10 years of Caja Negra, independent publishers from Argentina

After Spain, Argentina is the biggest market for literature in Spanish. With a rich tradition of mainstream and independent publishers, a demanding readership and various fares, like the Buenos Aires annual international book fair (Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires), the field of literature in this country remains in good condition despite its frequently convulsed economy.

With so much competition, it’s hard to find a specific audience and begin building a catalog. Caja Negra has been doing so for the last ten years. Just like the case of Mexican Sexto Piso, Caja Negra was set up by two friends with no particular plans to get a formal job, and instead a dreamed occupation based on personal interests and taste was the basis for this publishing house. No marketing and no business plan: just the intuition that if you publish what you love reading, others will want to read it too. They were right.

Raised in the 1980s, Diego Esteras and Ezequiel Fanego’s cultural baggage is composed in equal parts by Latin American literature, universal classics, philosophy and pop culture. They’re far from the high brow/low brow distinction that’s still prevalent in the field of literature. Inspired by a Ballard quote, they’re following their obsessions and what they know. They’re publishing what they want to read. The result? A diverse catalog where British postpunk and Baruch Spinoza, among others, compose an exchange of ideas no one else believed possible before the editors. In their words, Caja Negra is “an invitation to compose heterodox traditions”.

Just like in pop music it was immediately recognizable anything signed by labels such as the British 4AD or Creation (hence the phrase “a 4AD sound”), Esteras and Fanego want their published products to have a signature, to be a discourse, something that distinguishes them but mostly, something that makes their readers maintain their trust in their judgment. A literary “selecta” of sorts, Caja Negra bases its accomplishments in something intangible and hard to pin down, just like a rare night when you find a DJ with the right vinyls.

It’s easier to compare the publishers to DJs or music label directors than to other literary publishers because it’s precisely music the most distinguishable topic in their catalog, specifically music criticism, a discourse that has plenty of readership in English, but it’s marginalized to newspapers, magazines or websites in Spanish. Their best seller remains “After Rock” by Simon Reynolds, the English music journalist, following an editorial line that proves to be a very demanded one, not only in terms of what can be translated, but what can be published by local music critics and read by an avid audience searching for quality criticism.
According to the publishers, in the current era of digital and traditional publishing, it’s the taste and the signature of an editorial house what can set it apart from competitors, and not the format. In Esteras and Fanego’s case, it’s also a sense of boredom what will tell them it’s time to move on to another project and not develop and rely on a tried formula. However, the format of their books is carefully chosen. A Caja Negra collector will probably take care of the books as of they were small pieces of art, with independence of their content.
This poses a problem, though: expensive and rare books sooner or later are only read by those who can afford/find them. This is a problem especially in the Latin American market, where art or rare books are expensive and public libraries will rarely have them in their catalogs.
Yet a sense of elitism has surrounded this editorial house since its founding. Its carefully selected subjects have been translated to attract a specific audience in mind. Back to Simon Reynolds, a sort of godfather of Caja Negra, has now three translated books (“Postpunk”, “Retromanía”, “Después del Rock”), but just as rare is Vilém Flusser’s “El universo de las imágenes técnicas”, the Czech journalist’s compiled academic writings from his 30 years of activity as a teacher in Sao Paulo.
The world of cinema is well represented with the works of other Latin American authors dismissed by big publishing houses, such as Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the man whose films and theoretical writings composed a revolutionary political and aesthetic manifesto known as Cinema Novo (“new cinema”). Caja Negra’s “La revolución es una EZTETIKA” compiles the early thinking of Rocha, as well as interviews and other articles written during his lifetime.

Rocha was radically opposed to the “aesthetic colonization” of Hollywood, just as much as “realism” in cinema, which he thought was nothing but a manifestation of the bourgeois. With his texts and his images, he wanted to confront the spectator with images of misery, pain and hunger. A must for scholars and fans of cinema in general, is his seminal text of the 1970s “La estética del hambre” (“the aesthetics of hunger”), as well as “La revolución del Cinema Novo” and “El siglo del cine”, two other important articles that have been dispersed until now.

Other film figures appear in Caja Negra’s catalog, such as a collection of Ed Wood’s articles for various magazines, from Science Fiction to sex fantasies. Wood belongs to the cult “Z genre” of film, characterized by low budget production and mediocre scripts that have gained validation by their viewers. If anything, Ed Wood’s texts are an extension of the cinematic interests and abilities of the late American director.

Two really interesting books that will capture the attention of scholars and a larger audience are the recently deceased German filmmaker and theoretician Harun Farocki’s “Desconfiar de las imágenes” (roughly, “To mistrust images”), whose work has had a re-emergence in various exhibitions and publications. Another German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, has in “Los pixels de Cezanne” a collection of essays about his early relation to painting and other filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Wenders, in writing about his early loves and influences, perhaps delivers the best type of autobiography there can be.

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I’d rather jump off a sixth floor: the case of Sexto Piso, independent publisher

I’d rather jump off a sixth floor: the case of Sexto Piso, independent publisher

It’s no secret Mexico has a problem with its reading habits: UNESCO has recently (2012) shown the average Mexican reads less than three books per year, one of the lowest numbers in developing nations. These poor results have persisted for decades, despite official initiatives to promote this activity in all sectors of society. So how exactly do you plan to open a publishing house under these conditions?

The case of Sexto Piso is a rarity: around 2003, a group of Political Science students in the country’s largest public university –National Autonomous University of Mexico, with its campus in the south of Mexico City– decided to translate and publish their mentor and friend Roberto Calasso, an Italian author and publisher with plenty of experience in his country and other European countries. Calasso not only offered his expertise in matters such as rights acquisitions, but gave them exclusive rights to some of his titles.

Sexto Piso’s founders didn’t have marketing studies or strict business plans when they set up the company. Despite its logo, which shows a man jumping off a sixth floor (a “sexto piso”), becoming publishers wasn’t exactly a leap of faith: they cultivated a selection of mostly foreign and obscure authors and topics, hired more than competent translators and printed high quality editions, catering to the knowledge and interest of a very specific sector: the highly educated middle class of the capital.

Surprisingly, Sexto Piso’s main obstacle wasn’t a low number of readers, disinterest in their obscure or rescued classics, or difficulties in buying rights: they had to fight very hard to get a space in bookstores that were very reluctant to exhibit other titles than their proved formulas. The publishers worked hard for their spaces and began a fast rhythm of editing carefully selected and diverse materials, from Political Science to Philosophy and Science Fiction. Some of their first publications were Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (“El crepúsculo de la cultura americana”), novels by the somewhat obscure Stanislav Lem and Milorad Pavic, and titles of classic writers that hadn’t been translated to Spanish, such as David Hume, Etienne de La Boétie or George Orwell.

What all these heterogeneous books had in common was their singularity and their dedicated design, the discreet but recognizable covers with their funny falling man logo, a clean typography and acid-free paper that was a luxury in those years, but has become a standard in many local artisanal publishing practices. Within a year, Sexto Piso won the 2004 International Young Publisher of the Year Award, opened an office in Spain (the main market for Spanish language literature) and has become a shift in the paradigm of how and what to publish in one of the most difficult markets for literature, such as Mexico.

The editorial house, now with more than 300 titles divided in six collections ("classics", "narrative", "essay", "actualities", "illustrated" and "kids"),  bases its success in the taste of its board members, exercised almost as a curation of a work of art in itself: a solid, perfect catalog that’s been possible against the odds. More than 10 years since its foundation and without having become massive, Sexto Piso has grown steadily in Mexico despite the low levels of readership that all surveys show, and in a permanently stagnant economy.   

Another component of their growth is the opening of a section dedicated to illustrated books and graphic novels, a collection called “Sexto Piso ilustrado” (“Sexto Piso illustrated”). One of the first titles and on-going projects is the 2006  adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time volume I, by French comics artist Stéphane Heuet, and translated to Spanish by Conrado Tostado. Heuet’s adaptation of the French classic took many years to complete and proved how a visual adaptation to the form of comics is far from a substitution of the written text, but a rich and demanding narrative with its own merits.

The illustrated collection of the editorial house is not only following the guidelines of some of the finest art and comics publishing houses, such as Fantagraphics or Drawn and Quarterly, but competing with them in the growing market of Spanish-speaking readers in the United States, acquiring rights and signing authors such as Peter Kuper, whose “Diario de Oaxaca” was an astonishing drawn and written diary that offered a personal and intimate insight into one of Mexico’s most brutal political confrontations of recent years, the civil protest led by teachers in the state of Oaxaca, and the repression that followed in 2006.

Sexto Piso’s method of work wasn’t new; Spain’s Anagrama and Siruela, or  Argentina’s Amorrortu, among others, have been following an approach of singular titles with attention to design and a particular audience in mind for many years, and with great results. But it’s Sexto Piso’s merit to have defied the very real obstacles of the Mexican editorial industry and perhaps even the commonplace of "a disinterested audience that doesn't read", who, in response, maintains alive and in prosperity one of the country’s most important independent cultural projects.

As part of the third edition of "Celebrating Mexico", a program that shows two-minute short films of various successful Mexican personalities from diverse areas (arts, science, entertainment, gastronomy, sports…), Latin American Discovery Channel and its various networks are presenting, from September 2015 to September 2016, a video-clip of Eduardo Rabasa and Felipe Rosete, two of the founding editors, talking of their company's place is Mexico's editorial landscape and the role of editing and writing, as they show what a common day is like in the workshop press and in their offices. They can be watched during the commercial breaks of the networks regular schedule.

Local TV show Central Once recorded a program centered on the company's main collections, as well as an interview with Eduardo Rabasa. Their great collection of covers and high quality pressings can be seen next to shots of graphic novelists working on their desks. It's on Youtube, in Spanish.  

http://www.bookwitty.com/text/565824aeacd0d03c098a1cc0