At Erdosain we believe that a book is printed discourse on paper, contained between two covers. As if looking into the magician’s crystal ball, every book written in the world is itself the complete history of the world, regardless of whether the book is ignored for its weaknesses or lack of readership, or whether it is praised by the critics of the ages, transcending in time.

If in the distant future, a homo alienus visited an uninhabited and deserted planet Earth, where, of all our creations, a single book remained, half-buried in the dunes of oblivion, this would perhaps be the only testimony of a vanished humanity: a tiny fragment that would communicate everything we once were. A small and enigmatic Tower of Babel where once again all peoples and languages ​​would become one. This we believe to be the responsibility – and fault – of the editor.

Every book can be a reflection of all books in the world, the first and last, the particle and the cosmos; the letter, the word, the language. Just like the meticulous polishing of a glass makes it possible to achieve a more accurate reflection for a mirror, how many images of the world can the production of a book contain?

Aware of all this and in search of the elusive reflection of what is human, we also want to face the old contradiction between aesthetics and poetics: we want to be critics and artists, judge and jury, correcting the dichotomy without dissolving it. We would rather open and confound it, never finding the pot of gold shining before us in the night of time.

We do not want the parts to dissolve into a gestalt or for the whole to fragment into positivist parts. No! Before this happens, we choose for everything to become eroticized.

In close work with our writers and illustrators we aim for each of our books to find its own eurhythmy, and that from their singular objectuality they may tell a story of the world that finds its readership. We want our books to destabilize, at least in the heart and mind of the reader, the political-religious duality that governs our “westerned” lives. That they can become, as Kafka wrote in a letter, “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” We want them to unveil imaginary borders in order to cross them steadily. We want them to speak to us about the deception of truth so that we can ponder on it once more. May each one of them become the visible cog of the hidden engine in the machine where “the man who knows himself” is constantly articulated and disarticulated.

Remo Erdosain wanted to galvanize a rose in copper: to transform feeble beauty into a perennial metal through an alchemical process. Esotericism and science in the same search and same desire. The beauty paradox, contradiction. Erdosain Press takes the name and spirit of this tragic character, replacing his fragile and beautiful chimera of a copper rose, with the chimera – beautiful and not so fragile – of paper books.

Blanco Pantoja