My beautiful city
The title My Beautiful City is a homage (to not call it 'theft') to our good friend and collaborator El Persa.
There are many books about cities, almost as many as there are cities, and all serious publishers —and as you can see, even the not-so-serious ones— have a complete series. It is only natural, because commentaries about cities excellently explain many of the ideas and mechanisms that govern modern life. There is no subject that unites a greater variety of topics and interests.
Practically everything has already been said about cities; nonetheless, it makes sense to continue to care about them, to speak of the people that live in them, and we would like to do so from different perspectives. We will flee from the tourist guides and avoid suggestive names with magical resonances summarized in a set of monuments or bars.
The author of each of the books that compose this series will always be a graphic artist, someone who lives in that place, and consequently, loves and hates it, who has been given the freedom to highlight the aspects that they prefer. The artist can thus conceive a book about Paris (for example), which does not contain the Eiffel Tower, or a book about Helsinki which does not mention the low temperatures, since the author got used to them long ago.
What matters to us, above all, is that someone from Tokyo would be interested in a book about Zaragoza only for the pleasure of discovering what it is like and how people live in that remote and exotic place, even though they do not have any holiday plans or relatives living there.
The selection of cities is determined by the whims of the publishers and by an Alphabetical constriction, which establishes a correspondence between each letter and the initial of a specific city, with no repetitions allowed. The book about Tokyo would cancel other potential ones about Toledo and Timbuktu; the one about Zaragoza would cancel books about Zamora, Zacatecas, Zurich, Zagreb, and Zagora; and the vone about Valencia, negate the ones about Vilnius, Valladolid and Vladivostok. The next publications will be about São Paulo and Rubielos de Mora.
