When a few days ago I called Eduardo Martínez de Pisón (Valladolid, 1937) to ask if we could go to his home to interview him, the geographer, writer and mountaineer warned with a laugh: «As you wish, but keep in mind that my house is like a large library a bit chaotic. On the downstairs floor the books are a little more domesticated, because my wife, who has since passed away, forced me to keep them more organized. The two upper floors, where the specimens I use the most are, are absolutely wild. The books not only fill the shelves, they are spread all over the floor. They know they have won. And it’s no joke. As soon as he opens the door of his chalet in Pozuelo de Alarcón, in Madrid, one has the sensation of entering Mr. Koreander’s old bookstore, the one from which Bastián Baltasar Bux runs out with a copy of ‘The Neverending Story’ under the arm. As in Michael Ende’s famous novel, the 87-year-old mountaineer’s living room is surrounded by antique wooden furniture, including an “expertly dated” 16th-century chest of drawers with numerous tiny drawers and a secret apartment “in the “that the king kept his mysteries,” he comments with a playful smile. The walls of the “trained” living room, on the ground floor, are full of books… and more books. There are many from the 18th and 19th centuries, most of them on geography, but there are also those on philosophy, art, history and travel. About half are in French. We see the diaries of Columbus, the essay ‘Explorers and conquerors of the Indies’, written by the geographer Juan Dantín in the middle of the last century; two biographies of Hernán Cortés and an original copy of Father Feijoo’s ‘Erudite and Curious Letters’, published in 1742… It doesn’t matter how old they are, they are all used and full of post-it notes. Standard Related News No David versus Goliath of the sea in the brilliant naval history of Spain Israel Viana The confrontation between the young Beltrán de Castro and the expert and feared English pirate Richard Hawkins in 1594 is still considered today as one of the great feats of our country«The truth is that they are very valuable to me, and not because they are old collector’s pieces or have leather binding, but from an intellectual point of view. They are all very vivid. Sometimes they misplace them a little and I have a hard time finding them, but I know where each one is. If you ask me for a title, I’ll tell you what floor it’s on and usually find it right away. I have about 13,000 books,” emphasizes the National Environment Prize winner in 1991, author of one of the largest studies that exist on the glaciers of Everest. A job that forced him to live for more than four months at the foot of the highest mountain on the planet.—Have you read them all?—Yes, of course. They are to enjoy, but they are also my work tools, in the same way that a carpenter or a shoemaker has their hammers, nails and measuring tapes. It is exactly the same, that is why they are full of papers written down between the pages.Martínez de Pisón, at the North Pole, in 1999 ABCImagined GeographyOn the table is a copy of his essay ‘The Earth of Jules Verne: geography and adventure’, which The Fórcola publishing house has just republished it for the third time. This is the first part of the trilogy with which Martínez de Pisón wanted to go beyond, in 2014, the limits of his subject, physical geography, to immerse himself in literary geography and the field of imagination. A fusion that this professor of encyclopedic knowledge due to his infinite readings and his numerous trips around the world completed with ‘The mountain and art. Views from painting, music and literature’ (2017) and ‘Journeys to the center of the earth’ (2018). Martínez de Pisón says that the book on Jules Verne’s geography – real or invented – came together little by little. First in view of a dilapidated 19th century French atlas that he found and with which he began to recreate in his head the ‘Extraordinary Voyages’ that the famous author published between 1863 and 1918. The same adventures that millions of readers around the world world they have devoured and continue to devour today. Later, upon returning from a trip along the Silk Road, the Spanish Geographic Society asked him to give a lecture comparing the places on the ‘Claudio Bombarnac’ train itinerary imagined by Verne in this 1892 novel, with the places real of that same journey. Some of those impressions found a place in his first essay for Fórcola, ‘The Long Thread of Silk’ (2011), which recounted his own journey through the great landscapes of Central Asia. Thus came ‘The Land of Jules Verne’, in which the veteran geographer and mountaineer follows the journeys imagined by the writer through poles, seas, islands, mountains, caves, volcanoes, rivers, forests, steppes, cities, lost roads and, even the sky, comets and the moon. ‘Extraordinary voyages’ An adventure that Verne began in 1862, after failing in the theaters of Paris, when he visited Pierre-Jules Hetzel with the manuscript of ‘Five Weeks in a Balloon’. The editor agreed to publish it immediately. He liked it so much that, eager to create an informative collection for young people, and presaging the fortune, he offered him 20,000 francs to write two novels a year for the next two decades. This is how he became, curiously, the most sedentary travel narrator in history, as he wrote piecework in a home without a partner or love, suffering from diabetes, ulcers, fainting, facial paralysis and gradual loss of sight and hearing. ‘The Land of Jules Verne’ Author: Eduardo Martínez de Pisón Publisher: Fórcola Pages: 400 Price: 27.50 eurosDespite this, it is the geography that has been read the most in the world, the same as Martínez de Pisón He discovered it when he was a child, while traveling through the Valladolid mountains of his then small real world. «I learned to read when I was only four years old and, when I was approximately six, they gave me Verne’s first story, one that featured one of the pioneers of the American West. It moved me very much in those post-war years. And I was little and I didn’t know about the destruction that the Civil War had caused and the hunger there was. I would go to school, come home and get engrossed in reading. I dreamed that Tropical Africa was around Valladolid and that the Pisuerga was the Amazon. “Verne made me dream of a bigger world full of possibilities,” he recalls. In the few free spaces left by books in his house, Martínez has hanging photographs of the places he has traveled to throughout his life, either as a geographer on duty or with his wife. From the Pyrenees to the Alps; from the eruption of Teneguía, in 1971, to Tajogaite, in 2021, when our mountaineer was already 84 years old; from the Etna volcano to the Karakoram; from Everest to Aconcagua, and from Antarctica to the North Pole. «The North Pole has been, without a doubt, my ‘extraordinary journey’. It was there in 1999, when he was an advisor for ‘Al filo de lo Imposible’, the Spanish Television program. They asked me to accompany a military expedition. I was under the North Star! I remember as a child lying on the ground on my back to see the clouds and imagining that they were icebergs and that I was at the North Pole, so it was a dream come true,” acknowledges the geographer.Martínez de Pisón, in the Eduardo Martínez Alps by PisónGan Pampols, vice president of ReconstructionAfter a few seconds of silence, he continues: «What I am going to tell you now is going to interest you. One of the expedition members was Francisco José Gan Pampols, the new vice president for the Reconstruction of Valencia after the flood. There I saw that he was a very honest, good, competent and intelligent man, as well as a great friend. We called him Curro Gan. I am sure that he will do well, because he has extraordinary ability. He has been to Kosovo, Afghanistan, to the summit of Everest, to the North Pole and to the South Pole. “We must congratulate the election, because he is a great manager who will bring to fruition the essential reconstruction of that territory that has been left desolate.” Before leaving the house so that Martínez de Pisón can prepare the conference he has that same afternoon and his next trip to the Canary Islands in a week – “in which I am sure I will climb Mount Teide once again” – I ask him: Who will inherit all these books when you are gone?—The mountain books, which are very good, will be kept by the library of the Royal Spanish Mountaineering Society Peñalara. I can’t imagine a better place they could go. The rest, however, no one wants. Neither the National Library nor the neighborhood libraries. It’s tremendous… I don’t know. Well, at least they have served my wife and me well throughout our lives. Whoever comes next should do whatever he wants with them.
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