Since Norbert Tomàs' great-great-grandfather created it in 1876, the Calendari de l'Ermità has not stopped being published. Neither in the civil war, nor when the saints and religious images had to be eliminated, nor when on July 21, 1936 the revolutionaries burned part of the “very copious archive gathered, formed with constant effort and patience, by several generations of ancestors,” as documented by a grandson of Antoni Maria Morera.
There is a portrait of Morera in Tomàs' office, next to a custom-made bookshelf with glass doors: behind it, books by artists of the Catalan illustration, the Alcover-Moll, the Spanish-American Encyclopedic Dictionary, from the 19th century (with images and engravings that are not found on Google). Also a small jar of myrrh and the Leica of his father, Estanislau Tomàs, a metallurgical engineer who introduced him to photography.
For Tomàs, the library represents the knowledge obtained through books. He was impressed by the German Expressionists while studying Fine Arts. He says that culture is in his DNA and that he is an idealist involved in everything. He presided over the Association of Professional Photographers of Spain, from where he attempted to regulate the types of contracts and copyrights, which he would later apply to music through various entities through which he passed.
He was general director of Promoció i Difusió Cultural in 2011, he was in the direction of CoNCA until 2013. As a child he drew. He entered an academy and had the opportunity to go to Cesc's studio, “it was an honor, it was the first time he visited an artist's workshop.” When he was 14 he made some Christmas cards and they showed him a printing press. He was fascinated by the operation, the rollers, the stamping, how they inked the drawing. He was already passionate about linoleum for engraving, which he knew from his family's plates.
Commercial expert, accounting book reviewer and liquidator expert of the Commercial Courts of Barcelona, his great-great-grandfather Morera published the Perpetual Universal Historical Calendar in 1856, the first year that freedom of printing calendars was given, “he was very versatile, now I am discovering.” Morera built a house with a chapel that gave its name to the La Salut neighborhood.
The library was on the roof, and when he went to see his grandparents, Tomàs remembers a hallway full of treasures, like a Don Quixote from 1723: “You were surprised by a book with cork pages; You opened a drawer, and there were magazines tied with string, others from En Patufet.” It was the first thing he read, apart from Cavall Fort – he still has the first numbers – and Gedeon in French, illustrated by Benjamin Rabier (the creator of La vache qui rit). “They went to Paris to buy, they had romantic literature of the time,” or copies of the Bibliotheque des Écoles Chrétiennes with beautiful engravings.
On the ground floor was the storage room for calendars, bundles of old paper and Gothic script. When his grandparents died, the family had to get rid of the house and hundreds of books that could not fit in the current floors. Tomàs hasn't lived there long, and he still has things to discover in stacked unopened boxes that he left behind. Going through them, he discovers little gems, Ricart woodcuts hand-painted in Montserrat. Tradicions i llegendes, by Joan Amades, or limited editions from when businessmen invested in book sponsorship. There are them everywhere, including the ones he edits. He has just sent to print La nit de Sant Joan, by folklorist Amadeu Carbó, “the Joan Amades of the 21st century; "He knows the traditional popular culture of this country in depth."
Because, in 2015, Tomàs created the Morera label - "I'm a microeditor" - and, among other projects, he is preparing number 150 of the Hermit Calendar. It won't be the first anniversary he commemorates. His father – whose archives on the Catalan forge are in the Institute of Catalan Studies, where he was the first president of the Catalan Society of Technology – bought the Calendar of the Peasants in 1976, which has been published in Catalan since 1861. He bought it without an archive, unlike the Hermit, "which has allowed me to recover the memory of the family, and gives me the keys to understand what has happened throughout the history of such a publication".
