Joaquín Palau, director of Arpa: "Books are in excellent health; they're an unbeatable invention."

Arpa editores was founded in Barcelona nine years ago when father Joaquín Palau and son Álvaro Palau Arvizu decided to bring their dream of owning their own publishing house to life. Joaquín had worked for years at renowned publishing houses, while Álvaro had studied political science in Paris. This union and this knowledge gave rise to Arpa, which has since published titles in the humanities , social sciences , psychology, and business. A year ago, it launched a line of universal classics of literature and thought.

They've been distributing in Argentina for a few years now, and their latest books include titles like El Enfermedad de las Ciudades (The Discomfort of Cities) by Jorge Dioni López and Enciclopedia crítica del género (Critical Encyclopedia of Gender ). In this interview with Clarín , Joaquín Palau, a self-confessed lover of Buenos Aires and its cultural life, explains the challenges of running his own publishing house and the virtues of books, which he describes as a marvelous invention.

They've already launched a sister publishing house in France , Nouvelle Editions Arpa, and hope to continue growing. "We're not looking for more titles, but better books. In the field of essays and the humanities in general, things need to be edited and promoted very well ," says Palau.

–Arpa was born nine years ago as the result of an agreement and the creation of a publishing company between my son and me. It's not a publishing house that a father will hand down to his son or that a son will inherit from his father, but rather one we created together with two very clear and, I believe, complementary professional profiles. I come from a lifelong publishing background; I worked for 15 years at Planeta, seven as director of Destino, and I was also general manager of the RBA group. And Álvaro Palau, my son, has a degree in Political Science from Paris. At a certain point, due to a certain weariness on both of our parts for very different reasons, we decided to try to realize a dream we'd had for many years: to create a publishing house. It's called Arpa because they are the first syllables of our surnames: Arvizu, after my son's maternal surname, and Palau, after mine. We reversed the order, though.

–It is also a musical instrument.

–Yes, of course. Arpa was born with certain reluctance in the sector because the market was very mature, but we had significant competitive advantages, such as experience, contacts with many authors and the Spanish press, and a certain amount of experience on both sides, Álvaro's and mine, in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. So we felt capable of embarking on this adventure. Four years after its inception, with the Covid pandemic, book sales grew extraordinarily, which was a fortunate boost within the dramatic situation, and then, little by little, we have consolidated ourselves. It's not easy to work with a father, and it's not easy to work with a son, much less when both consider themselves very clever and men. But it has been possible. We have learned to give in when necessary and to discuss things well, and I think it's now a successful project in Spain, led primarily by Álvaro Palau.

–What is your catalog like and how do you think about the titles you publish?

–The main areas of study are, without a doubt, humanities and social sciences in the essay genre. We're also very interested in psychology. A big difference between my generation and my son's is, among many other things, the changing perception we had and still have of psychology. In my time, when I was young, anyone who went to a psychologist was considered a problem child. Today, in my children's generation, anyone who doesn't go to a psychologist is a problem child.

–Psychology is part of comprehensive health today; it's like going to a general practitioner, isn't it?

–Absolutely, we're committed to that, that is, to understanding that psychology is culture. We're also developing a line of business books because we like them and because Álvaro is particularly expert in that field, very oriented towards English-language books. And we're already enthusiastically working on a line of universal classics. We know there's a lot of competition there, but if there's competition, it's because it works. Our challenge is to produce, to the extent possible, renewed and updated editions of universal classics, both fiction and non-fiction. We seek to offer an optimal reading experience, something that affects the typography, the book's packaging, the design, the introductions, and of course the translations, because translations also age; every few years it makes sense to update them, and that's what we're working on.

–Do you think it's a good time for literature in this hyperconnected world we live in?

–The publishing business is growing. Reading is growing, although it varies from area to area. For example, children's and young adult literature has been growing for years, but it still happens that boys and girls, after a certain age, stop reading or read less, and after a few years, some do resume the reading habit. I remember being in Buenos Aires at the World Congress of Publishers 30 years ago, and I remember the sector being terrified because it seemed like books were going to disappear, and you know what the threat was? The CD-ROM! It ceased to exist five years after its birth. Books are in a state of iron health; they're an unbeatable invention. In 500 years, they've actually changed little. You pick up a book from 300 years ago and it's obviously changed, like everything else. Clothes have changed too, but pants are still pants, both then and now. A book is exactly the same: well-printed, well-edited pages of paper, and obviously with a progressive improvement in the reading experience. I would say that the book still maintains its great prestige and that the book alone has earned it.

–Has there been an explosion of non-fiction?

–I think nonfiction has been growing steadily for decades. Today, in Spain, for example, there isn't a self-respecting chef who doesn't have a published book; that can be applied to many professions. It wasn't like that before.

–One of the books coming to Argentina is Jorge Dioni López's book, The Discomfort in Cities …

–Yes, Jorge is an extraordinary essayist, born as a great essayist in Arpa, that's the truth. Today he's a reference on this topic. He analyzes, from a Spanish but now practically universal perspective, the economic and social dynamics that are severely impacting urban housing. They are forcing two key groups out of the cities: young people and the elderly. After the 2008 real estate bubble, half-built or already built houses, or those with failed mortgages, many of them in the hands of national banks, passed, for four euros, into the hands of investment funds. Instead of helping to solve the housing problem, they've only aggravated it even further, promoting tourist apartments and rising rents. This means, for example, that many older people can't cover these rent increases. And young people, with today's salaries, find it difficult to own an apartment or a project for an apartment of their own, and this, in turn, creates a bigger problem: many young people live together. What consequences does this have? The lack of new families, which seems like a joke, is extremely serious in the medium term. This book, which was a bestseller in Spain, is based on his first book, La España de las piscinas (Spain of Swimming Pools), a masterful text that Madrid booksellers considered the best essay of the year in Spain in 2023.

–Does the book help us think?

–Thinking isn't easy, whether you read or not, but I'd say yes, it helps. But books have to learn to coexist with many other sources of knowledge. I have a son who reads a lot and a son who doesn't read much—I mean conventional reading—but who is extremely cultured because he reads in a different way, through other means: through social media, for example. If you want to be a great expert on Petrarch, you may have to work hard with more literary resources, with more sources of knowledge than those, but I'd say that today, well-managed social media allows you to learn a lot, almost everything. I think learning to think, to be lucid, isn't the preserve of books; that's fair to admit. There are many people who read a lot and remain just as bad, okay? Books sometimes make you refinedly evil if you're evil, but if you're a good person, they make you refinedly good, and this is the great gift of reading and literature.

–I was thinking, for example, about the Lutheran Reformation, which fought for the individual practice of reading, for the free interpretation of the divine word, and what the practice of reading implies for reason and thought.

–Yes, a book demands that you concentrate, in fact, that's why there are chapters in books, so you can rest. I would say there's no way to be a mentally lucid person—it's fashionable to talk about critical thinking now, although it's a somewhat worn-out expression; I would say mental lucidity, mental richness—without reading. Books are also essential for having a great time, for having fun. For imagining other worlds. My daughter once told me something that I found funny because she said it spontaneously. I have a family that loves traveling. Whereas I, and in this at least I'm like Immanuel Kant, don't like it as much. I stay at home with my world, with my poems and my books. Then one day my daughter said to me: 'Of course, you travel from your table, Dad.' And it's strictly true. I believe that literature, in any of its genres, allows you to be anywhere in the world you want to imagine.