The Catalan who was the first to publish 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

If we walk along Ronda de Sant Pere, in front of the department store in the green triangle, when we pass number 3, we'll see a fast-food establishment from a large American chain. This is still the case today, but for many decades, in this same location, we could find what was perhaps the best-known bookstore in the Catalan capital: La Catalònia, which was open from 1931 to 2013. Before that, since 1924, it had been located not far from there, on the corner of Plaça de Catalunya, where it is now owned by the wealthy Joan Pich i Pon.

The architect of Catalònia was the editor Antoni López Llausàs, a lawyer by training and member of a lineage of Barcelona editors and booksellers who, among other initiatives, had founded the satirical magazines The Torratxa Esquella and The Bell of GraceAfter working for a time in the Barcelona office of the Havas advertising agency, he took his first steps in the world of publishing as a printer, after becoming independent from the family business. In 1921, he published the work Evolution and immutable principles, by the philosopher Francesc Pujols, and a year later he joined Francesc Cambó's initiative to publish great classics in Catalan, which took shape through the Bernat Metge Foundation (in fact, he ended up acquiring Editorial Catalana, the label in charge of bringing this collection of classics to market). As we mentioned from the beginning, in 1924 he opened Catalònia, which was intended to be the most important Catalan-language bookstore in the city. There is no doubt that by the 1920s, López Llausàs had already become a pillar of Catalan literature, and proof of this is that it seems that it was precisely he who influenced the celebration of World Book Day on Sant Jordi, instead of in October as was customary. Just before the end of the 1920s, he presided over the Rotary Club of Barcelona, ​​an organization in which he coincided with the artist and businessman Josep Maria Roviralta Alemany (founder of Uralita, SA) and the writer Carles Soldevila.

Before the Civil War, he was still involved in the creation of magazines Images, From here and there and The Black Lamb and, above all, he edited the General dictionary of the Catalan language, Pompeu Fabra. When the war broke out, and at risk of being persecuted by both sides, he went to Paris and finally settled in Argentina, where he was appointed to lead the Sudamericana Publishing House. The key person in helping López Llausàs eventually head the company was Rafael Vehils Grau, a man from Francisco Cambó's family in Chade (Compañía Hispano Americana de Electricidad), whom he had met during his brief exile in Paris. In this firm, he teamed up with Julián Urgoiti, a member of the founding family of Papelera Española, the Calpe publishing house, and the newspaper The Sun. At this point, the second stage of his life begins.

In the Argentine capital, he repeated the strategy he had used in Catalonia, in the sense of working as both editor and bookseller, because shortly after arriving, he acquired a large bookstore in the city center. The results were soon evident: he had taken over Editorial Sudamericana in a very precarious situation and a few years later it was already a very profitable business. The list of authors he published is extraordinary: William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, William Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Hermann Hesse, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. He was also the first to publish One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, after the Catalan publisher Seix Barral had declined to do so. As a result of this success, in 1946 he created a new imprint, Edhasa (Editora y Distribuidora Hispanoamericana, SA), based in Barcelona and managed remotely by López Llausàs. This new publishing house was the gateway to the Iberian Peninsula for the literary boom of the Latin American 1960s and 1970s.

As the decades passed—for forty years he headed Editorial Sudamericana—López Llausàs acquired shares in the company until he became one of its principal owners. In the 1960s, he attempted to retire, but the sudden death of his son in 1965 forced him to take over the reins of the business again. Finally, his granddaughter, Gloria López Llovet, succeeded him.