Bookselling and publishing

The thirteenth entry is o fundo editorial, and the noun inside it is one of those Portuguese words a dictionary cannot hand over in one piece. O fundo is the bottom of a thing — o fundo do mar, o fundo do copo. It is the background behind a figure, um fundo azul. It is money set aside, as in o fundo de pensões. And here it is the part of a publisher’s list printed in earlier years that goes on selling quietly while the new books make the noise. English spends a separate word on every one of those: « bottom », « background », « fund », and, for this last, a coinage of the trade — « the backlist », with « the frontlist » beside it and a verb, « to backlist », cut straight out of the noun. The asymmetry is worth noticing because it runs the opposite way from the usual complaint. Here the Portuguese reader has one common word to carry across four situations, and the English reader has four words, one of which is never heard outside publishing.