&etc and Vitor Silva Tavares

Abstract

&etc and Vitor Silva Tavares Emanuel Cameira (bio) “There are books and there’s merchandise. The difference between the two is the difference between poetry and capitalism.” — Vitor Silva Tavares (2010) Many are those who currently consider the book trade a business just like any other. The unorthodox publishing company &etc operated in the antipodes of this logic. A historical Portuguese publishing house, it was a sort of poetry in action “in the few remaining pools of life” (the phrase belongs to Jason Epstein’s famous 1963 text, “A criticism of commercial publishing”). As Jean Dubuffet wrote in his Asphyxiating Culture (1968) — an iconoclastic essay which fed the ideological azimuths of &etc — the notion of culture as it is conceived today, essentially a culture of advertising, is naturally driven to cherish the most heavily simplifying works, so as to lend them better to the mechanisms of advertising, and then to gradually transfer the principle of the value of works to their advertising value. Click for larger view View full resolution Taking this into account and assuming in the line of Pierre Bourdieu that the action of publishing “is turning the unofficial into official — publishing is breaking up a censorship,” it should be noted that everything separated &etc from the rules that animate the editorial media system. Broadly speaking, it was a small, independent, literary publishing house based in Lisbon, whose activity began on the eve of the Carnation Revolution (the 1974 revolution that ended the Portuguese authoritarian regime). In fact, it was not “just another case” in the Portuguese literary publishing scene of the last four decades — it went out of business following the death of Vitor Silva Tavares (1937-2015), the publisher, the life and soul of &etc. Its main traits included a return to certain forms of craftsmanship and knowledge, the rejection of a purely mercantile relationship with books, the promotion of marginal literary discourses, and the association with specific aesthetic groups (its initial connection to a particular wave of Portuguese surrealism should be marked). Starting in the mid-1960s as a supplement in a regional newspaper (Jornal do Fundão), it later emerged as a separate magazine of the same name and then as the book publishing house (1973-2015). In the second half of the twentieth century in Portugal and specifically as far as the sphere of literary publishing was concerned, Vitor Silva Tavares corresponded almost perfectly to the archetype of the wholesome cultural intervener, giving a printed voice and legitimizing literary and artistic lines that otherwise would hardly have come into the field. Driven by the ethical mission of printing the necessary book, the activity of the selfless publisher of &etc, according to Nuno Medeiros, did not anchor “its steps and its selection and mediation apparel in the perception produced about what the market — taken as the demand — aspires to and the reception behaviors it demonstrates.” With a barely viable publishing model, since it only made profits between 1980 and 1985 (the period when the volume of titles published by &etc was the highest — from 1982 to 1984, Silva Tavares published twenty-two annual titles, twice as many as he printed in other productive years, excluding 2001), this publishing house, of primarily cultural characteristics, survived to a large extent thanks to the efforts of Célia Henriques (a partner in the publishing company, and Silva Tavares’s second wife) who capitalized the company whenever necessary (her contribution was not merely creative, as she also produced multiple translations), the result of the affective/sentimental relationship that linked Henriques to the publisher. This privileged situation, almost a patronage that Vitor Silva Tavares put to the service of others (because he could, and had the opportunity), dragging behind him, giving voice to authors of different generations and aesthetic proposals, is therefore sociologically relevant, since it leads one to conclude that the (generous) editorial action was economically determined by an anti-mercantilist logic, not guided by economic dictates, or by the search for “argentarium capital gains.” Moreover, the operation of a small and fragile structure such as Silva Tavares’s publishing house was quite permeable to circumstances of the personal lives of the publisher and some of his collaborators...