By Mauricio Vallejo Márquez
There was not electricity. The darkness had vanished everything. Suddenly the light of a match landed on the wick and the room was illuminated. Mirna continued turning the crank of the mimeograph machine. That device produced the Edisal notebooks that my family created. My uncle Tony made the drawings and my dad along with the rest of the brothers dedicated themselves to researching and collaborating in that family business from which no one left unscathed. Even I managed to collate and staple those notebooks for Social Studies, Language and Literature, Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
Although I arrived in the twilight, I only managed to produce the social studies ones. However, that dedication of my grandmother María Julia Marroquín de Vallejo fascinated me. She, that woman, directed everything and she was a participant. With her I visited many bookstores and educational centers proposing her family product until the day she decided to let everything become a memory.
Over the years, notebooks and other products appeared that my dad and my aunt Marlya had designed in addition to the notebook. When I was in sixth grade I remember taking one of these to school and the teachers were impressed, to the point that they wanted to make notebooks with these designs. But my mother Yuly, that’s what I always called her, told me that she was not going to do any of that again. I remained silent, wishing that she were the opposite, but in addition to being a woman with great tenacity and determination, she was also a firm decision-maker. So the next day those words that didn’t want to come out left disappointment. I stayed with that. I missed the days when the house became a printing press, but that’s life, everything changes in due time.
Over the years and with the love of poetry, and the desire to make ourselves known, together with Rafael Mendoza López I remembered those efforts and we combined again. Rafael was in charge of designing the plaquette that paved the way for us through literature and I collaborated with him, we cut and distributed the product and then gave it as a gift and sold it. We were excited. I think that Carlos Clará and Danilo Villalta gave us the impetus with their collection of poems Montaje Invernal. Ours was not a little book, it was a booklet, but that was enough for Jorge Ortiz Espinoza to give us space in the National Library and for us to begin our path in letters.
Then things took us in our own directions and I continued with the editorial project, learning to design, diagram and do what we started in Edisal, with the only difference that I did it alone. He claimed that the thing was sustainable and he could do it all the time without using the machinery that made life easier.
I printed with Edgar de Pérez and then collated at home, there I stapled or sewed, bound and then cut the edges with a steel rule and a razor, after which I packaged them and sold them. That’s how we gave life to that adventure until I finally got tired of it. In the end I didn’t see the commercial sense but rather the instrument of a dream to share my soul that was dressed in words.
Now that the days dissolve and those nights without electricity are no longer so common, I live everyday life waiting to return to those days when that generosity of soul made me write and scream my soul through ink just waiting for a couple of months more to republish a book, with that enthusiasm with which Mirna made the pages of the mimeograph machine emerge.
Mr. Mauricio Vallejo Marquez
Bachelor of Legal Sciences
Master in University Teaching
Writer and editor
Cultural Supplement Coordinator 3000
#mimeograph #pages
