In its early years, however, Sudamericana did not release many titles of Latin American literature. It mainly published academic monographs, classics, general interest books, and Anglo-American and European modernist literature. At first, its books targeted the market of readers in Buenos Aires, had initial print runs of under three thousand copies, and only traveled abroad through networks of writers and critics. By 1959, its literature catalogue included works by some important Argentine writers (Cortázar, Marechal, Sábato, Eduardo Mallea, Manuel Mújica Láinez) and mainstream international writers such as Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Simone de Beauvoir, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote. Its catalogue also included Nobel laureates François Mauriac, Hermann Hesse, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Until the 1960s, Sudamericana made its profits from literature publishing by selling international and well-established names in translation (as was the case of its competitor Emecé). Yet, when it came to Latin American authors, most of them were published at a loss. Unsold copies of Cortázar’s first book, Bestiary (1951), were in storage for eleven years; the same happened to Onetti’s works. Sales of their books skyrocketed in the mid-1960s, at the onset of the Latin American Boom.53
Spanish-born Francisco Porrúa was behind Sudamericana’s contribution to this boom. From an early age, he developed a taste for Anglo-American novels and especially for science fiction and fantasy literature. In 1955, he founded Minotauro to publish this type of literature, back then a minor but popular genre in Argentina. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (with a prologue by Borges) was its first title. Next, it published works by Cortázar, Brian Aldiss, Italo Calvino, Olaf Stapledon, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Seeing its sales potential, Sudamericana partnered with Minotauro to increase its science fiction catalogue. Sudamericana also offered Porrúa a position as one of its manuscript readers, and then, in 1962, it appointed him as acquisitions editor. Under his leadership, Sudamericana released two best-selling titles of the New Latin American Novel, in which fantasy plays an important role, Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963) and One Hundred Years of Solitude. The publication of this latter novel was also part of an expansion campaign. In 1967, Sudamericana opened new headquarters and aimed to put a book a day on the market. It could be a new title, a re-edition from its back catalogue, or a book from affiliated publishers like Minotauro.
Despite a protectionist book market and censorship in Spain, Sudamericana published its titles there. Exile López Llausàs took the lead. He rekindled his connections with the publishing industry in Barcelona, where in 1946 Sudamericana opened its franchise, EDHASA. During its first decade, it only distributed books published by Sudamericana, Emecé, and Hermes. In the 1960s, EDHASA changed its strategy and started to distribute its own titles exclusively. Now, this agent of transatlantic capitalism in publishing became a key connection between mainstream publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.54 One of its collections, launched in 1963, had the symbolic name The Bridge (El Puente) and was edited by Spanish exile de Torre. This collection published authors on both sides of this literary bridge as well as Spanish writers in exile. Six years later, EDHASA started to print and sell on Spanish soil thousands of copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
A TRANSNATIONAL GATEKEEPER AT WORK
The rise of the literary agent, a new player of print capitalism, was essential in connecting writers in Latin America to publishers in Spain. Catalan entrepreneur Carmen Balcells played this role. Born in 1930, she belonged to the same generation of publishing entrepreneurs such as Barral, Seix, and Porrúa. She was also a contemporary of writers of the Novel Generation. She opened her agency in Barcelona in 1959, and thanks to tips from Barral and aware of the Formentor Group’s agenda, she decided, “My destiny is America.” She entered the publishing industry there, including trips to remote places to meet with members of literary circles, such as the Barranquilla Group in Colombia which was crucial to García Márquez’s literary education. In less than a decade, she became the literary broker of the Latin American Boom, with clients such as Donoso, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Onetti, Cortázar, and García Márquez. Her role in the promotion of Latin American literature comes close to that of French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who brokered the international success of impressionist art. Like Vollard, Balcells was the boundary-spanning agent in search of “creative raw material.” She believed that the “indispensable raw material is the author,” not the “paper.”55
Before Balcells, most Spanish-language authors faced an unregulated professional environment fully controlled by acquisitions editors. This lack of regulation meant that average authors like García Márquez before the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude had to accept tough contractual conditions to publish their work. Publishers were used to negotiating with writers without intermediaries. Therefore, they regarded agents like Balcells as intruders and parasites. Publishers also detested that agents encouraged their clients to shop a manuscript around and to publish their works with different publishing houses, a behavior that Mexican publisher Joaquín Mortiz regarded as, using a sexual analogy, promiscuous. For publishers like López Llausàs at Sudamericana, the relationship between the author and the editor could not just be “exclusively commercial, but rather of friendship and mutual fidelity.” As his granddaughter recalled, “The two agreed on a contract directly and one could not imagine that a writer would change his publishing house because he got ‘a better deal.’ . . . My grandfather organized social gatherings and luncheons in his house, attended by his writer-friends, such as Abelardo Arias, Silvina Bullrich, Marta Lynch, ‘Manucho’ Mújica Láinez, Manuel Puig, and many others.”56
With the arrival of agents, writers started to break away from this old model. In the early 1960s, Fuentes was a rising star: a young and dashing full-time writer, whose regional and international success inspired budding writers like García Márquez and Donoso. Fuentes knew how important it was to have a capable agent promoting his career, so he hired New York literary agent Carl D. Brandt and recommended him to his peers; for example, he wrote to Donoso: “He is really first class, takes care of your interests as if you were his Juliet, fights for you, forces publishers to advertise the work, ‘stings’ critics, etc.”57 Fuentes quickly learned that the agent’s job was to take power away from editors and give it to writers.
Changing this power balance was Balcells’s primary goal by the time she signed García Márquez as her client. To achieve her goal, she introduced game-changing contractual practices.58 She negotiated publishing agreements per each work that were limited by time (as opposed to contracts for life or until the edition sold out) and by national markets (before, the publisher could sell the work anywhere in the world without the author’s consent). Rather, her agency enforced the delimitation of “territories” for books that circulated in and across linguistic areas; now this practice has become standard in book contracts. Balcells also asked for a strict publication schedule; if the publisher did not print the work in the period included in the contract, the author was released from the contract and would not return any advances to the publisher. She demanded a meticulous payment of forfeit royalties. She regulated author payments for