On an academic trip to Chile, the poets at a conference staying in the same hotel as José Daniel Barquero invited him to wine, cheese, and to recite. That night he met Judge Guzmán, who prosecuted Pinochet and whose father was a friend of Pablo Neruda. Now he has seven hundred books by Neruda and a collection of manuscripts, also by García Lorca. They are in a gray folder, inside a sealed cabinet, with camphor balls to protect them from the silverfish that collectors hate so much. Between the pages, sheets of papyrus prevent the acids in the paper from absorbing the ink.
There are other documents: a text that Freud addressed to his nephew, a letter from Einstein, another that his friend Camilo José Cela sent to Barquero. A reading point that Neruda dedicated to Cortázar, as always in green ink; a few words for his “dear García Márquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude; or a poem to Salvador Allende. “After the coup d’état, if you had a book by Neruda they hung you from the mainmast, that’s why, during the dictatorship, people tore off the dedication and threw the book away.” Among other gems, it has Canciones (1921-1924), with a dedication from Lorca to Neruda and a “Memory of Federico” signed by the Chilean poet.
Books are your greatest treasure. She is able to rescue them from the street while he walks his three Jack Russells. He spends hours searching secondhand bookstores. Perhaps it is a passion inherited from his father, whom he always remembers with a book, or from his mother, 82 years old, “an inveterate super-reader.” First you see them, then you stop, one day you catch one. And over time, “the selfishness of possession leads you to buy more than you can read.” In its five libraries – between Madrid, Barcelona, ??London and Moià (the largest) – it has some fifteen hundred on public relations since 1923, including those of Edward Bernays, founder of the profession and with whom he worked in the US. He also an architecture and design collection of almost three thousand books and another on painting; He is an administrator of the Thyssen group.
It is part of the Association of Bibliophiles of Barcelona, ??”one of the most important in Europe”, the oldest active one in Spain, and which has brought together the Duque de Alba, bookbinders such as Palomino and Brugalla, Néstor Luján, Martí de Riquer , names such as Güell, Godó, March, Gili, Carulla, Masaveu, Gay, Mateu, Ybarra, García Nieto, Ferrer, and in which Madrid is present in partners such as Herrero de Miñón, the Count of Orgaz, Santiago Saavedra, Susana Bardón or Barquero himself.
He even collects cacti. And polychrome wood carvings. In the living room he has an encyclopedia that he paid for for seventeen years with all the species of birds. In front there are photos in which he appears with the king emeritus and Felipe VI. Next to the sofa, his medals from the academic and scientific world. And on the table, a book about eggs of the world. “If you see a book like that, you have to buy it.” Next to it, another about which watch he wore with each dress in each era for 500 years.
As a child, in addition to the adventures of The Five, he devoured animal encyclopedias, such as that of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, which he bought in installments with his savings. Even then he was a collector. From insects and butterflies he moved on to stamps. And then, to the coins and watches. He says that you feel attracted to an object, you want to know everything about it, until you finally create the International Museum of Fine Pocket Watchmaking. Which leads you to collecting books on how to teach time to children. He has written more than fifty, such as The Congress Clocks, or the catalog of all the clocks of the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy. Or Torre Sevilla, for which he documented so much about skyscrapers that in the films he recognizes the cities by their skyline.
