Cover photo: stories from Calleja belonging to my father and my aunts.
Saturnino calleja It is one of those figures so well known as blurred by the passage of time. Writer, editor and educator, his vast collection of children's literature gave rise to the well-known expression "Have more story than Calleja", which can already be lost due to ignorance. This is a review to his life and work.
Saturnino calleja
Saturnino calleja Fernández was born in Burgos in 1853 and is a referent essential in children's and young people's literature, teaching and reading promotion in his time.
En 1876 Fernando Calleja Santos, his father, opens the bookstore and bookbinding business that will soon become Editorial Calleja, which revolutionized the publishing scene. In its more than 80 years of history, published thousands of titles by Spanish and foreign authors for children and adults.
Saturnino calleja also created and directed the magazine The Illustration of Spain and the National Association of Spanish Teachers and organized the National Assembly of Teachers.
Tales
It was not until 1884 when he started publishing the stories that would make him so famous. Before he had focused on School books as reading methods, geometries, geographies or stories from Spain, catechisms, encyclopedias, manuals of civility, iconographic alphabet books, made with the idea of teaching almost playing or, at least, having fun.
The stories were an extension of that idea. He published many in different collections such as New collections of stories (fairy, fantastic ...), Recreation library, Recreational school library, Illustrated library for children, Perla Library. Stories of all genres appeared in them, including writers such as Salgari, Poe, Collodi or biblical narratives.
A curiosity was the dimensions of each story, which were also a novelty, since they were tiny and they could be collected as stickers, in addition to keeping or taking anywhere. Each one was about 5 inches wide by 7 inches high.
The addition was that also valued illustrators like few and he did not hesitate to have the most recognized artists of the time, whose work was very careful. After his death, the publisher had names like Penagos or Tono.
In addition, adapted stories by authors as Hans Christian Andersen or the brothers Grimm and put the traditional touch and those final morals so typical for which he was also criticized and responded to. Classic phrases such as «and They were happily ever afterThey didn't give me any more because they didn't want to ».
Anys of the countless titles are: The stepmother, The trip of Thumbelina, Venturita, The merchant of Venice, Paco I the napias, The silkworms, The gold ounce, The miller's daughter, From urchin to senator, Giant, lion and fox or The island of Jauja .
Achievements
Calleja was the first to launch large circulation editions, achieving a lower cost and with prices for all budgets.
In 1899 he published more than 3 million volumes of almost 900 titles of diverse themes, not just stories, which were less than half. He also published religious works, dictionaries and adult books, as a quite famous collection of medical books at the time. And at a time when 60% of the population was illiterate, his passion for literature and pedagogy led him to want to spread culture starting with school. Thus edited textbooks and pedagogical for teachers who even gave away to the schools of the villages with fewer financial resources.
He also made the first edition of Platero and me (Juan Ramón Jiménez worked at the publishing house) and published several of El Quijote, among them, some curious as one with pink paper or another microscopic.
And to finish, He was a pioneer in the promotion and dissemination of his books. It had up to eighteen delegations between America and the Philippines, and was one of the first also in include opinions in catalogs about his books, something that is so common today.