"Since the beginning of the Transition, episodes such as that of Adolfo Suárez and the UCD crisis, the 23-F coup d'état, the GAL, the 11-M attacks and some others have provoked waves of instant books to explain the keys, but in the Catalan and Spanish context none has generated bibliography to the extent and proportion of the independence process". The reflection that the historian Joan B. Culla makes to La Vanguardia is not an exaggeration. Eugeni Giral has dedicated the last decade to collect them and has counted, to date, 850.
In February 2019, the economist published an inventory of the 525 titles he had located until then after Muriel Casals, the former president of Òmnium Cultural, gave him the idea of collecting the material related to the procés. The first half thousand has been donated to the Communication Documentary Center of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, of which he is the promoter. The rest will also go there.
Giral advances to this newspaper that will be the curator of an exhibition, which will be made from these volumes "to show the scope." It will be inaugurated at the Palau Robert at the beginning of 2023. The economist has also asked a dozen opinion-makers from different fields -among them Joan Tapia, Josep Ramoneda, Joan B. Culla or Núria Orriols- to make a selection of the five books that each of them considers most interesting about the procés, so that a list of the 50 basic works on the subject is configured and presented coinciding with the exhibition.
For Culla, the book that can be considered "the forerunner of the literature on the procés, the forerunner of the phenomenon even before it was baptized that way and that there was awareness", is 2014, which Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira published in 2008 The essay proposed the passage from emotional independence to a majority one and set September 11 of that year as the horizon, a key date.
The immediately subsequent work focused on the consultation on the independence of Arenys de Munt in 2009 and the popular votes and, from here on in the Catalan National Assembly, the production of documents for and against, profiles of the political leaders , the comparison with the processes of independence in other countries, the Catalonia-Spain relationship or even novels with the procés as background. “Most of the texts are in favor of the right to decide and independence”, says Giral who, at the same time, is surprised by “the lack of explanations of how the proposed 'Catalunya-stat' could work” .
"It is a fact that for five or six years many books were sold on what we call the process, only the election of Carles Puigdemont as president and led to the appearance of four simultaneous books on his human and political profile," he told La Vanguardia. editor of Pòrtic, Josep Lluch, who has opted for the subject. For Sant Jordi they arrived at the bookstores Les horas incertes, Dietari de Canonges (Symbol editors) by former president Quim Torra, the second part of the reflections on his time at the Palau de la Generalitat; Many and no one Embastat of memories and other stories (La Campana) of the ex-minister Clara Ponsatí, or Judgment in justice. An x-ray of the current situation of political justice in Spain (Roca Editorial) by journalist Iu Forn.
The appeal, however, is on the decline. "It's been a year since interest has plummeted," says Lluch. “Now the topics have diversified: Russia, self-help, extreme right, memories, pandemic, media book, etc. The Catalonia/Spain conflict no longer arouses interest. The feeling is threefold: there is nothing to say anymore; those who write are not trustworthy; what has happened is better to forget it”.
The bookseller Joan Fàbregues agrees. "The editorial avalanche came after October 2017 with the testimonies of the events, the photo books of 1-O, the diaries of those imprisoned or exiled and the subsequent collective analysis and for two years there was excitement." The owner of La Llar del Llibre de Sabadell explains to this newspaper that the demand for this "quasi-genre" has made them expand the space dedicated to the politics section and "we have also learned to resolve the overflow of capacity in some presentations, as in the case of lawyer Gonzalo Boye, in which there was no room.
Since the calling of the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014, Catalan sovereignty has sought parallels between both cases. The editorial production generated around the two processes, however, has been divergent. “There are important differences”, analyzes for La Vanguardia, Andrew Dowling. “The British book market does not have the same tradition when it comes to publishing essays. Non-fiction is still strongly dominated by the Second World War", says the professor of History at Cardiff University, who adds that during the Scottish referendum production was higher in Edinburgh than in London, "a bit like the contrast between of Madrid and Barcelona on the procés”. Instead, Dowling sees in books about Brexit "the only real point of comparison" with the Catalan editorial case.
Not everyone has played the card. Edicions de 1984 is one of the few Catalan publishers that has remained on the sidelines. "The books prior to 2017 arise from activism and still have a plot, but those after are the result of commercial opportunism," its editor, Josep Cots, tells this newspaper. “We haven't gotten around to it because we haven't seen a restful in-depth analysis that was of interest and, on the other hand, it seemed like there was a rush to publish this product. Some have gone deeper into the analysis, but few”.
On the other hand, Fàbregues considers that booksellers cannot choose because they are "between two worlds, the cultural and the commercial, and if the first does not go through the checkout, the bookstores cannot be maintained". He sells this type of book “to maintain the others”. He nevertheless believes that the phenomenon can generate new readers if some occasional buyers "want to go further" and is a gateway to other genres. “It is a debate similar to what there was with the history novel as a result of books, for example, such as those by Noah Gordon. If a small percentage made the leap to essay or continued with fiction, it was already worth it”.
Cots, less optimistic, shows his reserve. "The sale is motivated by the extreme citizen mobilization prior to 2017 and by the subsequent need to explain what happened and to find a way out." On the other hand, he points out that in certain areas "the editorial identification with this product has even been proposed and, therefore, with a political orientation, those who do and those who do not, and that is not positive".
“In perspective –Lluch maintains- some titles now make people laugh. They have distorted the offer of non-fiction in Catalan because they are a kind of souvenir books. Many weeks, practically the first ten books on the best-seller list dealt with the procés”. Fabregues agrees. Unlike the police genre in which some titles have contributed to its resurgence, such as those by Dolores Redondo or Carmen Mola, or in the children's narrative a few years ago with the Harry Potter saga, which went from best sellers to long-sellers, the bookseller believes that those of the procés are “ephemeral books that will not be republished because their high point is the newsworthy event of the moment and curiosity”.
At this time, all of them share that the subject has ceased to be a commercial lifesaver for publishers and booksellers. The vast majority will forget. However, Professor Culla assures that "although they are very often battle books, with a desire for immediate intervention in the public debate, with a content that is overtaken by events, they are snapshots of a state of opinion that will be essential for researchers of the future. Giral's exhibition will demonstrate the magnitude now that the phenomenon is languishing.
