Kiosk Literature of Silver Age Spain

Modernity and Mass Culture

Jeffrey Zamostny, Susan Larson, Jeffrey Zamostny, Susan Larson, Jeffrey Zamostny

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783206650
• eBook ISBN: 9781783206674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The so-called 'Silver Age' of Spain ran from 1898 to the rise of Franco in 1939 and was characterized by intense urbanization, widespread class struggle and mobility and a boom in mass culture. This book offers a close look at one manifestation of that mass culture: weekly collections of short, often pocket-sized books sold in urban kiosks at low prices. These series published a wide range of literature in a variety of genres and formats, but their role as disseminators of erotic and anarchist fiction led them to be censored by the Franco dictatorship. This book offers the most detailed scholarly analysis of kiosk literature to date, examining the kiosk phenomenon through the lens of contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space, visuality, celebrity, gender and sexuality, and the digital humanities.

Chapter 1

Literary Collections

Alberto Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa†,
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid

A Revolution in Literary Publishing

The turn of the twentieth century marked a veritable revolution in cultural and leisure habits in Spain, with a remarkable alteration in reading habits as a result of the appearance of numerous new print forms.¹ Among these, serial literary collections began their rise with the appearance in 1907 of El Cuento Semanal. Over a thousand similar series followed on the heels of this collection, including those dedicated to short novels, theatrical works, novelized films, poetry, biographies, news bulletins, song collections, and more. They flooded kiosks and bookstores and were distributed to home subscribers. In the process, they placed literature in the political arena, caused readers to rethink customs and lifestyles, and introduced new moral and behavioral models, with direct implications for such important aspects of life as sexuality. Likewise, they succeeded in finally making reading the cheapest and most basic cultural and leisure activity.

Although the emergence of periodical literary collections was groundbreaking in many respects, it should not be viewed in isolation from related trends. Indeed, the entire publishing world was evolving, with reading becoming a cheaper pastime with vast social repercussions. Print runs increased, reaching numbers unimaginable even today. The nascent proletariat turned to reading as a key to its emancipation and social progress, and groups such as women and children became accustomed to reading products that publishers marketed especially to them. A genuine cultural revolution had begun, and Spain, while inserting itself into a more global cultural scale, began producing a literature in which Spaniards—all Spaniards, and not only the dominant classes—could recognize themselves. The number of works and authors grew exponentially and the demand for literature often exceeded the supply, which encouraged writers to produce novels based on all manner of premises and previously published writings. Accordingly, abridged editions of literary works abounded, together with what would later be known as refritos: works published several times with slight alterations and variations to their title.

Returning to the key role played by literary collections, the birth of one followed from the death of another, and together they spanned all genres: narrative, drama, and poetry, as well as novelized versions of silent films, of historical and tragic events, and of celebrity biographies, among others. Not even the Civil War or censorship at the outset of the Franco dictatorship put an end to these literary collections. In fact, they can be said to have survived up to our days in cheap but literarily interesting collections distributed by neighborhood bookstores and kiosks. This chapter builds on my earlier attempt to catalog these collections, which was necessarily incomplete and provisional (Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, Bibliografía).

According to Hipólito Escolar Sobrino, the editorial output of 1901 consisted of 1,318 titles made up of

an impoverished set of poorly designed books of purely local interest […] on the one hand, didactic materials such as travel guides, formularies, cookbooks, technical manuals, and dictionaries; and on the other hand, a series of novels purely for entertainment, primarily in the form of translations from the French: [Pierre Alexis] Ponson du Terrail, [Eugène] Sue, Victor Hugo, [Alexandre] Dumas, etc. Among Spanish authors, the playwrights enjoyed greater prestige and were more widely read than the novelists.

(9)

Nevertheless, practical and technical books were not necessarily of purely local interest, and in many cases their design was quite respectable. Indeed, these materials were published to higher editorial standards than would later be the case. Couché paper, photochromic prints, illustrations with wrap-around text, and custom bindings were the order of the day.² Unfortunately, the prices were dauntingly high, ranging from one to five pesetas. The only cheap publications were the popular novels cited by Escolar Sobrino, and only because they circulated in high enough numbers to lower the unit price. The opposite occurred with “high cultural” literature, about which Escolar Sobrino states that “a publisher was satisfied if he could sell 500 copies,” “[Miguel de] Unamuno, when he had published twelve books, had earned only 4,000 pesetas,” “[Pío] Baroja failed to earn a single peseta from his first four works,” and “the youth of ’98 and the modernistas had to pay for their editions, and in any case, earned nothing or next to nothing” (12).³

These observations are true enough, but they are not cause to paint too bleak a picture of Spanish publishing in the first decade of the twentieth century. Spaniards were demanding access to universal culture in a market shaped by the ideological concerns of an emerging proletariat and a bourgeoisie eager for national regeneration. Between 1902 and 1910, the presses of Bauzá, Maucci, Sopena, and Sempere, together with the publishing house La España Moderna/The Modern Spain (publisher of a journal of the same name between 1889 and 1914), released the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, and Herbert Spencer, along with Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. An abridged version of Capital sold around five thousand copies, which may not seem like many until we consider that they were passed around in workers’ clubs and labor organizations. Nor was narrative fiction absent from Spain. The Generation of ’98 translated H. G. Wells and William Morris, and there was a place in Spanish bookstores for Émile Zola, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Max Nordau, Octave Mirbeau, and Albert Sorel (Escolar Sobrino 12).

This universalizing trend in Spanish culture came into its own at the end of the 1910s with the creation in 1919 of Editorial Calpe’s “Colección Universal”/“Universal Collection.” It published more than three hundred “universal” works between 1919 and 1925, including the Greco-Roman classics, William Shakespeare (with unsurpassed translations by Luis Astrana Marín), the English Empiricists, the European Romantics, Charles Darwin, the giants of the Spanish Golden Age, and the great novelists of Russia, France, and Great Britain (Sánchez Álvarez-Insúa, Colecciones). “Colección Austral” would be the direct heir to this collection. First published in Buenos Aires in order to circumvent censorship in the early Franco years, its list encompassed almost all of its predecessor’s titles.

The expansion of universal culture in Spain took place alongside the development of great early twentieth-century Spanish literature. The date to remember is 1902, which witnessed the publication of Camino de perfección/The Road to Perfection, La voluntad/Volition, and Sonata de otoño/Autumn Sonata.⁴ These seminal novels ushered in what José Carlos Mainer so aptly called the Silver Age of Spanish literature (La Edad de Plata). Be that as it may, developments in Spanish narrative did not diminish the influence of foreign literature in Spain or the publication of Spanish novels abroad.

If we are to believe the data supplied by the research team at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes in their pioneering study of El Cuento Semanal, Spanish publishers put a good number of novels on the market between 1907 and 1912, the years of that collection’s appearance (Magnien et al. 50). Hence, 203 novels saw the light in 1907. Of these, foreign novels more than doubled Spanish productions (142 versus 61), a figure that began to go into reverse in the following year. After six years (1907–12), the ratio of Spanish to foreign narrative was four to three, or 464 to 316 novels. Meanwhile, poetry and theater were making a retreat while a literature of “ideas” in the fields of history, politics, philosophy, and science was reaching new heights. Hence, in 1907 Spanish and foreign novels comprised 65% of publications in Spain, 20% being Spanish and 45% being foreign. Poetry and theater made up 7.4% of the total output, whereas essays accounted for 27.6%.

Clearly, this change was facilitated by the appearance in 1907 and 1909 of El Cuento Semanal and its sister collection Los Contemporáneos. Yet the expansion of Spanish publishing cannot be attributed solely to these two series or the others that arose shortly afterwards. What really made this possible was the collections’ cumulative impact on the publication of long novels, which they promoted by popularizing authors, elevating print runs, and, in the process, lowering prices.

The start of the collections thus represented a significant increase in literary production in Spain, which lowered the cost of literature as a commodity. Together, these trends transformed literature into the least expensive form of entertainment. This process culminated in 1916, when La Novela Corta began to sell novelettes for five cents apiece.⁵ Buying a full-length novel at three pesetas was like purchasing a ticket to a bullfight or the theater, but with a number of additional benefits. It took five times the amount of time to read a novel than to view a show, and the novel could be resold or become part of a library, entertaining multiple readers. Short novels, in contrast, occupied about as much time as a show (around two hours), but their cost was ten times less, at approximately thirty cents.

El Cuento Semanal, Model and Paradigm

After the Civil War, there was a long silence on the literary period of the first third of the twentieth century. Lasting until the late 1940s, it was motivated by political and generational considerations that fall outside the scope of this chapter.⁶ This silence, coupled with the academy’s traditional disinterest in literary collections, delayed the appearance of their first scholarly vindications until the 1950s. First Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles and later Luis S. Granjel studied the phenomenon from a global perspective, but with a number of errors resulting from more or less incomplete access to the original sources, a problem that persists to this day. The first mistake was to call El Cuento Semanal the first serial novel collection in Spain.

This statement is both true and false. El Cuento Semanal was the first novel collection by Spanish authors to take the form of a magazine rather than a book. Experts from the University of Paris VIII have identified three collections prior to El Cuento Semanal: Biblioteca Patria/The National Library, Colección Diamante/The Diamond Collection, and Biblioteca Contemporánea/The Contemporary Library (Magnien et al. 49).⁷ In all three cases, they published books or booklets. The first two collections were in fact dedicated to Spanish authors, with Biblioteca Patria standing out for its prizes for moralizing novels. Colección Diamante published authors classified today amongst the modernistas and their precursors. Biblioteca Contemporánea, in contrast, was the forerunner of the “Colección Universal” and published both Spanish and foreign classics.

There were other serial collections, as well. One of the longest-lived was La Novela Ilustrada/The Illustrated Novel (1884), which would survive through the first decade of the twentieth century under the literary directorship of the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. This series published works by foreign authors including Guy de Maupassant, Hugo, Dumas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung (writer of the first Raffles stories⁸), Charles Dickens, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. Similar to this collection was La Novela de Ahora/The Novel Now, published by Saturnino Calleja in three different runs. Its slogan was Literature-Arts-Morality-Amenity-Culture, and it produced works by the adventure writers Emilio Salgari, Paul Féval, and Ponson du Terrail. In its third run, it also published Spanish authors such as Armando Palacio Valdés, Ramón Ortega y Frías, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Carlos Frontaura, Francisco Navarro Villoslada, and José Selgas. The collection published in several genres, alternating between adventures, melodramas, and historical novels. Finally, La Novela Maestra/The Masterpiece Novel was produced in Barcelona by the established publishing house El Gato Negro/The Black Cat. It was a tabloid journal dedicated to the works of Dumas. In another vein altogether were the serial collections of theatrical works published by the Sociedad de Autores Españoles.⁹

The second inaccuracy resides in the assumption that Spaniards read very little. Those who were able did in fact read, often turning to the daily press. During the years of El Cuento Semanal and Los Contemporáneos, Madrid boasted seventeen relatively important newspapers, four literary magazines (two others disappeared in 1907), seven color magazines for a general readership, two magazines specializing in comedy, three erotic or gallant magazines, and twenty-six ephemeral satirical magazines.

In his famous memoirs, novelist and editor Eduardo Zamacois identifies the weekly magazine Vida Galante/Gallant Life as the inspiration behind El Cuento Semanal (Un hombre). Zamacois himself had directed the publication between 1898 and 1900. Undoubtedly, there are similarities of design between the two enterprises, but this was true of a large number of publications of the time, both domestic and foreign. They all featured couché paper, two columns of print, photochromic prints with wrap-around text, and folded newsprint. Zamacois’s statement about the publication’s origins likely had ulterior motives. It would not have been looked upon kindly for a series comprised of Spanish authors to be based on a foreign model. This shows, once again, the caution required when drawing on secondary sources. Ultim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Note on Translations
• Commonly Cited Literary Collections
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Kiosk Literature and the Enduring Ephemeral
• Chapter 1 Literary Collections
• Chapter 2 Between Secrets and Simulations: Women Writers in La Novela de Noche
• Chapter 3 Backward Modernity? The Masculine Lesbian in Spanish Sicaliptic Literature
• Chapter 4 Literary Medicine, Medical Literature: César Juarros and La Novela de Hoy
• Chapter 5 Celebrity, Sex, and Mass Readership: The Case of Álvaro Retana
• Chapter 6 Virtual Álvaro Retana: Recovery and Fandom in the Digital Age
• Chapter 7 Cinema Literacy in Cinema Fan Magazines and the Novela Cinematográfica
• Chapter 8 Technology, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Sexuality in La Novela Semanal Cinematográfica (1922–32) 223
• Chapter 9 La Novela Femenina: A Collection by Women Writers in the 1920s
• Chapter 10 Getting Away with Wife Murder: Article 438 in the Press and Popular Fiction 285
• Chapter 11 Carmen de Burgos: Teaching Women of the Modern Age
• Chapter 12 Sports-Themed Kiosk Novelettes and the Silver Age Debate on Tradition and Modernity 329
• Chapter 13 Joaquín Belda’s “Tourist Postcards”: The Origin and Foil of His Novels (1924–31) 353
• Chapter 14 Reading and the Street: An Inventory of Madrid Kiosks in 1911
• Chapter 15 Modeling Kiosk Literary Collections for the Mnemosyne Digital Library
• Conclusion Kiosk Literature as a Geography of Cultural Objects
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover