If you have lived in Spain (or someone in your family has done so) at the end of the sixties of the last century, there is a very high chance that copies (perhaps all of them) of the Salvat RTV Library that were sold in newsstands from 1969 passed through your house. Aesthetically unmistakable (paperback covers in light tones without photos or illustrations, low quality paper, very rough binding), this collection did a lot to introduce a series vast amount of essays and fictions, many unpublished, in Spanish homes. It is probably the most shared cultural object in the country’s recent history.
Government origins. At the end of the sixties, the Ministry of Information and Tourism, then directed by Manuel Fraga, called a competition among private publishers to finance and distribute a literary collection of mass reach. The project had the explicit support of Radio Televisión Española, whose initials would appear on the cover of each issue. What emerged from there was a collection of one hundred books that would end up selling more than thirty million copies.
The contest. The Ministry ended up choosing the joint proposal of two companies with very different profiles: Salvat Editores, founded in Barcelona in 1869, with decades of experience as a publisher of enclopedias; and Alianza Editorial, newly born in 1966 at the initiative of José Ortega Spottorno (son of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, future founder of ‘El País’) and with the no less legendary collection ‘The Pocket Book’ already underway.
The importance of television. The ‘RTV’ label was of great importance in promoting the dissemination of the collection. National Radio of Spain and Spanish Television authorized the use of their initials as official support, which gave the collection visibility and institutional legitimacy that was very important at that time. Furthermore, the books were advertised on television just when the progressive penetration of the appliance in Spanish homes was making it one of the main leisure options for Spaniards.
Photo by Alberto Haj-Saleh
Spain reads. The Spain that saw the birth of books was still suffering the echo of the decades of post-war cultural isolation, and many foreign authors were still circulating in imported or clandestine editions. The Press Law of 1966promoted by Fraga himself, had partially lifted the weight of censorship, but it still continued to exist. The researcher Francisco Rojas Claros states in ‘Cultural management and editorial dissidence in Spain (1962-1973)’ that the Salvat Basic Library was for many families the first real opportunity to access notable works from different periods, with correct translations and at a price that did not leave out the working classes.
What was in the collection. The committee that selected the books (here the complete list) was made up of Dámaso Alonso, the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias and the French writer Maurice Genevoix. Each volume included a prologue signed by a figure linked in one way or another to the work, and the selection combined universal classics (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Molière, Swift, Tolstoy, Dickens, Stevenson) with Spanish literature from the Golden Age (Quevedo, Calderón, Lope), Spanish authors of the 20th century (Unamuno, Baroja, Machado, Delibes, Cela) and a Latin American selection (Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Onetti, Asturias himself). And yes, somehow Orwell’s ‘1984’ passed the censorship filter.
The magic of 25 pesetas. The RTV seal was important for the popularization and dissemination of the collection, yes, but nothing was more important than the price of 25 pesetas (with adjusted inflation, we would be talking about a little less than five euros today). At that price, books were within the reach of an expanding middle class and working-class families with a stabilized salary after the years of developmentalism. They were not as cheap as newsstand novels were, but they were affordable if bought week by week.
Mine. Let’s finish with a personal note: I only have one book from that collection where I first tasted Poe, Wilde, Hammett and Clarke. As everyone who has come to touch it knows, over time the glue of the binding became worn and the pages began to come off (note in the header image how the owner has had to re-stitch the spines of some copies). The book that I read and reread dozens of times was ‘Spanish graphic humor of the 20th century’, number 46 in the collection, an absolutely monumental anthology of cartoons, satirists and graphic humorists, to the point that I would say that it has not been surpassed.
Many of those books (those mentioned in the previous paragraph, without going any further) I have subsequently read in better and more convenient editions, but this volume remains unique, has not been reissued and is among my favorite volumes in my library. Furthermore, since so many copies were distributed, it is relatively easy to buy it second-hand at a ridiculous price, so you know: let it not be said that we only recommend things with a built-in microchip here.
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