This month we have been featured in a report written by María Blanco for Mi Petit Madrid, which tells very well what our publishing house is.
We want it to be the first entry in this blog of Libros de las Malas Compañías (Bad Crowd Books). The illustration of the Libros de las Malas Compañías team is by María Hermoso, also known by her pseudonym Una Artista Desconocida (an Unknown Artist), and we love her.
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Much of the world's literature is unwritten. Ana Cristina Herreros, writer, storyteller and editor, knows this better than anyone. With a degree in philology, she began to delve into the richness of oral storytelling to develop her doctoral thesis (which she defended in 1992) and since then, she has continued to listen and tell all the tales of yesteryear that can be heard, but hardly voiced. In Libros de las Malas Compañías they have decided to write them down and publish them, so that they are not forgotten, so that they will always remain and, above all, to show the richness of a cultural heritage that exists, even if it is not seen.
Ana, born in León and adopted by Madrid, as well as being an editor and writer, is first and foremost a storyteller. Her storytelling alter ego is called Ana Griott ("griot" is the name by which storytellers are known in West Africa), and it is precisely in her role as storyteller that she has travelled half the world listening and then, transmitting and translating onto paper the stories that have been passed down from grandparents to grandchildren over the centuries, in every corner of the world.
The publishing house Libros de las Malas Compañías (Bad Crowd Books) was born in 2014 with the intention of becoming a publishing project on the fringes of the labels that are traditionally attached to literature when it only pursues purely commercial ends. In fact, its very name is a declaration of intentions, which identifies it as a disobedient publishing house behind which, together with Ana Cristina, portrayed here from left to right, Daniel Tornero, art director and illustrator of several of its books, Anaïs González, commercial, marketing and communication director of the publishing house, and Antonio Hernández Ribaina, who is in charge of managing the non-bookshop network and distribution in the Canary Islands.
Extremely careful with each of their books, they do not hesitate to sacrifice good profit margins for the sake of a product that is not only high quality, but also environmentally responsible and honest to their way of seeing life. The paper they use comes from sustainably managed forests. Their print shop is in Madrid and they are their own distributors, which obliges them to select and take great care over the bookshops where they sell their titles. In this selection, they leave out the large surfaces to focus solely on a network of bookshops that they trust both for their professionalism and their ethics because they believe that "books can be made and sold in a different way".
For example, her so-called noir series (which has nothing to do with crime literature, but with the recovery of the oral memory of the black communities), began as a solidary project for the construction of a library in the Casamance region of Senegal. When they saw that they had no books to fill their shelves, but they did have the stories that belonged to the oral tradition of the Senegalese people. Ana Cristina went there and recorded the stories that the grandparents of the communities told in Diola, a language that has no written form and only exists in oral transmission. Thus, the first things that were lent out in that library in Casamance were the grandfathers and grandmothers. And of the more than 100 stories immortalised by Ana Cristina, 33 were selected and published in El Dragón que se Comió el Sol (the Dragon that Ate the Sun) y Otros Cuentos de la Baja Casamance (Other Tales from Low Casamance) (which can also be heard in Diola on the website of Las Malas Compañías).
This unique experience led Las Malas Compañías to continue researching, and they decided to seek out the most silenced African peoples and support their publishing project with another solidary project that would focus directly on helping the populations of the area in some way. So far, in addition to the stories from Senegal, they have published Los Cuentos del Erizo (The Hedgehog's Tales) y otros cuentos de las Mujeres del Sáhara (Other tales of Sahara’s women). They have just listened to the albino population of Mozambique, a journey that will lead to Los Cuentos del conejo y otros cuentos de la gente albina de Mozambique (Rabbit tales and other stories of the albino people of Mozambique), which will be published in spring.
It should be noted that thousands of anti-personnel mines are buried in Casamance in an attempt to stop the self-determination of the people by instilling fear. The people of the Sahara are suffering from the daily plundering of their cultural wealth and identity, as well as from persecution and denial as a people, forcing them to live in refugee camps for more than 40 years. As for the albino populations of Mozambique, they struggle daily against discrimination, mistreatment, persecution, hatred and death. Choosing these people and not getting involved with them would not make any sense for Libros de las Malas Compañías (Bad Crowd Books).
For this reason, part of the income from their sales goes to the cultural project that each community decides on. Thus, in Casamance, they are supporting the network that teaches Spanish in Senegal, while continuing to collaborate with the library, bringing funds and running reading workshops, film forums, literacy courses for women, etc. In the Sahara, they work closely with the SADR’s Ministry of Education through a research group to recover the oral memory and restore the chain of traditional transmission, broken by the long confinement in the camps. And with their latest project (the publication of Rabbit tales and other stories of the albino people of Mozambique), they aim to show that albino children tell the same stories as non-albino children because they are not spirits as many of them believe.
Happy solidary Reading!
(By María Glück, on the 15th of december, 2017)
