Arguably, the agency’s most important contractual innovation was to regulate subsidiary rights, that is, the rights paid for reproducing parts of the author’s work prior to and after its publication. In the past, publishers only paid authors a small percentage, or even nothing, for such reproductions. Now, Balcells asked, in the case of prepublication, for subsidiary rights in between 50 and 90 percent of the amount received by the main publisher from the subsidiary publisher. In the case of postpublication of the author’s work, subsidiary rights were around 50 percent of the subsidiary publisher’s payment, whose exact amount the contract established according to the length of the text to be reproduced, format, duration, and prestige of media outlet. Under Balcells’s protection, it did not take García Márquez long to understand that these rights were “a gold mine.”59
Balcells enforced these contractual practices with Spanish-language publishers throughout the 1960s. And since she was the agent of several best-selling authors at the time, her contractual practices had a domino effect in the publishing industry internationally. By the end of the decade, her agency had turned into a powerful broker of literary excellence. As her client Donoso put it, “She seemed to hold in her hands the strings to make us all dance like puppets.”60
MODERNIZING READERS’ TASTE
In the late 1950s, when literary critic Tomás Eloy Martínez arrived in Buenos Aires, he noticed that “very few people read the great Latin American narrators [whose] books went unnoticed outside the lettered circle.” He was referring to the traditional educated minority of local elites and writers—the main and only audience of most titles of Latin American literature until then. Less than a decade later, his review in Primera Plana magazine of One Hundred Years of Solitude reached over two hundred thousand readers in the region. His review celebrated this novel as part of the international success of “Latin American literature, now the most original of all literatures.” What stands in between both statements made by T. E. Martínez is the modernization of readers’ taste. Within a decade, habitual reading became a common practice and a sign of distinction, especially for the rising middle classes and university students. No longer could writers complain, as Vargas Llosa did, that it was impossible to receive “encouragement” to develop “an audience.” “The boom,” Cortázar believed, “was not done by editors but by readers, and who are the readers, but the people of Latin America?” This was also García Márquez’s opinion: “There is no emergence of writers, but of readers. We, the novelists so requested and read today, have been working for the past twenty years.” And these writers started to believe that their literature was helping readers to be aware of Latin America as a single region.61
Indeed, more and more readers realized that they belonged to a regional literary community and celebrated the rise of its literature. They did so, for example, in letters to the editor of magazines and newspapers. In 1965, readers of Life en Español in the United States, Argentina, and Mexico sent letters reacting to Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s article “La nueva novela de Latinoamérica.” They did not deny that the boom of the novel existed. Rather, they noticed that the critic ignored the works of more important writers such as Sábato, José Revueltas, and Luis Spota.62 Some readers did not keep their comments to the pages of periodicals; they shared them with writers. “When my last novel was published,” Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti wrote the year One Hundred Years of Solitude came out,
I received many phone calls from people I didn’t know and who simply wanted to discuss with me a passage or a character in the book; several times, in the middle of the street, I was approached by strangers who had different objections or agreements about my novel. Such strangers were not the elite by the way. . . . They were simply readers, who liked or were outraged by the novel, and who wanted to compare their affinities or to state their differences, hand in hand, with the author. Such a reaction would have been inconceivable, not just ten years but even five years ago.63
For some critics, the sudden appearance of readers in general and of consumers of novels in particular was part of an ongoing social change in the region. There is “an urban growth that justifies the existence of the genre,” Rodríguez Monegal explained, “the novel needs a society that reads it, an audience, an editorial field. It is no coincidence that precisely this boom of the Latin American novel coincides with the growth of cities, urban societies and therefore of publishers.” Indeed, by the early 1960s, the region’s population had grown from 140 million of two decades before to 211 million. Its expansion went hand in hand with rural exodus, improvement of living standards, increase of rates of literacy, and rise of disposable income for the consumption, for example, of literary books. In October 1965, when García Márquez had just started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, Primera Plana magazine reported that in Argentina alone there was a 40 percent increase in sales from the previous year.64 A year and a half later, thousands of Argentine consumers were among the first readers of his novel.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, readers first and foremost started to imagine themselves as members of a larger cultural community thanks partly to general interest magazines and newspapers. Not only did these periodicals have print runs that were ten times larger than the average literary book, but also many crossed national boundaries. In them, publishers informed readers about new literary titles, too. Best seller lists started to become common practice to influence readers’ tastes, and critics like T. E. Martínez and Rodríguez Monegal developed a reputation as reviewers of mainstream Latin American literature. Simultaneously, in the region and Spain, a revolutionary publishing format made its appearance: cheap paperbacks.
Publishers designed paperbacks to reach the broadest audience possible. With the motto “The man who reads is worth more,” the Continental Organization of Book Fairs (Organización continental de los festivales del libro) launched in 1956 a series of book events in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. This organization also published the collection Biblioteca Básica de Cultura Latinoamericana, which followed “an imperative need: to spread the fundamental books of Latin American culture.” It intended to do so by printing thousands of copies of affordable books. In Colombia, this collection planned to publish in 1959 twenty-five thousand copies of García Márquez’s Leaf Storm, which hardly sold its first edition years before. Thus, García Márquez learned about the forthcoming paperback revolution several years before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, first released as a low-priced paperback.65
In Argentina, Sudamericana launched Piragua, its collection of pocket-size books. In 1958, its titles had print runs of ten thousand copies and were sold in bookstores as well as less conventional sale points such as newspaper kiosks (the same points where One Hundred Years of Solitude was sold in Buenos Aires a decade later). In 1959, Editorial Porrúa of Mexico, a popular publisher of cheap paperbacks, started its best-selling collection Sepan Cuantos . . ., dedicated to all-time classics with prologues by Latin American authors. In Peru, the Populibros collection, created in 1963, sold close to one million copies its first two years. And in Spain, Alianza launched the collection El Libro de Bolsillo (which literally means Pocket Book), while paperback sales of the collection Austral by Espasa-Calpe rose during the 1960s.
Another important change that helped to shape readers’ taste for Latin American literature was the creation of the book club Círculo de Lectores, which was inspired by the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club and was founded in 1962 by the German Group Bertelsmann and Catalan publisher Vergara (the same year García Márquez contacted Vergara in vain to publish In Evil Hour). Researchers have shown that book clubs are platforms for the “sentimental education” of the reading middle classes. In Spain, this book club offered its clients a combination of best sellers and highbrow literature in attractive and affordable editions. Círculo de Lectores did so by creating its own network of agents and door-to-door delivery system. (Unsuccessfully, it tried to expand to Latin America in the 1970s.) Thanks to this book club, thousands of Spanish households saw New Latin American Novels delivered to their door for the first time ever. This was possible because Seix Barral and Balcells were on good terms with Círculo de Lectores from the start, and the book club