and Mexico, increased their numbers by 82 and 94 percent, respectively. In Spain, the increase was 327 percent, that is, production grew four times above the world average.21 This tremendous growth also affected the publication of literary titles. Figure 2.1 shows the surge of these titles published in 1960, after the approval of the Stabilization Plan, and then again in 1966, after the adoption of a new law to reduce censorship. Not coincidentally, titles of the New Latin American Novel boomed during this publishing surge in Spain.
2.1 Number of literary works printed in Spain, Argentina, and Mexico (1950–1980).
Source. UNESCO Basic Facts and Figures (1952–1962) and UNESCO Statistical Yearbook (1963–1983).
There was also a surge of publishing houses in Spain, some of which have controlled the Spanish-language market ever since: Plaza & Janés (1959), Anaya (1959), Santillana (1960), Círculo de Lectores (1962), Alfaguara (1964), Alianza (1966), Anagrama (1969), and Tusquets (1969). By 1970, there were over five hundred publishers registered. Although the majority of these publishers did not release literature, they marketed their catalogues to readers in Spain and overseas.22
The Spanish government’s goal of entering the Latin American book market worked so well that publication of new literary titles fell by more than 50 percent in Argentina and stagnated in Mexico in the 1960s (see figure 2.1).23 By the end of this decade, these two countries had become the main foreign consumers of books produced in Spain. Almost one in three books, including literary works, printed in Spain in 1969 was sold in these two countries. These numbers suggest that the New Latin American Novel was an idea imagined in Latin America but printed in and sold from Spain.
TO CENSOR, OR NOT TO CENSOR, THAT WAS THE QUESTION
For the Spanish government, books were not only commodities for national economic growth. They also were political weapons to promote its vision of Hispanic culture overseas. To do so, the government began imposing a conservative agenda in the arts after the Civil War. But two decades later, government officials realized that a major obstacle to conquer the Latin American market was ideological: censorship. “There was no competition,” a magazine editor wrote about publishing in Spain in the 1960s. “We all had a common enemy, which was government censorship.” Since publishers could