"I have managed to successfully publish North American best sellers and Marxist books," Juan Grijalbo told this newspaper in 1995. Perhaps at that time the Catalan publisher was already working on his memoirs, which remained unpublished after his death. They now appear in a limited edition, at the initiative of his daughter Poppy. With the title The Last Word, they will be presented this afternoon at the Macba Atrium.
One of the signs of triumph in the world of books is leaving one's last name to a label that has continued to function when its creator is no longer around. This is the case of Einaudi, Gallimard, Salvat or Seix Barral; This is also the case of Grijalbo, a publisher that today is part of the Random House Mondadori group and publishes several dozen titles a year.
Juan Grijalbo (1911-2002) was a great character, a union and political activist from the 1930s who, after holding important positions on the Republican side during the Civil War, began a successful publishing career in American exile, which made him a millionaire and culminates with his return to Spain. The initiative to publish his memoirs, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his death, belongs to his daughter Poppy, who points out that he "knew how to build a cultural and sentimental bridge over the Atlantic that he always felt very much about." proud".
The journalist Víctor Fernández has taken care of editing the transcriptions of the memories that Juan Grijalbo dictated; he has contrasted data and dates and has complemented them with documents kept in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, such as the contracts of the Grijalbo publishing house with authors such as Kurt Vonnegut or Joan Didion.
The journey of the Memoirs begins with Gandesa: the only son of a dedicated mother and a father expelled from home for his dishonest adventures, Grijalbo enters at the age of fourteen to work as a bellboy at the Bank of Reus. Thus, he started a career that took him through different banking entities while he joined the trade union world, and politics in the socialist sphere. "The bank employees contributed a lot to the triumph of the Republic and later defended it during the war," recalls Grijalbo in La última palabra.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he took part in the creation of the PSUC, became a good friend of the López Raimundo brothers and, on behalf of the UGT, was appointed member of the Consell d'Economia by Josep Tarradellas. With this politician he begins a relationship that will last over the years; Grijalbo contributes to financing the Generalitat in exile, and the two will happily meet again in Barcelona after Franco's death with the institution restored. He also had an excellent relationship with the communist Joan Comorera.
In the final moments of the war, Grijalbo embarks on the path of exile in a movie outing in Barcelona, when the Francoist shots are already resounding in the Diagonal and after taking charge of preventively destroying, for fear of future reprisals, the archives of the Department of economy. After passing through France, he disembarked in Mexico, where with a loan authorized by President Negrín (but which some comrades in exile would discuss with him) he started the Atlante publishing house with some partners, with which he took his first steps in the world of books.
It promotes throughout Latin America -and with a very good reception!- the books of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He also launched the collection of Gandesa biographies, a tribute to his town of origin. He publishes Josep Ferrater Mora's Dictionary of Philosophy. In Costa Rica, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru or Colombia, the great leaders receive him.
Willing to launch his own label, he receives priceless advice from the great Mexican publisher Daniel Cossío Villegas: read the American specialized publication Publishers Weekly every week and pay attention to its best-seller list. This is how Grijalbo will detect novels such as El motín del Caine, by Herman Wouk, and above all The Godfather by Mario Puzo, his biggest bestseller. He will also successfully publish Wayne W. Dyer's My Erroneous Zones, opening a market for self-help in which he considered himself a pioneer. During the Transition he published the histories of the Civil War by the Hispanists Hugh Thomas and Gabriel Jackson.
He was a pioneer in using printing techniques and book packaging systems; in 1988 he sold his publishing house to the Italian group Mondadori.
Grijalbo's memoirs briefly review his personal life – three marriages, with a daughter from the first and two daughters from the third and final, with the Uruguayan Dinath Grandi – and represent a living testimony of Spanish exile, although with gaps in other fields. "They are unfinished memoirs, you can tell that he wanted to continue, because there is a lot of detail in the formative years, the war and the construction of the publishing house, but not so much of his heyday as an editor," says editor Víctor Fernández.
There is no shortage of curious revelations: his good relations with the USSR earned him the consideration of a Soviet agent by the US authorities. Usually dressed as a dandy, Grijalbo aroused the admiration of thriller author Chester Himes, who asked him where he dressed. The editor accompanied him to the Barcelona tailor shop Pellicer, on Paseo de Gracia, where Himes ordered six English cloth suits. Until shortly before his death, he smoked four cigars a day.
With the Tarradellas family, the editor broke relations when they took the politician's posthumous memoirs to Planeta, instead of the one who had helped him so much.
On the other hand, one of his best-known anecdotes does not appear in the book: when he went to the Frankfurt fair, not speaking English, pure in his mouth, he negotiated with his hands: each finger he raised represented a thousand dollars more than he offered for the title under discussion.
