him when he signed a new contract with Balcells, after which he started the novel. And he asked exile Vicente Rojo to design the novel’s iconic cover. In sum, Spanish exiles were present throughout the imagination and production of his novel.
MODERNIZING THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY IN LATIN AMERICA
While the publishing industry in Spain was crucial to the commercial success of Latin American literature, this industry in Latin America was not simply a bystander of such success. To begin with, publishers in the region offered deals to writers that helped a larger number of them make a living from their books, even if contractual conditions continued to be skewed in favor of publishers. Other professional incentives for writers included royalties and literary awards such as the Xavier Villaurrutia, Casa de las Américas, Rómulo Gallegos, and Esso. (In Mexico, Universidad Veracruzana Press started to pay royalties in 1958, which encouraged García Márquez to publish Big Mama’s Funeral with them.) Yet until the 1960s, literary titles were not central to publishers’ agendas. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Sudamericana, and Emecé, among others, published mainly titles of general interest and in the human, social, and natural sciences. By the mid-1960s, as these publishing houses expanded, the increase in new literary publications authored by Latin American authors was noticeable in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In Argentina, Primera Plana reported in 1964 that numbers of new titles were up by 20 percent from the previous year. New publishing houses contributed to this increase. Joaquín Mortiz (Seix Barral’s partner in Mexico) began to publish contemporary Mexican, Latin American, and international literature as well as Barral’s winners of the Biblioteca Breve award. In Mexico, too, Era “emerge[d],” according to Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis, “as a Latin American project [when] the moment of Latin America is electric.”50 (Aware of its region-spanning publishing agenda, García Márquez first reached an agreement with Era to publish One Hundred Years of Solitude.)
New and old publishing houses launched collections of contemporary literature to promote their titles. By the time García Márquez was living in Mexico City, University Veracruzana started the collection Ficción; writer Juan José Arreola subsidized the publication of Los Presentes in Editorial Cultura and Ediciones de Andrea; Fondo de Cultura Económica inagurated Letras Mexicanas, which published best-selling titles of the New Latin American Novel Pedro Páramo by Rulfo (1955) and Where the Air Is Clear (1958) by Fuentes, both rejected by censors in Spain. And Joaquín Mortiz released Novelistas Contemporáneos and Nueva Narrativa Hispánica. Yet print runs in these collections were still small. For example, titles of Los Presentes averaged five hundred copies, Universidad Veracruzana printed two thousand copies of García Márquez’s Big Mama’s Funeral in its Ficción collection, Letras Mexicanas released on average about two thousand copies (as it first did with Pedro Páramo), and Joaquín Mortiz printed between three and five thousand copies.
José Donoso, Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and other writers seeking to become full-time professionals voiced their concerns about the small size of editions. And they lamented that these companies were driven more by an amateur love for literature than by commercial profit. For this reason, these writers dreamed about publishing with a major Latin American or Spanish company, even if they had to see their work delayed by censors. While looking for a publisher for his novel Three Trapped Tigers, Cabrera Infante knew that “the alternative would be to publish the original book in Mexico” with Joaquín Mortiz. But he also knew that “there, Seix Barral’s schizoid cadavers would go to their rest on the other side of the border: death or death.” Thus, Cabrera Infante and peer writers eager to join the literary mainstream preferred to adapt to censors’ demands and to publish their work with a major press, rather than seeing it perish with a small one. This was also the aspiration of García Márquez. After signing the contract with Sudamericana to publish all his past and future works, he achieved, as he wrote to a colleague, “an old dream.”51
A REGION-SPANNING PUBLISHER
“No, you cannot sell books in this country,” Spanish book editor Antoni López Llausàs said regretfully after visiting García Márquez’s home country, Colombia. “Let us go back to Paris even if we die of hunger.” During his visit, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, this political exile also visited Cuba. His goal was to open a publishing house somewhere in the region. But he returned to France and worked for Hachette Press until a friend, Catalan expat Rafael Velhis, offered him the position of executive manager at a new press in Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. A decade later, he was its director and major stockholder. By then, another Spanish expat, Julián Urgoiti, was its executive manager and served as president of the Chamber of the Book in Argentina. Between 1939 and 1967, Sudamericana became the Latin American publishing house par excellence. Readers, critics, and writers associated its brand with novelty, prestige, commercial success, modern design, and affordable books. By the early 1960s, Sudamericana was actively promoting Latin American writers and contemporary foreign literature. Just days before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez shared in a letter to a literary critic his excitement about publishing his work with Sudamericana: This ends “a problem that you point out almost dramatically in your letter: that my friends, acquaintances, and strangers have to get my books miraculously, through the charity of other friends.”52
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
