The small pleasures of Blanca Pujals

Blanca Pujals (Vila-seca, 1992) has had the good fortune of coming up with good ideas. It's never easy, and even less so when you're starting out in a sector that isn't the one you had prepared for. But, with a long trajectory as a reader and prescriber of books to family, friends, and acquaintances, Pujals has managed to carve out a niche in the publishing world with the collections Petits Plaers and Club Victòria, whose books already occupy the bookstores —and Instagram profiles— of many.

Before breaking into the publishing sector, Pujals worked as a lawyer. She did so until she got tired and decided to study for the Master's in Publishing at the UPF Barcelona School of Management (UPF-BSM). As her final master's project, she conceived a collection of short novels, a very popular genre in Europe, especially in France, but one that is largely overlooked here. "Stefan Zweig, a great writer of short novels, defined them as the perfect work. He would write a story and then cut it down until he found it," she states.

Pujals thought of friends who always told her they didn't have time to read and could only dedicate their subway commute to work or Sunday afternoons. Furthermore, with such sporadic and brief reading moments, when they resumed the story, they had forgotten who the protagonist was. To all this, other distractions are added, such as social media or streaming platforms, against which books have to compete to snatch a few minutes of the little available leisure time.

As a solution, Pujals recommended short novels to her friends, but she had noticed that they were not found in bookstores or were included in more extensive compilations. With the project under her arm, Pujals approached the Viena publishing house, and thus the Petits Plaers collection was born in 2018, made up of a cast of classic authors, many of them unpublished in Catalan. "With a Petit Plaer, you become the luxury spectator of a story for two hours. You have the feeling that everything happens very quickly, that you have escaped and are in another world," says the editor, "and all this without your mobile phone." Comparing it to series, Pujals points out, always accompanying her explanations with examples that could be labeled as very millennial, this genre is like Fleabag, with few and short, but intense, chapters.

"It's high literature, but it hooks you and you lose your fear of the classics," Pujals continues. "Like a review on TripAdvisor," she exemplifies. That is, if you like the short novel by Henry James, Pandora, that she has published, you might then be encouraged to read more complex ones like The Aspern Papers, The Bostonians, or Portrait of a Lady. Stefan Zweig, Ivan Turgenev, or Anton Chekhov are other great authors that can be sampled with a Petit Plaer.

Nevertheless, Pujals' initial venture has become a phenomenon, and it's no surprise that Viena Edicions' short novels occupy a prominent position in bookstores. "It's a small miracle. People are very dedicated and have understood the concept of a collection, like with the episodes of Black Mirror. A reading community has already been created," she recounts. So much so that the publisher is aware of couples and families who have created reading clubs with a copy of Petits Plaers. She also knows that it's a common gift to give to friends when meeting them for dinner or drinks. It's worth noting that the books are just the right size to fit in a purse or coat pocket. "I measured it," its creator admits.

The collection has been particularly successful among young people. Its success is evidenced by details such as the fact that, the day after a new book is published, the editor already receives notifications of photos invading social media with the cover, which, coincidentally, is very Instagrammable. The Twitter threads in which she reveals the reason behind the design of each cover, always with very striking patterns and colors that have not been chosen at random, also have many followers. "Maybe because I'm a millennial and I've been precarious, I want to take something beautiful when I spend my money and I want others to see what I'm reading," she defends.

So far, Petits Plaers consists of a total of 28 books and has eight more scheduled until next summer, among which there will be some titles by Aurora Bertrana. "There's no limit," she warns. The collection is also available in Spanish, under the title Pequeños placeres, but at a slower pace, with 17 titles available.

Jane Austen never fails

Petits Plaers has not been the only good idea Blanca Pujals has had. As for many, Jane Austen played an essential role in her career as an insatiable book devourer. The stories of Elisabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, and Emma Woodhouse became undisputed staples in her library at an early age, opening the door to discovering other authors like the Brontë sisters: "With them, readers are created forever". That's why she was surprised when she saw that classics like Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Agnes Grey, A Room with a View, or The Making of a Marchioness were not published in Catalan. As she explains, they had been out of print for 20 or 30 years, and while Sense and Sensibility has 29 editions in Spanish, there were none in Catalan.

Blanca Pujals was surprised when she saw that classics like Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Agnes Grey, A Room with a View, or The Making of a Marchioness were not published in Catalan

Finally, the launch took place in March 2021 and "it was crazy". The Club Victòria premiered with Sense and Sensibility, with an eye on Sant Jordi, but it sold out before April and there was no time to print the second edition. "It has been a discovery for Generation Z. They keep posting tweets saying: 'How come no one told me about Jane Austen before?'"

The numbers support it: almost all the Club Victòria books published in the last year are already in their third edition. "After two or three months, we have to do a new edition," Blanca Pujals specifies. The same happens with the Petits Plaers, most of which are also already in their third edition. "We started with small print runs and now we are coming out with between 2,000 and 2,500 copies in the first edition," she adds. These figures, she emphasizes, are quite higher than those for translations, which stand at 800 copies.

So far, they have seven books in Viena's new collection. The latest, a surprise, The Confessions of Mr. Harrison by Elizabeth Gaskell. The eighth, according to Pujals, will coincide with All Saints' Day and will be Dracula. The editor is thinking of Stranger Things to introduce Bram Stoker's essential work. Later will come another classic, always controversial and unclassifiable, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. After the success of Petits Plaers and Club Victòria, Pujals is already devising new projects. "I have some other ideas, but now I'm going to enjoy the moment," she anticipates.