News in the publishing sector these days has its own name: Youth. The Catalan publishing house specialized in the publication of children’s and young people’s books is immersed in the celebration of its centenary, while still savoring the National Award for Best Editorial Work that the Ministry of Culture has just awarded it. But keeping a medium-sized family publishing house afloat for a hundred years has been a titanic undertaking to which up to four generations of the Zendrera family have dedicated themselves. Luis Zendrera has been, since 1995, the sole administrator and leads a team of 20 workers from his long-standing headquarters on Provença Street in Barcelona.
In a sector that is increasingly polarized between large publishing groups and micro-publishing companies of one or two people, Juventud is a rare bird in the Catalan panorama that has a turnover between 2.7 and 3 million euros annually and publishes around 70 or 80 novelties. The publisher has managed to successfully weather the pandemic, but Zendrera still remembers with chills the crisis of 2009, when the publishing world experienced a drop in sales of up to 40%. “Youth has managed to make a comeback since 2014 and currently we are already in figures similar to those before this great crisis,” agrees Zendrera.
Many know Juventud for being the publishing house that allowed readers in Spain to enjoy the adventures of Tintin, by Hergé. That was the achievement and success of Conchita Zendrera, the aunt of the current administrator, who not only managed to introduce Tintin in our country, but also to write down the first translations in Spanish and Catalan of some great classics of universal children’s and youth literature such as Peter Bread and Wendy or Alice in Wonderland. She also hooked thousands of young readers with the adventures of The Five by Enid Blyton or those of Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren, who at that time landed in Spain as Pippa Longstocking.
Luis Zendrera is the third generation of this saga of editors and Marta Zendrera, his niece and fourth generation, is also part of the staff. He began working at Juventud in 1985 and two years later he traveled to Colombia, where he spent a couple of years printing books for the Latin American public and making contacts across the Atlantic. Some lands that have not been unknown to the publisher since José Zendrera Date, Zendrera’s grandfather, set up another Juventud in Argentina in 1930 “which helped him weather the Civil War and Spanish censorship,” says his grandson. Since then, exporting, especially to Latin America, has become a cornerstone of the publishing house, since it represents between 25% and 30% of the business and 40% of the turnover.
Juventud publishes between 70 and 80 novelties a year, nothing like the figures managed by giants like Penguin Random House or Planeta. “There is so much supply of books that if you publish more, they are diluted, lost,” justifies its editor. They have a catalog of between 800 and 1,000 authors, but their true value is their collection. “The reprinting of books from our collection is one of the characteristics that makes us strong,” says Zendrera, who estimates that Juventud carries out around 250 reprints, which represent two thirds of what it publishes in a year. The rest, barely a third, are new, especially focused on the illustrated album. “The publishing market is very strange,” acknowledges Zendrera. “After the pandemic we are going to jump over the bush. There are many questions. We have a crisis on us with the rise in prices of energy, paper, food… That makes customers also cautious,” she concludes.
During these hundred years, Juventud has been tested by some large group in the sector, but it has never succumbed. “As long as the company continues to operate, it gives a lot of freedom to be an independent publisher. But every day you feel more alone, because there are fewer medium-sized independent publishers left,” analyzes Zendrera, who puts on muscle and chest for the big celebration.
