This is the land of Castile, a land of gentle hills and broken cliffs between plains that surpass horizons. High plains where wheat sprouts or mountains dotted with oaks, olive, walnut and almond trees.

It is this land of Castile that has given us so much. So much harvest in austere stubble. So much beauty, solemn between plateaus and valleys. So much glory, so much vision (divine revelation). So much moderation. So much pride: my people, heir to the chalice of eternal wisdom.

Luis Mínguez Serrano, who seems to be a master in the art of fatherhood, has begotten me and my two sisters. And all his other children: books from different marriages.

My grandfather, Arturo Mínguez Anchuelo, who wrote poetry and prayed with glassy eyes. Death made him a saint.

And then there’s everything we do: books, books, books. Bookbinding, craftsmanship, art. Here all considerations are irrelevant because they go back to ourselves, to past realities, to overflowing self-esteem.

My grandfather was born in 1926. He learns to bind in the General Archive of the Administration. He is already old. My father was born in 1967. He learns to bind as a teenager. He is good at it. He takes over from my grandfather, whose eyesight is failing. He trains with the best bookbinders in the world. He collaborates with great artists. He is in competition with a few patrons of royal houses. And then prizes and awards: several, quite a few. National Bookbinding Prize, first prize at the World Biennial, the official cross of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.

And every detail of this story is subject to interpretation. Grandiloquent, exaggerated. Very real, accurate.

But there is one constant: that we inherit the weight of family virtues and their stigmata. The increasingly dense blood accumulates with each new generation. And knowledge is a book that is not always restored, to which uncertain leaves are added. Leaves of revolutionary materials.

Behold the human, insignificant. Because there is something greater than our own existence. Because man is the son of Saturn, of the entropic cold. And yet: fragility makes him beautiful; the inexact makes him possible; the ephemeral, important; insignificance reveals transcendence. The perishable is necessary. As is death, which with each exhaled breath opens the way to life.

Gonzalo Mínguez Mínguez.