SIX YEARS OF BLACK LABEL
few years ago, I received an email from a Peruvian friend Julio Villanueva Chang, to propose to write an article for the third issue of a magazine called Black Label , which had just launched in Peru. I wrote the text and sent it, days later, I received the answer: July I send the text again, but now with the order of the paragraphs changed and with suggestions for improvement. I lived in the United States and was used to working with publishers minute; my surprise, it was now running into one in Latin America. Excited, I reviewed the text during the night and sent it to July. After a while, I received an email with the news that everything was approved.
In his six years of life, just Black Label has become an essential part of a group of premier cultural journal in Latin America. Black Label Villanueva was born from the meeting between Chang and two entrepreneurs, the brothers Huberth and Gerson Jara. Jara brothers, owners of a small printing shop in a crowded Lima, were interested in publishing a magazine that came into the world of people like them, "entrepreneurs who want more than just making money." Someone told them about July, who had just quit his job as a journalist in Trade and wanted to be a travel reporter (he had written three stories for the magazine Leopard and decided that his was the more than magazine journalism journal .) After a meeting at the coffee Haiti, and that in July the take home to show the room in which he kept, meticulously sorted, all copies of the publications collected ( Esquire, The New Yorker , Vanity Fair ...), they realized that the project was July not with theirs. And yet, had the smell to recognize that the dream of July - "imagine the best magazine in your life" in the words of Toño Angulo Daneri, another of the journalists who embarked on the adventure, had great value, and decided to bet for him.
In order to understand the immensity of what was achieved should be noted that the investment of the brothers Jara was just twenty-five thousand dollars. With that sum, it was to have a staff editorial: there were several contributors, but for the first five numbers the only dedicated right in the magazine was in July. In the midst of snuff and wine, meetings were held in his living room. That craftsmanship, combined with the power of conviction in July, who got first-rate writers, John Lee Anderson, Fernando Savater, Carlos Monsivais, Juan Villoro, did endorse the project and collaborate without receiving anything in return, gave his seal magazine.
Black Label remained unchanged during the first five years: elegant design, thematic unit for each issue (money, sex, food, football, etc), and crónicasextensas of big firms. Such ambition made the early years s Black Label barely survived: the market for this magazine in Peru did not exceed five thousand copies, and no luck at all there were attempts to internationalize. And yet, as noted by Daniel Titinger, new managing editor of the magazine: "Black Label with something very strange happens: the customers began to support us with their ads without the trade magazine. Even, sometimes, we have been at odds with the commercial, doing everything contrary to what a customer would ask. We are not a magazine for housewives, or for men alone, or society, or sports, or lifestyle, we had no fixed niche: and supported us and support us. "
Last year Toño July and left the magazine in the hands of Daniel, who was already working with them. Black Label has been redesigned, with the result that is different, but it is the same. Remain the thematic unity and ambition to publish stories and essays in class, the number of January this year, the last thing I have in my hands, the theme is "Invisible Cities" and there are great stories about Alvaro Bisam apparitions of the Virgin in Valparaiso and Alex Ayala on Vallegrande, the city where Che died - short sections that are added to give read more agility, an unpublished short story (strawberries, Fuguet, Vila-Matas ..., Diego Salazar is the editor of fiction), and the last page belongs to the Argentine cartoonist Liniers.
Black Label is, in turn, journalism and literature. Important names of the current review published in the journal Latin America: Gabriela Wiener, Juan Pablo Meneses, Leila Guerriero, Josefina Licitra. Recent books by chroniclers of the Black Label orbit -Marco Avilés, Juan Manuel Robles, the same Titinger-show conclusively that the magazine has made school. Also walk around books other members of the core of the magazine (Toño Angulo, Sergio Vilela, Daniel Alarcón). The only thing missing is that Black Label can overcome the usual compartments that limit the flow of cultural products of the continent and found in bookstores and newsstands beyond Lima. Meanwhile, at least for the last issues, we have the network .
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