Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details.
Cover art: Luis Royo
Blurb: “LUIS ROYO, OR HOW THEY CLOSED FANTASY UP BEHIND A COVER
There's a world so strange that its impossible to believe it. Events there happen in a monotonous and predictable way. Cities and gardens, hats and mountains, bowls and val-leys, neckties and trees, wigs and rivers, everything, even the crashing of the sea or the orbits of the planets is made and organized in a rational way. Days and landscapes pass by or go on in a syncopated rhythm or in regular proportions. Life happens between tick and tock or moves from here to there. For the inhabitants of this world, time fits into a calendar and space in an atlas. To move around without getting lost, all they need is a watch and a compass.
Even though the form of this world is round like all the planets and has length, width, and height, everyone lives in a long, narrow corridor. A stretched out but symmetrical and equidistant continuity converts existence into a long, straight course. Things and people don't happen or appear except to parade by in a compact, enclosed formation. They move around following the lines mark on the gray asphalt while up in the sky clouds just as gray pass by, from which falls a rain so sad it takes away any desire to cry. In this predictable and predicted world, the only things that aren't gray are the signals indicating prohibited directions and mandatory feelings.
In such controlled circumstances, the men and women of this planet live in constant peril of boredom. To flee from this danger, so they won't be overpowered by an enormous yawn that will split them in half, some dedicate their lives to feverishly repeating the same gestures in an activity they call work. Others take charge of organizing more or in another way the corridor where they all circulate. They mull over the appropriateness of new rules, or try to set up more adequate traffic systems that often end up provoking gridlock and bloody confrontations.
Fantasy, surprise, and the unusual don't exist, so the inhabitants of this strange world have to invent them. For that they have a faculty that lives in between memory and the desire for transgression, something they call imagination. From it, the unexpected bursts out in flashes of color. They invent risky and adventurous possibilities for the development of events. But, as if they were afraid that these fantastic creations would fade away in the ordered world they live in, they gather them and hide them away in well-isolated vaults.
In this way they make books, films, records, paintings, which, enclosed in frames, in bind-ings, or on screens, maintain a clear distance from reality. So that these products of the imagination won't disturb their legislated and stipulated way of living, they keep them on the other side of the walls of the corridor where they live. They pile up all their imaginative ravings behind many doors so that they won't slow down or get in the way of their existence. There they accumulate books, each one of which, in turn, is closed off behind its dust jacket, records and videos imprisoned in their boxes, magazines and all sorts of publications hidden behind their front covers...They lock away fantasy, as if they wanted to muzzle anything that grows from their frustrations and their dreams.
The inhabitants of this planet cautiously enter their imaginative studies and then, after making the rounds cautiously, they leave quickly. They stay just long enough for a fib, for a sigh, for a sad memory, for an illusion quickly rejected as impossible. And then they go.”