Carlos Aganzo: Phil Camino, without shouting in the agora

From a little earlier, in 2010, he organizes with a group of friends the cultural encounters of Esles de Cayón, where every year “writers and wise” come to share ideas and experiences. They are the inspirators of the catalog of this singular editorial seal, which adds and follows a hundred length of titles in their catalog.

Camino was a doctorate in journalism with a thesis certainly ‘Avant la Lettre’, which was entitled ‘Aggressions to sexual freedom and social response: Vargas Llosa and French realism’, and for some years he worked on jobs that had to do little ( The communication department of a foundation) or nothing (furniture designer) with literature.

So until, frisying the forties, he wrote his first novel, ‘Belmanso’ (2012), which was followed ‘Haranes’, who has now reappeared with his own seal, and later the essay ‘Ten White Moons’ and his last Novel, ‘The memory of the living’, without forgetting a book of poems: ‘Where the meat no longer feels’. In between he opened a bookstore, which did not reach five years, and has still had time to translate two novels by the French Pierre Assouline, in addition to ‘The Seesiente Man’, by Violette Ailhaud.

Before all these adventures, Phil Camino was a girl who dreamed of being a classic ballet star, and who was “lucky” to live in a house with books. That of his parents, but above all that of his grandparents, in France, where he spent the holidays. Something or much also had to see in his affiliation his education at the French high to comment on something.

From then on, the volumes of the Rose Library and the Green Library, of Hachette, or the Stagur Comtesse stories remember very well. With his brothers he also read comics and enlightened books, from Sandokán to Mortadelo and Filemón, passing through Astérix, Tintín or Spirou.

Another very different thing is when he began reading Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert or Maupassant, in the collection ‘Le Livre de Poche’, which made him know that reading was more than adventure or hobby. With 17 years he discovered ‘Las Flores del Evil’, from Baudelaire, and then understood that there was “another jump.” Fruit of that jump, later the emotions experienced would come when reading ‘Nothing’, by Carmen Laphoret, with that character, Andrea, who got me under my skin. Of that era of “revelation” keep almost all books. He has read again ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Red and Black’, although he would not do the same with ‘The Lover’, of Hard, whose reading gave him such a strong blow that he needs to maintain the sensation intact.

After the French began with the Spaniards. He was fascinated by Cela and Delibes. And when he had in his hands ‘Malena is a tango name’ he couldn’t stop until he finished it. He also enjoyed the Latin American ‘boom’, in the editions of Alfaguara: Bryce Echenique read everything suddenly, and with the Cortázar magician, he says, he certainly walked crazy. Until Borges arrived, before starting the Russians …

The big garden happened perhaps as a result of all that. And he aroused his editor’s vocation, from the need for the texts of the meetings in Cantabria not to be lost. What began as a testimonial action became a commercial publishing house that took its name from an old apple garden, close to the place where the appointment of each year takes place. Literary works that foster free thinking. And that seek quality and care, before quantity. After ten years of settlement of the project, what the publisher is now pursued is the balance between reprints and novelties.

With its touch of distinction in the brief essay collection in the Spanish language. A series, he says, that young people are very interested, and that he has a certain inspiration in the collection ‘that Sais-Je?’, By Presse Universitaire de France. Identity signs that allow it to compete in times of an immense editorial offer, and “with more capacity than ever in history to express and disseminate ideas and opinions.” In any case, the opportunity to contribute its own space from which to promote leisurely reflection, “from calm and screaming in agora.” It does not seem little.