Books Across Nations

Known among his peers as ‘The Unofficial Consul of the Catalans in Great Britain’, Joan Gili single-handedly built The Dolphin Book Company into a cultural force. Using over 2,000 unpublished documents,Books Across Nationsreveals innovative strategies that brought Spanish and Catalan classics across borders, censorship and exile.

Politics built barriers while Gili was connecting communities through culture – for six decades, he used The Dolphin Book Company to promote classics across borders, censorship and exile through visionary strategies that continue to resonate today.

Long before the digital era, Joan Gili spent sixty years cultivating taste. The Dolphin Bookshop opened in April 1935, in London’s bookselling district around Charing Cross. A partnership at first, it soon became a one-person company driven by Gili’s entrepreneurial spirit, his roots in the book trade, and his mission to spread Spanish and Catalan literature overseas. Targeting so-called ‘discriminating readers’, the new bookshop challenged Britain’s book-borrowing culture, defying the mainstream.

The present study is not a biography of Gili. Based on over 2,000 unpublished manuscripts from his personal and professional archive, this multidisciplinary study grounded in Translation Studies reveals the full reach of a man committed to two worlds, and determined to create a bridge between them. Students, scholars and professionals in publishing and bookselling will find here a rigorously researched story of passion, war, taste, strategy and vision, which speaks directly to the world we live in today.