New editions that will be added to the nine that are already sold out, in addition to an explanatory book of the contents of the text and material illustrated by the cartoonist Guillo appear on the horizon of editorial LOM, as the next actions tending to massify the constitutional proposal, that which will be submitted to a plebiscite on September 4. “It has been a phenomenon that we have never experienced before. Never has a book printed by us had such a reception. In just two weeks we have sold about 70,000 copies, and that is out of the ordinary”, declared Paulo Slachevsky, director and founder of the publishing house.
So far, the sale of copies has resulted in unprecedented success, said Paulo Slachevsky. The initiative has been so successful that it far exceeded his own expectations, which, as he acknowledges, “there were not many due to the climate that has been installed (of rejection of the proposal), so I think we have come to break a certain logic of this campaign on the constitutional process and the same proposal that the conventional ones have made to the country”, he maintains.
“On Tuesday, July 5, we put out the first thousand copies for sale and they sold out in about three hours. We put out a new edition and the same thing happened, not to mention the huge queue outside the publisher,” adds Slachevsky.
The strange thing is that this reality does not match the reality observed in the polls, said the founder of LOM. “All of this has been very hopeful in the sense that, quite to the contrary, people were happy to find so many people looking for the constitutional text. I believe that a reality has been building for a year, and that it created a negative imaginary around the entire process. This is a sign that there are many people interested in learning about the text and showing that it has an abysmal difference from the Constitution that Pinochet left us,” Slachevsky asserted.
Likewise, the director of LOM expressed his bewilderment at the resistance of the defenders of the Rejection option to government representatives disseminating the content of the new Constitution, since logic suggests that the most functional thing for their strategy would be the massification of a text extremely poor, just as they have presented it in the media. This attitude would rather reveal, in his opinion, that the followers of the Rejection fear that people find out first-hand about the enormous advantages that the proposed text has compared to the Constitution of 1980.
“The attitude of the Rejection has been unfortunate. They have made propaganda to account for their will, and have used lies and discredit in a brutal way. They do little honor to a frank and constructive conversation, and that shows that willingness to keep everything as it is, ”he pointed out. “It is necessary to have a country in community, not in conflict with each other, and that allows us to build a more just and humane Chile and closing ourselves off from that is a great historical mistake. Rejection is a breeding ground for instability, insecurity, violence and injustice”, he added.
Finally, the founder of LOM editions highlighted the publication of “The New Constitution of Chile: with pears and apples”, material produced in conjunction with Platform Context, “which will allow us to understand what the Constitution proposes and the difference with the current Constitution, in addition to a publication that collects the most fundamental of the proposal but illustrated by Guillermo Bastías, the great Guillo, at a value of one thousand pesos, since we want it to be affordable and spread”, he concluded.
