The Spanish Albatross

The Albatross editions in Portuguese that I wrote about in my last post, were far from being the business’s only experiment in foreign language translations of English novels.  Perhaps not surprisingly they also tried Spanish, publishing about ten translations between about 1947 and 1950.

The Spanish books looked completely different, although the design is clearly a development of the classic Albatross design.  The same colour coding is used, but the writing around the border becomes much larger and rather dominates the central section.  It produces a design that is quite striking, but to me seems to lose the simple elegance of the original.  The books are also larger than the standard Albatross size, again losing in elegance what they may gain in impact.

They were published by Ediciones Albatros, a Spanish company based in Madrid and presumably set up for the purpose.  Unlike most of the other post-war ventures by Albatross, there is no evidence in the books of this being a joint operation with a local partner, although it may have been.

The series started with ‘Diplomaticos en Pekin’, a translation of ‘Peking picnic’ by Ann Bridge, a book that had not previously been published in English by either Albatross or Tauchnitz.  It was followed by translations of ‘Highly inflammable’ by Max Saltmarsh, which had been published as Tauchnitz volume 5242 in 1936 and ‘Soldiers from the war returning’ by Jerrard Tickell, which had appeared as Albatross 552 in 1946.  Six of the seven other books I know about had previously been published by either Tauchnitz or Albatross.

The books are numbered from 1 to 13 but I have never seen books numbered 4, 7 or 12 so I only know of ten titles.  Although the series lasted only for a couple of years and I doubt that any new titles were published after 1950, it appears that some of the books were reprinted later under different covers – showing even less respect to the traditional Albatross design.