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 sales to book clubs and similar organizations and for remainder copies. She offered a limited-time option on the author’s next work. And she streamlined the publication of pocket-book editions.
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
