Sometimes you are in luck for very strange reasons. This is one of them. Literary Adventures, a tiny but very original Segovia publishing house, has chosen Barcelona for the third installment of his collection of black maps, unclassifiable product which is better understood if the first two editions are recorded. The first time he charted the London of the crimes of Jack the Ripper. The second, through Arthur Rimbaud, recalled the syndiose of the Paris Commune of 1871. And now, just a few days ago, he just took ‘Rosa de Fuego: anarchists, gunmen and underworld’ from the press, a journey back in time to the turbulent stage that this city lived between 1884 and 1909, or, as Dani Castillo and Mónica Vacas say, that is, the publisher’s atrium and ventricle, an illustrated and commented chronology of when “Barcelona went ‘boom’ & rdquor ;.
It would be easier to assemble an Orsini bomb without having notions of explosives than to tell without inaccuracies what literary maps are and, above all, the black maps that Literary Adventures illuminates from time to time. They are maps, yes. They are also clippings from the press of the moment. Or fragments of famous novels. They also have a certain ‘fanzine’ air. They are also delicate collectibles, because they are precious, presented in a colorful cardboard envelope. Perhaps, however, the best way to settle this introduction is to tell what happened to one of his maps, that of Sherlock Holmes’s London. In its version translated into English, it is sold at no less than Stanfords, the world’s most famous travel book store, a claim that is not at all questionable, since it appears so much in Arthur Conan Doyle’s own novels. There the novelist sent Dr. Watson to find a map of Dartmoor, the county where the plot of ‘The Dog of Baskerville’ takes place. It is the repera, a tiny Segovia publishing house dares with Sherlock Holmes, intangible heritage of the United Kingdom, and in a bibliographic temple like Stanfords, official supplier of Sherlock Holmes, they make a hole in one of their shelves.
The point is that in this line of editing black maps, Dani and Mónica had in their portfolio one day tackling the dawn of anarchism at the end of the 19th century. The initial idea was to repeat with London, to transfer to a map crossed by the Thames the adventures of Joseph Conrad’s secret agent, with those perfidious plans to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and, also, address one of the most atypical novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the anarchist plans go through put a bomb on the very statue that Shakespeare de Leicester Square.
The fuse of that project did not light and that is how they redirected their plans to Barcelona, a city that embraced the libertarian apostolate exercised by Giuseppe Fanelli with more fervor than Madrid, the first destination to which Bakunin sent him, but where it seems that due to language problems it was not. they understood not even me. That in Barcelona, a city already long before the second half of the 19th century, subscribed to riots, revolts and rowdies, anarchism took deep roots is something well known and the examples of this are many, but, once you have chosen one striking, what happened in the hours following the attack on the Corpus Christi procession of June 7, 1896 stands out due to its figures. As in two moments in ‘Casablanca’, Captain Renault ordered the arrest of the “usual suspects & rdquor ;, the Barcelona authorities gave the same order that day and in a flash they put 500 people behind bars, which is said soon. Louis Renault was not even remotely capable of such a feat.
Barcelona’s anarchism was the engine of enormous social progress, that no one takes it away, but what is relevant in this new installment of the black maps is its face, its love for swipe the balls from the railings of the stairs of the stately estates of the city and, after a risky exercise of terrorist DIY, make them reborn as hand bombs. It is for this reason that the Orsini pumps, like the one that did not explode at the Liceu of the two that were launched, look so beautiful, chrome and perfect, almost as if it had been bought in Vinçon.
To tackle this explosive matter, Aventuras Literarias has gone, they confess, to the best of sources, a highly out-of-print, hooligan and iconoclastic book published in Barcelona not many years ago, ‘The Barcelona of dynamite, lead and oil’ , in which they are censored and commented, with “Insults to the clergy and tutelage to the authority & rdquor;, the long hundred attacks that were committed in the city between 1884 and 1909. In Segovia they have a copy. What envy!
To the valuable documentary material that that book provides, Dani and Mónica have added stories that should not be forgotten, such as the cross-correspondence between Miguel de Unamuno and Joan Maragall following the anticlerical coven of the Tragic Week and, above all, the landing in Barcelona of the Parisian Apaches, a sort of French brawl that gave rise to the press (‘El Diluvio’, ‘La Vanguardia’, ‘La Publicidad’ & mldr;) giving their specialists carte blanche from the chronicle of events to draw their sharpest pencils. “These sectarians live by the most refined vice, they are very adept at swindling and so disgusting are they that almost all of them live at the expense of those unfortunate women of happy life & mldr; & rdquor ;. “Such is the audacity with which the Apaches operate that two years in a row they have stolen the coat from the same police prefect & mldr; & rdquor ;. “In the calle del Mediodía and adjacent ‘les bas fond’ of the city, grouped in tribes, live hungry women of angry life, men almost women, homosexuals, and human birds of the worst condition … & rdquor ;.
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Barcelona, for putting a finishing touch on this excursion, is indebted to Segovia, home of Aventuras Literarias, a small but responsible publisher, at its scale, of great bestsellers. His map of Madrid by Benito Pérez Galdós is now in its eighth edition. Something admirable happens to the southwest of the mountain range of the Iberian system. Unparalleled black maps are made in Segovia. In Burgos, the Siloé publishing house printed in 2017 a total of 898 handcrafted copies of the mysterious Voynich manuscript. In 1999, Johnny Depp gave life to a character of Arturo Pérez Reverte for the film ‘The Ninth Door’ and went to a Toledo printing press in search of a book, ‘The nine gates of the kingdom of shadows’, handwritten by Satan himself. I don’t know, Monica and Dani, maybe so many coincidences would lead to a map of fantastic editorials.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com