The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

THERE ARE NO SECOND CHANCES IN LIFE, EXCEPT TO FEEL remorse. Julián Carax and I met in the autumn of 1933. At that time I was working for the publisher Toni Cabestany, who had discovered him in 1927 in the course of one of his "book-scouting" trips to Paris. Julián earned his living playing piano at a hostess bar in the afternoons, and he wrote at night. The owner of the establishment, one Irene Marceau, knew most of the Paris publishers, and, thanks to her entreaties, favors, or threats of disclosure, Julián Carax had managed to get a number of novels published, though with disastrous commercial results. For a giveaway price, Cabestany acquired the exclusive rights to publish Carax's works in Spain and Latin America, with the translation of the French originals into Spanish by the author himself. Cabestany hoped to sell around three thousand copies per novel, but the first two titles he published in Spain turned out to be a total flop: barely a hundred copies of each sold. Despite these dismal results, every two years we received a new manuscript from Julián, which Cabestany accepted without any objections, saying that he'd signed an agreement with the author, that profit wasn't everything, and that good literature had to be supported no matter what.

One day I was intrigued enough to ask him why he continued to publish Julián Carax's novels as a loss-making venture. In answer to my question, Cabestany ceremoniously walked over to his bookshelf, took one of Julián's books, and invited me to read it. I did. Two weeks later I'd read them all. This time my question was, how we could possibly sell so few copies of those novels.