PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED

In 1926, a Va­len­cian pub­lisher called Vi­cent Clavel sug­gested to Miguel Primo de Rivera, the Cata­lanopho­bic ruler of Spain at the time, that Cer­vantes’ birth­day – Sep­tem­ber 29th– be cel­e­brated as the ‘Day of the Span­ish Book’. In 1930, once Primo had popped his despotic clogs, the day was moved to April 23rd, the Day of Sant Jordi, the pa­tron Saint of Cat­alo­nia and Cer­vante’s death­day (the de­ceased dic­ta­tor must have swiveled a lit­tle in his grave). Since then it be­came a uniquely Cata­lan cel­e­bra­tion until 1995, when UN­ESCO made it into World Book Day. Here, it’s an ex­cep­tional event, with book­stands in every town and city– over 400 in Barcelona alone– which last year sold a total of 1.9 mil­lion vol­umes (over half of them in Cata­lan).

For the au­thors in­volved, how­ever, it’s not all a bed of roses. If they hap­pen to be sign­ing in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal, for ex­am­ple, they will usu­ally be asked to move from one book­stand to the next in a mat­ter of five or less min­utes, even though the next spot might be half way across the city; hence the fre­quent sight­ings of sweaty, flus­tered au­thors turn­ing up twenty min­utes late for their sign­ing ses­sions, time after time. And once you’re fi­nally seated be­hind a pile of your books, you might find your­self next to a media celebrity, or an au­thor of quack­ish yet phe­nom­e­nally suc­cess­ful self-help books, or a self-con­fessed nympho­ma­niac, all of whom will have longer queues than you (as­sum­ing you have a queue at all). Or you might find your­self ex­iled to a book­stand lo­cated so far out of the cen­tre that po­ten­tial buy­ers will cross your path only by the mer­est of co­in­ci­dences. Or you could be shar­ing a table with an ut­terly un­known au­thor who is con­vinced that he (it’s al­ways a he) is the bee’s knees to the ex­tent that he will start wag­gling his book in the air and yelling out to in­no­cent passers-by that they don’t know what they’re miss­ing, some­thing which sends said passers-by scut­tling away like bee­tles from a stomp­ing boot. Oc­ca­sion­ally, how­ever, there may well come a year when you’ve pub­lished a book that read­ers want enough to queue for; that way you meet some in­ter­est­ing peo­ple as well as hav­ing the sat­is­fac­tion of see­ing the stands’ over­seers hur­ry­ing to freshen up your fast dwin­dling stock.

Per­son­ally, I have been in all these sit­u­a­tions over the 28 years that I’ve been sign­ing– or pin­ing to sign– on Sant Jordi’s Day. Only on one oc­ca­sion did I have a truly dif­fi­cult mo­ment and it hap­pened when one of my favourite au­thors (James Ell­roy) turned up for Sant Jordi. I’d imag­ined there would be a queue a mile long of his many fans in Cat­alo­nia, but no, he was on his own, look­ing bored. So I walked right up and asked him if he would sign my copies of his books, which he did, and then he tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion; I was so over­awed by this idol of mine deign­ing to con­verse with me, that I gave a start, banged my head against the iron scaf­fold­ing of the stand, blushed like a rose, thanked him and hur­riedly strode away.

This year, as the pub­li­ca­tion date of my new book has been un­ex­pect­edly moved for­ward to 2026, I’ll be giv­ing Sant Jordi a pass. Un­less James Ell­roy turns up again, be­cause this time, older and wiser (or less fool­ish) as I am, I might even try to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with him my­self.

Opin­ion