Francesc Moll or continuity
Francesc Moll Marquès has died. He was the head of the Moll publishing house from 1967 to 2014. The publishing house was founded in 1934 by his father, the linguist Francisco de Borja Moll Casasnovas, and is currently operating under the name Nueva Editorial Moll, promoted by Antoni Mir. He was the brother of Aina Moll (linguist and first Director General of Linguistic Policy for the Generalitat of Catalonia), Josep Moll (a long-standing leader of Catalan socialism in the Balearic Islands), and Joan Moll Marquès, who, as a pianist, excelled in recording and promoting the work of Antoni Torrandell.
His father, Francisco de Borja Moll, was a giant of 20th-century Catalan culture. A collaborator and follower of the work of Antoni Maria Alcover, we owe to Moll the existence of monuments of the Catalan language such as the Catalan-Valencià-Balear Dictionary (known precisely as the Alcover-Moll) or the edition of the Majorcan fables collected by Alcover. With the aim of promoting the publication of these great works, he founded the publishing house Moll, which became a leading label during the darkest years of Franco's dictatorship. In addition to the Dictionary and the FablesMoll soon became a refined literary publisher, with a catalogue that included everyone from Llorenç Villalonga, Joan Fuster, and Salvador Espriu to Thomas Mann and John Keats. The so-called literary generations of the 1950s and 1970s (Blai Bonet, Josep M. Llompart, Jaime Vidal Alcover, Mariano Villangómez, Lorenzo Moyà, Miguel Ángel Riera, Baltasar Porcel, Antonia Vicens, Guillem Frontera, María Antonia Oliver, and Gabriel Janer Manila) emerged. Without these authors and their contributions, current Catalan literature cannot be explained. It probably wouldn't exist; it certainly wouldn't exist as we know it.
If Francesc Moll Sr. wanted to continue the work of Antoni M. Alcover, Francesc Moll Jr. decided to continue his father's work, following his example of commitment, thoroughness, and rigor. He added his interest in nature to the publishing house, with beautiful editions on natural sciences, hiking, and trekking. Moll was also a founding member of the Balearic Ornithology Group (GOB), the environmental civic entity that has prevented the urban sprawl in the Balearic Islands from becoming much worse than it has been. It now has more work than ever, with a government determined to cement and pave literally everything.
All of us who had the honor of working alongside him at one time or another are witnesses to Francesc Moll's total commitment to language and culture, his perseverance, his progressive nature and worldview, and his reluctance to any form of protagonism. Perhaps that's why some people can't place him: either because of that or because we suffer from a lack of dynamism and a certain excess of big mouths.