In the world of editorial promotion there is a before and after Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, who made them spectacular. One of them, very special, took place in November of the emblematic year of 1975.
The French journalist who died last week, who spoke perfect Spanish, was in Spain presenting his book Tonight, freedom. Meanwhile, his great friend and co-author Collins was dealing with English-speaking countries.
To launch that great report on the independence of India in 1947 in a big way, the editorial Plaza
A television ad campaign, also a pioneer in national book marketing, supported the tour.
But that was a month of great unrest in the country. Francisco Franco was dying (he died, as is known, on the 20th) and the public wondered what was going to happen after the disappearance of the dictator.
As Lapierre explained to me a few years ago, “it was a peculiar situation, flying over Spain with Franco dying, carrying a device with that phrase. At various airports they asked us what freedom we were demanding; All of this was a completely new initiative in the publishing arena. In Zaragoza, when landing, we almost collided with a military plane. I signed copies at El Corte Inglés and at the big bookstores in every city, and we were so successful and so many people came that many booksellers, restless, hung a sign in their windows warning that Tonight, freedom had nothing to do with it. with the events that the country was going through".
There were reasons for caution, since a few months before, when the director of Plaza
Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (died 2005) were old acquaintances of Spanish readers. His attractive formula of reporting contemporary history with very professional projects on a huge scale had seduced the literary director of Plaza
The couple's successive international best-sellers, Arde París, about the end of World War II in the French capital, Or you will wear mourning for me, about the spectacular rise of the bullfighter El Cordobés, and O Jerusalem, about the creation of the State of Israel , had also occupied the top positions in the sales lists here. Books, by the way, that have stood the test of time splendidly.
To write Freedom Tonight, Lapierre and Collins toured India for three years in a Rolls Royce prepared to tackle the most difficult roads, interviewing hundreds of witnesses to the events that culminated in the division of the former British viceroyalty into two states. ; then they had locked themselves in to write their text with four hands, Lapierre in French, Collins in English, following their usual work system.
As a result of his work for that book, and for the subsequent The City of Joy, which he wrote alone, Lapierre created a humanitarian aid foundation in India with his royalties. As his nephew and collaborator, the novelist Javier Moro, has recalled these days, it is the only case of a writer who has seen his words transmute into the creation of hospitals.
In November 1975, according to surveys carried out regularly by the National Spanish Book Institute, INLE, Esta noche, la libertad was the best-selling book in Spain. And although it was not about Franco but about Gandhi, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten, perhaps it was no coincidence that a book with the word "freedom" on the cover was the one that was bought the most that month and in that country that was waiting for the dictator to abandon the scene, and for their own collective freedom to be activated.
