The Prince and Princess of Asturias attend the 50th birthday celebrations of Santillana publishing group

At school, Princes use textbooks books featuring their grandparents, parents and friends of their parents. It must be an uncanny feeling, strange and familiar at the same time. "Most of us here today have likely handled [a Santillana book] at some point in our education," said Prince Felipe yesterday at the Casa de America during the celebrations marking a half a century of Grupo Santillana, which were presented by Iñaki Gabilondo. Eight years before the Prince was born, Jesus de Polanco and Francisco Pérez González founded the publishing house. It's likely that the Prince's wife, Princess Letizia, who also attended the event, would have come across the textbook for Social Science and Civics at the La Gesta school in Oviedo. In it she would have seen a lesson about the transition to democracy illustrated with the photo of a little boy who looks on as his father is sworn in as king before the Spanish parliament.

What in 1960 started out with a capital of 600,000 pesetas ­- about 4,000 euros - is today is a transatlantic publishing conglomerate with revenues of 650 million euros and which in 2010 added 6,000 new products to its growing catalog of 31,000 titles. This brief bookkeeping came courtesy of Emiliano Martínez, president of Santillana, but the celebrations were really about a very different sort of book.

Javier Marías, who improvised his speech, recalled how when in his early twenties he was invited to join in on Alfaguara's meetings which were "serious without being solemn." Ensuring there was little solemnity on this celebratory occasion he told the crowd that at the meetings, aside from discussing literature - books by Modiano, Bernhard, Walser, and so on, we "ate, drank and smoked...." This drew laughter from those present and more than one reached instinctively into his pocket for a pack of now-forbidden cigarettes.

Marías remembered the times when Jaime Salinas headed Alfaguara, and José Manuel Blecua, the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), recalled a phrase from Jaime's father, the poet Pedro Salinas: "The best way to remember a book is to read it with love." So he and his colleagues read excerpts from the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, a collaboration between Santillana and the RAE, and the commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, another result of the same partnership. So rich in linguistic variants was the work of García Márquez, recalled Blecua, "that the text had to be set for each page and then sent to the RAE for final editing." Alfaguara published the novel.

The late Jesus de Polanco, his daughter Isabel and Francisco Pérez González were fondly remembered, as were the early days of Santillana's forays into the Americas. The latest port of call on this epic journey is Brazil, as was revealed by Paulo Renato Souza, the country's Minister of Education under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Souza took the opportunity to reflect on the expansion of public education  -the great revolution "in the development of Western civilization over the past two centuries"- and the challenges it faces in the digital age. "It is futile to place all our hopes in new ways of training of new teachers," he said. "This is important, but it would take a long time, time which we don't have." The solution? "Ongoing training."

"Knowledge today," said the former Brazilian minister, "becomes obsolete every 5 or 10 years. Our grandparents and our parents lived in a much more stable world." José Manuel Blecua said he was confident that Santillana's 50th anniversary would, in the future, come to be seen as a milestone. Perhaps in 50 years, a prince or princess will remember the day they saw in a web book - a project already up and running - an ancestor reading a speech from an old thing called paper.

Source: EL PAÍS