A friend of mine published a story with them, in one of the football anthologies they put out. I didn't know them before. When I was a bookseller I did get to see some of his books, especially Boyacá's on a bicycle, but I didn't pay much attention to him. They told me it was a publishing house that published sports stuff. Chévere, I thought. That kind of publishing house is not abundant around here. When I found out that Andrés was writing in that book published by them, I became interested. I'm a Chicken, I'm a Lion was the first Iron Horse book I held in my hands. The other was that of The Art of the Mask, a very well-made pod about the history of wrestling in Bogotá. And there something else started, like a love at times, from those that one has and leaves there, paused, to return later, in difficult times and feel welcomed.
Caballito de Acero is a Bogota publishing house that mixes two passions that readers usually have: sports and literature. In my case, the issue goes more on the sides of football, but I still read about other sports that also interest me. Well, it's just that one thing is interests and passions are another. The project has behind it Luis Alejandro Díaz, a guy who studied literature and is also a philologist, who played football in the inferiors of Millonarios and painted to be a professional, but a health complication gradually drove him away, who has in his house a lot of books about sports, which he likes to read, but also ride a bicycle, who gets up early to see the Giro d'Italia and does not miss a boxing match, which he studied in Spain and wrote there for the sports newspaper Nuevo Estadio and interviewed a lot of people and covered from the Spanish League to the Champions League, to the World Cup in Brazil 2014. The man was looking for ways to merge these two passions of his and came up with the idea of the publishing house. He completed it in 2017. Thank God, because more than one of us were waiting for something like that.
The first publication was this book by Boyacá. A photographic tour of the department with the bicycle as the protagonist. There are names such as those of Nairo Quintana, Winner Anacona or Fabio Parra, but the book focuses more on people's daily lives, on the way this two-wheeled vehicle ends up being part of their everyday life. Juan Camilo Urrego, who took the photographs in the book, was responsible for portraying these daily episodes in which both the ruana and the bicycle are an essential part of life in Boyacá. It is an apology to sport, to how heroic and complex cycling is.
Then came other books: A six rounds, an anthology of boxing stories; the already named Soy Gallina, Soy Lion, a book heads and tails, with stories written by fans of Millonarios and Santa Fe. Among the names that collaborated were Nicolás Samper, Ricardo Silva Romero, Federico Díaz Granados and Santiago Rivas, among others, including that of my friend, Andrés Osorio Guillot. Bonner Mosquera and Alfonso Cañón wrote the prologues; La instrumentalina, a short novel about the world of bicycles; also already mentioned, The Art of the Mask, which really is a very good editorial success; Twenty-four Russian miniatures, an anthology of 24 stories about chess; A Woman Runs, novel by the writer Bibiana Ricciardi in which she addresses the subject of running; The Tennis Players, by Lars Gustafsson, in which tennis is the obvious protagonist; The Little Breton, by David Guénel, which is a novel to be applauded, what a good thing to do. A novel biography of Lucien Georges Mazan, who won the Milan-San Remo between 1907 and 1908, when it was newly created, and who was also a writer and photographer, who was a soldier in World War I and lived in Buenos Aires during his childhood. A powerful booklet this; Colombia 86, a graphic novel that imagines what that year's world cup could have been if Colombia had organized it; Round 15, by Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, a novel in which the story of a lonely man who spends his days at the mercy of boxing is told; and the second anthology of football stories, this once with text from fans of Atlético Nacional and Independiente Medellín, I am purdolaga, I am powerful.
Recently, the publisher announced the arrival of two new books. They will be presented within the framework of the Bogotá International Book Fair. The first one, Quo vadis, Sanchez? , is a novel by a Catalan writer that is barely published in Spanish. It was originally published 90 years ago and in it, Francesc Trabal, its author, tells the story of Sànchez, a poor subject who ends up being a kind of Wilhelm Meister, but in a parody tone. It is an apotheosis of the grotesque vision that comes to the idea that sport can educate. “Francesc Trabal's work is one of the most remarkable humorous visions of the characteristic aspects of modern life that have ever been written in Catalan literature,” said M. de Montoliu, La Veu de Catalunya, on 5 April 1932.
The other is a book that promises too much for footballers. A novel about the first Colombian football team that went to a Copa América, that of Chile, in 1945. Written by Carlos Castillo Sánchez, When to lose was to win a little, it is proposed to narrate not only the experience of the national team in the tournament, but the situation that the country, and the world itself, was experiencing at that time.
Both books will be presented on the first weekend of the FilBo and promise to delight readers. The editorial promises, as Andrés J. López points out in an article published in 2018 by Cartel Urbano, to give its publications a plus, to show sport from another perspective. Its website says: our Steel Horse is ready and saddled so that it is the artist who tells us about the cyclist's cadence when climbing the mountain, or the skill of the footballer in inventing the rhythm of an impossible goal. The race begins. Horses in position. Place your bets.
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