In my first participation, I discussed the ancient authors who devoted themselves to the study of entomology, before and after Carl Linnaeus, and up to the 19th century. In the second session, in 2005, I presented a paper on locust plagues, and this was the beginning of my career as a scientific-historical author, with the work Bandas, enjambres y devastación (Gangs, swarms and devastation). Las plagas de langostas a través de la historia (Almuzara, 2007) describes the most dangerous species and the most significant plagues that humans have suffered since the Neolithic period, when they first began, until 2005. This is a 481-page, richly illustrated work, although it is now out of print and can only be found on digital platforms specialising in publications considered to be old. In the same year, 2007, this work was selected by the Department of Innovation, Universities and Business of the Generalitat of Catalonia as one of the hundred best recent books on scientific dissemination. 

 

In 2007 and 2009, I presented two new papers at the Cervelló Sessions, on the plague and yellow fever, which were the basis for the following published work, Insectos y hecatombes (Insects and Hecatombes), vols. I and II (RBA, 2012-2014). This is an extensive work of 1,834 pages in two volumes, a natural history of fleas, lice, mosquitoes, flies, bedbugs and ticks and the diseases they transmit through viruses, bacteria, protozoa or worms, such as plague, epidemic typhus, yellow fever, malaria, filariasis, African trypanosomiasis, Chagas disease, etc. The entire subject has been treated from an entomological, medical, parasitological, epidemiological and, above all, historical point of view, reviewing the transmitting insect, the pathogen and the disease caused, and the terrible impact it has had on humanity throughout history.

     These two titles are also out of print with RBA, but I reached an agreement with the publisher Plataforma (Estrella imprint) to keep the work alive and available, although only in a ‘print on demand’ version. It can be purchased through Amazon, but in three volumes, as it had to be divided up because this company only accepts a limited number of pages per copy.

 

Bandas, Enjambres y Devastación and Insectos and hecatombes (volumes I and II) are available in article form and separated by chapters under the Insecta tab, as can be seen in the general index, so that readers can easily find the specific topic that interests them. The extensive and accurate bibliography on which these works are based, and those I have written subsequently, have very diverse origins, although in most cases they come from digitisations carried out by various libraries that have democratised access to and knowledge of ancient works. I have translated the entire bibliography myself, thanks to my knowledge of Spanish, Catalan, French, English, Portuguese, Italian and some Latin and German.   

 

In June 2018, Historia de las moscas y de los mosquitos (History of Flies and Mosquitoes) was published by Arpa, which is actually a summary with additions from the second volume of Insectos y hecatombes.

 

The Miscellanea ad absurdo tab contains various phrases, ideas and stories, often surreal. These are minor, even trivial matters, but they give me a sense of well-being and pleasure. When I finished Insectos y hecatombes, I felt the need to shift my focus away from epidemics, death and desolation, which had absorbed my thoughts for more than seven years. So I set about writing a politically incorrect black comedy with the sole purpose of making people laugh, and I laughed a lot. It is called Siete crímenes por cópula (Seven Crimes by Copulation, Plataforma, 2015), by the pseudonymous author Margarito Micifú, as I did not have the courage to use my real name. I recommend you watch the presentation of the work at the Abacus bookshop in Barcelona, it was really entertaining. 

     I have since written a kind of sequel to this work and other more elaborate stories that I have posted on my website. I have titled it Miscelánea del absurdo. Once relatos y una premonición (Miscellany of the Absurd: Eleven Stories and a Premonition), which features a whole series of bizarre and surreal characters who seem to act with immaculate logic, indifferent to their own extravagance. This work has not been published and may never be.

 

In September 2019, Pasión por los insectos. Ilustradoras, Aventureras y Entomólogas (Passion for Insects: Illustrators, Adventurers and Entomologists) was published (Turner Publishing), a small, magnificently illustrated history of entomology based on the exceptional work of fifty-one women who dedicated themselves to the study of insects: illustrators, travellers, collectors and true entomologists. To support this work, I created the Biographica tab, organised alphabetically by author, where I uploaded the biographies of these women, expanded, as well as others referring to various naturalists, scientists, geographers, historians and travellers who appear in my works and for whom I feel great admiration; without their contribution, I would not have written anything. My intention in writing this work was to rescue from oblivion numerous women whose work was as important and valuable as that of any enlightened man in the same field.

 

In February 2023, the Viena publishing house published a new work of mine, now in Catalan, entitled Les aventuras d'Ida Pfeiffer. Una gran viatgera i naturaliosta del segle XIX  (The Adventures of Ida Pfeiffer). A great traveller and naturalist of the 19th century. It is a formal biography of the great Austrian traveller Ida Pfeiffer, born in 1797, in which her life and her five extraordinary journeys are reviewed: the Holy Land, Iceland and Scandinavia, two long trips around the world and finally Madagascar. Pfeiffer was a woman who began travelling when she was already forty-four years old and always did so alone and with few resources. She was also a naturalist who collected insects, molluscs and small vertebrates to sell to European natural history museums, mainly those in Vienna, Berlin and London, in order to cover the expenses incurred by her travels. On these journeys, she had incredible adventures that seem like something out of a film, so reading her five books, one for each trip, is a real delight. Pfeiffer cannot be considered a tourist, but rather a traveller bordering on an explorer, as she travelled through territories that had never before been set foot on by any European.  

     This 461-page work features numerous black-and-white illustrations so that the reader can not only experience Ida Pfeiffer's experiences but also "see" them. The iconography of the period regarding the places she visited is very rich. Due to the limited space available for the printed work, two tabs have been added to this website, Pfeiffer 1 and Pfeiffer 2, where all the necessary information has been added to complete the comprehensive understanding of the traveler and the journeys she made: explanatory notes, biographical sketches of the most important figures featured in the work, a chronology of her life and travels, a list of newspaper articles and letters she wrote; the voyages she made by sea, maps of all her journeys, and a bibliography of text and images. Tab 2 contains the complete iconography, hundreds of black-and-white and color illustrations.

 

I have written all these works voluntarily and exclusively as a hobby. I am aware that they will never be bestsellers and that their distribution is limited, but I don't mind; I write about things that interest me, things I would have liked to read, but that weren't published yet. The financial compensation has always been very meager, and in most cases, I've only been able to cover the costs of the extensive bibliography acquired to be able to write the work. However, the reward has been great: learning about everything I was curious about is the period of reading and research; and when my eyes opened wide, I felt the need to write it down so that others could benefit and enjoy it as I did. One of my driving forces in life is the acquisition of knowledge; I don't think the era of the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists has completely disappeared; this is at least my desire.

     Fortunately, my profession helped me in getting my works published. For more than fifteen years, I worked at El Corte Inglés as a bookstore buyer, in charge of purchasing books from publishers that were sold in the company's stores in Catalonia. The job really stimulated me, and I had the opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of the publishing world. This made my search for a publisher easier, as I knew the topics they published and was able to interact directly with them. In 2012, I was appointed purchasing director in Catalonia, covering all products related to that region, and I found myself very far from books, which have always been my great passion. In 2019, I reached an agreement with the company and left. Since then, I've had plenty of time to dedicate to what I love, and this makes me happy.

 

In 2023, I completed a special assignment. The goal was to write the history of the Evangelical Hospital of Barcelona, ​​as it was disappearing from its original location on Camelias Street and moving to a new building on Ciutat de Granada Street, in the Poble Nou neighborhood, where it has been operating normally since mid-2024. The old hospital was founded in 1879 to serve Barcelona's Protestant community, which at the time was abandoned and at the mercy of the incomprehension and mistreatment of the political and religious (Catholic) authorities. I found it an interesting topic because I was unfamiliar with the specific characteristics of Protestants, and I discovered a story of resilience and resistance that fascinated me. The Board of Trustees of the Evangelical Hospital was not interested in my conception of the work, which covered the history of the Hospital between 1879 and 2000, and included an introduction to Protestantism, its influence in Spain and subsequent traumatic disappearance, the life and work of the missionary George Lawrence, founder of the Evangelical Hospital, and a broader history of the remaining chapters. The official work, published at the end of 2024 under the title Evangelical Hospital of Barcelona, ​​more than a century of humanity and commitment, includes only a small part of what I wrote and which I now share in its expanded version under the title Historical Record of the Evangelical Hospital of Barcelona (1879-2000).

 

Another of my great hobbies is ancient history and geography. I enjoy reading Greek and Roman myths, and they frequently feature the names of places that are unknown, as they no longer correspond to those of today. For this reason, around 1995, I began creating physical maps of Greece, Rome, Hispania, and Egypt, with the locations of those names on modern maps. Later, I realized that the fundamental author for dealing with ancient cartography must be Claudius Ptolemy, who in his work Geographika incorporated the names of almost eight thousand references. Since 2015, I have begun an ambitious project that has been progressing intermittently, interspersed with other books I have been writing and which I may never finish due to its considerable scope. This is the tab Etiam Perire Ruinae, which means "even their ruins have disappeared, a phrase taken from Lucan in his work Pharsalia (IX, 969). The initial intention was to present a kind of tourist guide to the known world in the second century AD, including what a traveler of that time would find: seas, rivers, mountain ranges, ethnic groups, towns, cities, or regions, all in their Latinized names. The bibliography used is based on the writings of classical geographers and historians, especially Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo, but also many others who made minor contributions. So far, I have shared Ptolemy's maps with their ancient contours (according to the edition of the work published in Rome in 1478, one of the first), and maps with the modern contours of Europe and Africa (I still need to complete the twelve maps of Asia and the one of Egypt).

     This work is accompanied by two essential supporting materials that have not been uploaded to my website because they are still incomplete: the translation of Ptolemy's Geographika accompanied by an Access database that complements the entry of all the names on the maps and gives them meaning; and secondly, a history of ancient geography and cartography from prehistory to Ptolemy himself, so that the progress of world knowledge in antiquity is clearly visible.

     When this laborious work is completed, it will be relatively easy to compile maps of the places that classical authors cited in their works, whether historical or geographical, something that has not been usual in ancient or modern editions. Thus, the works of Arrian, Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Suetonius, Claudius Aelianus, Polybius, and Plutarch, to name a few examples, can be accompanied by maps specific to each work, which will greatly facilitate understanding of the text and the physical environment to which it refers.

 

The intention of this website is to offer free of charge the contents of everything I have found interesting and have learned and written over the years. I do not think it is appropriate for these works to remain hidden in a drawer, nor is it sufficient for them to be limited to published works and forgotten when they are out of print. I hope my efforts in collecting and processing information can be useful to anyone interested in these subjects that I am passionate about.

     Currently, in addition to working on Ptolemy's maps and the history of cartography, I am finishing the biography of two travelers who have much in common, not only because of the regions they traveled. These are Ali Bey (Domingo Badía y Leblich) and Hester Stanhope, and I hope a publisher will be interested in publishing them.

 

The last tab on the website is titled "Media," and there you will find links to newspaper articles and radio and television interviews that I have conducted over the years on my published works or related subjects.

 

Below, I make available to readers, in .pdf format, those works for which I have recovered the copyright and therefore can freely use them.