A good part of Jaume Ripoll’s childhood was spent in the back room of his parents’ video store in Palma. There he watched movies. He also went to the movies with two friends from school, and they talked about books. They had the impression of arriving at the readings before their time: Joyce, Baudelaire, then Zweig, Palahniuk when it became fashionable, Iain Banks, “and the good Philip Kerr who brought out Anagrama.” Those friends were Guillem Sans –today a journalist in Berlin– and the editor Andreu Jaume. Ripoll shared a flat with them in Barcelona when he studied at l’Escac. At that time, Houellebecq and Beigbeder seemed to him the coolest thing in the world, “they were like modernity,” he says, but he suspects that if he went back to 13.99, he would be terrifying. He became fond of Dickens, Melville translated by Valverde. He was a fan only once, when Negra espalda del tiempo, by Javier Marías, came out, and he went to La Central to buy the first copy. He read it in three days. But he is not mythomaniac. He has never stood in line to have books signed, nor does he ask for dedications; he believes that he may bother.
In 2005 he returned to Barcelona, ??where two years later he would found the Filmin platform, whose offices are opposite one of the six floors in which he has lived, on Plató street. So he brought DVDs and books that he considered essential: The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, by Tom Spanbauer, those by Foster Wallace, Chabon, many of the new American novels that Claudio López Lamadrid and Mónica Carmona edited at Random House. And from Bolano. He was selling the DVDs, but those books are still with him in the Poblenou duplex –very high ceilings and giant windows– that he entered with Lluís a year and a half ago.
On each floor, the order of the shelves has been changing. At first he differentiated between classics and contemporaries. Then they were by nationality: German, English, Spanish, Catalan literature. Now he has them as a publisher, except for the blocks of essays and authors with a lot of work, such as Cheever, Hitchens or Iris Murdoch, from whom he celebrates each new translation; He returns often to The sea, the sea. And Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but for another reason: he is unable to finish it, he will have tried fifteen times. He does not combine readings, and rereads little; in any case, loose fragments, like when Martin Amis died and recovered some of the information. He doesn’t like to throw them away, before he remembered people who didn’t return them, now he likes to give books away.
Upstairs there are several editions of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, LGBT-themed literature and espionage readings, “Anthony Blunt’s biography is fascinating.” He gets up around half past five in the morning, he watches a movie while having breakfast on the sofa. He then reads in the Eames lounge chair, under a painting by Francis Bacon. He hates becoming an inpatient reader, but between social networks, emails “and this life of constant impacts”, it is difficult for him to concentrate. The consequence is a growing disaffection for fiction, to which the editor Miguel Aguilar contributes, who pesters him with interesting non-fiction titles. On the coffee table are Men at War, by Luke Turner, which he has just bought in Dublin, and The Shatterings, by Brett Easton Ellis, to which he wants to give the time it deserves. This author has always aroused expectation in him ever since, at the age of fourteen, he acquired Menys que zero at the Setmana del Llibre en Català, in s’Escorxador. He obsessed her. He adores Lunar Park and the “wonderful” review that Rodrigo Fresán dedicated to it.
Every month he flies to Palma and buys three or four books, usually at Babel. Never online. Next to the chair, there are some for casual consultation (from Wilder, from Kubrick, from architecture). And a little further on, Traditional Cuisine of Mallorca, by Tomeu Arbona. It may be that he misses panades and cocarrois, and having him in the dining room makes him feel close. He loves to cook, but he doesn’t follow the recipes in the book because he uses strange concepts, like “tota sa farina que se begui”, and he only understands so many grams and so many milliliters. “He is our Faustus of gastronomy,” he jokes. The first one he gave his mother for Christmas would be La cocina fácil by Karlos Arguiñano, in 1993. Now he has published Videoclub. The films that changed our life in Ediciones B. He is surrounded by the books that are part of it.
