CHAPTER II
The Names of the “Toads”—The Director of Los Debates and His Editorial Staff
Sánchez Gómez the printer, who was also known by the nickname Plancheta, was a wealthy man, though he toiled away daily like a common workman. He was a person of diabolically uneven temper, of corrosive joviality and, at bottom, good-hearted.
He was the most picturesque and versatile printer in Madrid, and his business was likewise the most complicated and interesting.
One thing alone was sufficient to give the measure of the man: with a single press, run by a gasoline engine of the old type, he published nine newspapers, the titles of which no one could call insignificant.
Los Debates (Debates); El Porvenir (The Future); La Nación (The Nation); La Tarde (Afternoon); El Radical (The Radical); La Mañana (Morning); El Mundo (The World); El Tiempo (The Times); and La Prensa (The Press); all these important dailies were born in the basement of the printery. To any ordinary man this would appear impossible; for Sánchez Gómez, that Proteus of Typography, the word impossible existed only in the dictionary.
Each of these important newspapers had a column of its own; all the rest, news, literary articles, advertisements, feuilletons, announcements, was common to them all.