Joan Gili / Dolphin Book Company collection

Joan Gili was born into a publishing family in Barcelona in 1907 and emigrated to Britain in 1934. He helped found the Dolphin bookshop near Charing Cross Road, London and began his career as a publisher of Hispanic works in 1938. In the following year, Stephen Spender and Gili produced a translation of Nadal's selection of Lorca's poems. Gili wrote the influential "Introductory Catalan Grammar" in 1943. Several volumes of his translations of Catalan poems were published in the next few decades. Gili became a founding member of the Anglo-Catalan Society in 1954 and was later its president. He was also known as the "unofficial consul of the Catalans in Britain".

The Dolphin Book Company was founded by Joan Gili and C. Henry Warren shortly after Gili had settled in London in October 1934. The bookshop was initially based at the Charing Cross Road. At first, English and Spanish books were sold although Gili soon became the sole proprietor and concentrated on Spanish stock. The publishing side of the business was established in the wake of the success of the bookshop: Dolphin's first significant publication in England was in 1938. The Company published numerous translations and literary criticism of Spanish and South American literature in the succeeding years. Highlights included the publication in 1950 of J. B. Trend's translations of Fifty Spanish Poems by Juan Ramon Jimenez, and the translation of Platero y Yo, which appeared six years later to wide critical acclaim.