Books Across Nations

Long before the digital era, Joan Gili spent sixty years cultivating taste. The Dolphin Bookshop opened in April 1935, in London’s bookselling district around Charing Cross. A partnership at first, it soon became a one-person company driven by Gili’s entrepreneurial spirit, his roots in the book trade, and his mission to spread Spanish and Catalan literature overseas. Targeting so-called ‘discriminating readers’, the new bookshop challenged Britain’s book-borrowing culture, defying the mainstream. The present study is not a biography of Gili. Based on over 2,000 unpublished manuscripts from his personal and professional archive, this multidisciplinary study grounded in Translation Studies reveals the full reach of a man committed to two worlds, and determined to create a bridge between them. Students, scholars and professionals in publishing and bookselling will find here a rigorously researched story of passion, war, taste, strategy and vision, which speaks directly to the world we live in today.