The 'boom' of Blackie Books' adult notebooks

Few would believe that there would be someone who would want to make summer notebooks again when they were no longer asked for them at school. But life always holds surprises. The Barcelona-based publisher Blackie Books has shown that there is a growing audience willing to arm themselves with a pencil to solve the challenges posed in its Activity Book for Adults, which has become one of the essentials when one packs a suitcase or goes to spend the day at the beach. "We wanted to make something that a person could get their head into and spend hours thinking about," says one of its authors, Daniel López Valle, "and, in summer, life is suspended in some way and we have more free time."

This is how Blackie Books' notebooks were born eleven years ago, when López Valle met Jan Martí, the founder of the publishing house. The secret, however, was to "remove the traumatic part" that this student supplement had had in earlier summers. "We didn't want anyone to feel like they were being examined or that someone was looking over their shoulder," emphasizes the person in charge of writing the tests, complemented by Cristóbal Fortúnez's illustrations.

Despite being a goal they don't always achieve, racking the brains of more than one with impossible tests, their pastimes, logic games, word searches, mazes, tests, and crosswords have seduced more than 200,000 readers and have been adapted to other markets such as Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. During the month of August, it has positioned itself as the most read book in Catalonia in the non-fiction category in Spanish. "They have always worked very well, since number 1, and have grown over time," says López Valle. So much so that other publishers have copied the idea, such as the one specializing in travel guides, Lonely Planet.

It should be noted that the Activity Book for Adults does not contain the typical word searches or crosswords that one has filled in, almost disinterestedly, at some point. "You can find a lot of content and curiosities. Everything treated with humor. The grace is that people have fun learning or learn by having fun," defends the author, "but without the school sense." Thus, one can try to discover the title of a series with clues hidden in suggestive drawings; guess the name of a writer with a surprising description of their life; remember the names of the best reggaeton singers; relate famous tweets with the celebrity who said them; find lost objects in Marie Kondo's room, or relate the motorcycles of a motomami like Rosalía with the movies they appeared in.

To devise tests like these, López Valle gets together with the illustrator, Cristóbal Fortúnez, and they start to let out everything that comes to their minds. "We have a similar sense of humor," he admits. But he also turns to his girlfriend, whom he waits for at the door when she comes home from work so she can solve one of his crosswords and tell him what she thinks, or to his group of friends from his native Elche, who like anagrams and he always satisfies them by including some.

Over the years, the content has changed. At first, a rigid separation by themes was imposed, with differentiated sections for music, cinema, series, literature, science, sports, or art, but everything ended up merging, "mixing the trashy with the sublime," says its author. The doses of humor have also increased ---"we now address the reader as if they were our friend"---, and tests designed to be solved in groups have been included, after detecting that people shared the notebooks and took them to terraces and the pool to solve them. Against all odds, there have even been teachers who have used his tests to teach class.

From seeing how readers used the adult notebook, new formats have also been created. Two years ago, the Winter Notebook was born. Then came the Golden Notebook, launched in 2021 for an older audience, and this year's Kids Notebook. The latter is also available in Catalan. "Everything has come about because people regularly told us, 'why don't you do...?', and when we had the spirit and the time, we did it. For now, we're going to stay here," assures López Valle.

Blackie Books' notebooks have played a prominent role in López Valle's career for years, not only in charge of writing the texts but also of coordinating an increasingly varied collection. And it seems that it doesn't stop there. This September he will publish his first book, HEX. Historias Extraordinarias, originated, precisely, in some of the entertainments he has been thinking up for adults. "When the notebook was divided into sections, each one ended with a story, called HEX," he recalls. By compiling them, he wanted to make "a vindication of another way of making history, a tribute to human beings as they are, capable of supernatural feats, full of very common weaknesses."