Endymion

Endymion is a Barcelona publishing house founded by Pedro Sanmartí in 1945, amid the hardship and public silence of the postwar years. Its catalogue—catechisms, etiquette manuals, moralizing fiction, and successful boys’ comics—embodies the commercial and ideological conventions of the period. Yet the firm is not only a producer of popular books: its links to Inspector Javier Fumero make it a place where private vulnerability and political power meet, while its conventional publishing model contrasts with the later revival of Julián Carax’s work.

Foundation and Publishing Program

Sanmartí established Endymion with money from his father-in-law, whom he had sent to a nursing home while awaiting news of his death. He presented himself as a self-made businessman and cultivated young women; his broken English and habit of ending sentences with “Okay” were part of his public manner. The company’s name, which he chose because he thought it sounded impressive and would help sell books, reflects a deliberate attention to market image.

The firm published catechisms and etiquette manuals alongside moralizing novel series. Their protagonists included young nuns caught up in comic escapades, Red Cross workers, and contented, morally upright civil servants. Endymion also issued the comic-book series Brave Commando, which became a roaring success among boys looking for heroes. Together, the catalogue suggests an operation organized around familiar moral assurances and readily marketable forms, rather than the literary reputation of challenging or unfamiliar work.

Employees and Sanmartí’s Circle

Nuria, a copy-editor who had searched in vain for translation work, found a job at Endymion in 1945. She formed a close friendship with Sanmartí’s secretary, Mercedes Pietro, a war widow raising a seven-year-old son with muscular dystrophy. The two women recognized a shared condition of loss and isolation in a city where men were dead or had withdrawn from the world. Their friendship gave Nuria an ally within the publishing house, but it also made Mercedes’s warnings consequential.

Mercedes told Nuria that Sanmartí was a close friend of Inspector Javier Fumero, whose influence and honours were growing. The two men belonged to a clique that had gained power from the ruins of the war and was extending its reach through the city. When Fumero came to the office for a planned lunch with Sanmartí, Nuria hid in the filing room until the visitors had left. Mercedes understood the reason without discussion and thereafter warned her whenever Fumero appeared, enabling Nuria to hide again.

Workplace Pressure and Its Consequences

Mercedes had anticipated that the danger surrounding Fumero would eventually affect Nuria’s work. A few days after one of the warnings, Sanmartí began returning the manuscripts Nuria had corrected, claiming they were full of errors. Nuria was made to redo pages covered in his corrections and comments, staying at the office until ten or eleven at night almost every day. The episode turns editorial labor into a form of pressure: the firm’s ordinary process of correction becomes a means by which its owner can exhaust and intimidate an employee.

Endymion’s connection to Fumero therefore matters beyond the owner’s private friendships. Nuria’s concealment in the filing room, Mercedes’s repeated warnings, and the sudden burden of redoing manuscripts place the publishing house inside the machinery of postwar coercion. The evidence does not establish that Sanmartí’s publishing program itself directed Fumero’s actions; it does show how the owner’s association with the inspector shaped the workplace and narrowed the safety available to Nuria.

Literary Contrast and Afterlife

The wider publishing history of Carax’s novels provides a striking contrast to Endymion’s commercial catalogue. Between 1928 and 1936, Cabestany had published eight of Carax’s novels, though his firm made its money chiefly from catechisms and cheap sentimental fiction. After Cabestany took over the firm, a buyer offered three times the market value for the remaining stock of Carax’s novels. Cabestany demanded still more, the buyer withdrew, and days later the warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo burned to its foundations. The books’ precarious passage through publication, attempted purchase, and destruction shows how a work’s survival can depend on the fate of its physical stock as much as on its readership.

Endymion itself is not identified as the publisher of Carax’s novels. In a later development, Gustavo Barceló closed his bookshop, sold its stock, and created a separate publishing company devoted to reissuing Carax. Its first volume gathered three novels from proofs recovered in a furniture warehouse belonging to the Cabestany family and sold 342 copies, far behind the year’s bestseller, an illustrated life of the bullfighter El Cordobés. The contrast places Endymion’s briskly successful popular formats beside the modest sales and recovered material remnants of Carax’s work: one kind of publishing finds a ready mass audience, while the other makes literary preservation possible without promising comparable commercial success.