The Point of Publishing

In Asturias we visit El Mazuco where a famous battle took place in September 1937. Republican forces were vastly outnumbered and eventually defeated by forces that included the German Condor Legion. Soon after this defeat the Nationalists were able to control all of Northern Spain.

Back at the hotel there is a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls in a Mexican edition. How did it come to be here, and who brought it with them to this haven beneath the Sierra de Cuera? Now the only sound of bells comes from those around the necks of peaceful cattle.

In the hotel bedroom in northern Spain we find copies of Eñe: Revista para leer.  This issue – entitled Hotels. Mil aventuras – might be of great interest to the traveller, who cannot remember finding such a library of literary magazines in any British hotel room.

The hotel in the Serra da Estrela Natural Park is on the site of the first Portuguese tuberculosis treatment unit at altitude, dating from the late nineteenth century. The architect of this modern day Magic Mountain location was Pedro Brígida and there is, as might be expected, a book about it.

At a certain sort of hotel you will always find books about a certain sort of hotel.

Still travelling but unavoidably drawn back to the potential horrors of a post-brexit Britain governed by the bullying bonkers end of the Tory party. I would not give a penny for any of Michael Gove’s thoughts, but searching around I see that he appears to have written this panegyric on Michael Portillo in 1995 – now available for no more than a shiny new penny.

It’s hard to find a good picture of the cover, just this expanded thumbnail.  Perhaps no one wants to be reminded of this publishing venture.

Encountered at the bookshop at the Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, this title looks familiar but has moved forward in the alphabet.

The News Museum in Sintra is brand new and bills itself as “the greatest Media and Communication experience in Europe”.  It provides a fantastic overview of news media in Portugal and worldwide, and it doesn’t avoid the political dimension. There’s lots of technology and history, and a look into the future of virtual reality news.

In amonst the spectacular array of press, radio, TV, multimedia and VR there is a full-size digital bookshelf where some of the books (like this one on censorship in Portugal) open up to be read.

The window display at Lisbon’s venerable Livraria Ferin contains a number of translated titles and inside there is the new edition of Granta Portugal, the contents of which can be seen here. This is one of the many different editions of Granta produced in Brazil, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Norway, Switzerland and elsewhere.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas/The Club Dumas (1993) tells the story of Lucas Corso, a kind of book detective or bounty hunter, who tracks down rare books and manuscripts. In this book he gets tangled up with a bunch of Alexandre Dumas fanatics, and one of the places he visits in the course of his investigations is Sintra.

We are told that ‘Corso era un mercenario de la bibliofilia; un cazador de libros por cuenta ajena’. In Sintra these days you might need such an investigator to find a bookshop of any kind.