Alejandro Finisterre | Spain | The Guardian

Alejandro Finisterre

Exile from Franco's Spain made the life of Alejandro Finisterre, who has died at the age of aged 87, one of constant movement and creativity. Though Alejandro most valued his fight to conserve the legacy of the poet León Felipe (1884-1968), whose literary executor he was, he was famous for inventing table football.

One of 10 children of the radio-telegraphist at the lighthouse at the "end of the world" (Finisterre, which he adopted as his surname), Alejandro grew up in A Coruña (Corunna). At 15 he left to study in Madrid. When his father, who had become a shoe manufacturer, went bankrupt, Alejandro worked as building labourer, typesetter and tap dancer to pay for his schooling. The outbreak of the civil war in 1936 found him editing and selling on Madrid's streets a literary magazine, Paso a la Juventud (Step to Youth). It was then that he met Felipe, whose hatred of bourgeois society, individualist integrity and belief that poetry could revolutionise an unjust world Finisterre shared.

In November 1936, Finisterre was buried under rubble by a bomb. Left lame, he and his mutilated fellow patients in a convalescent home in Montserrat, Catalonia, faced a future unable to play football. He explained: "As I liked table-tennis, I thought, why not invent table football?" He found a carpenter to construct the table and carve the figures. A German, Broto Wachter, had invented a version of the game in 1930, but Finisterre used the realistic figures that are known worldwide today. On the advice of a local anarchist, Finisterre patented his invention in Barcelona in 1937. At the same time he patented a foot-pedal that enabled musicians to turn the pages of their scores.

Fleeing over the Pyrenees to France at the end of the civil war, Finisterre's patent turned to pulp in pouring rain. Back in Spain, he completed a philosophy degree, but left for Paris in 1947, then Ecuador in 1948, where he founded a poetry magazine, Ecuador 0º 0' 0". This became an important outlet for Spanish exiles, published first in Quito, then Guatemala and finally Mexico. In Guatemala City in 1952, he at last made some money out of table football, with figures designed in mahogany. He played the game with Che Guevara. "We had similar styles," the dry Finisterre said later.

The Spanish republican ambassador to Guatemala (one of the few countries that still recognised the republic), fearing a coup there, asked Finisterre to carry confidential documents to Mexico. In consequence, after the CIA-promoted military coup in 1954, Finisterre was kidnapped by Franco's agents and put on a plane to Madrid. In flight, he went to the lavatory, wrapped the soap in silver paper and, shouting "I am a Spanish refugee", threatened to blow up the plane. This early act of air piracy won the support of crew and passengers and Finisterre was let off the plane in Panama.

For the next 20 years, Finisterre published in Mexico City more than 200 books of Latin American non-fiction and poetry and the work of Spanish exiles, especially Galicians: "I published what was forgotten by commercial publishers." He met again and became close friends with Felipe, whose work he then published. In 1973 he brought together literary figures from both Spain and the Spanish diaspora in homage to Felipe in Chapultepec forest, where a bronze bust of the poet still stands among the trees.

Returning to live in Spain after Franco's death, he persuaded Alianza to reprint Felipe's work, wrote a number of essays on him and became recognised as the leading León Felipe authority. In 2003 he sold Felipe's papers to the poet's home town of Zamora. The town council promised to open a museum. As it didn't, Finisterre moved to Zamora for a final battle, polemicising in articles that the poet's neglected legacy was decaying in damp boxes. The situation is symbolic of how "official" Spain has ignored its exile culture.

Though Finisterre himself wrote poetry, he thought they were "just verses". A restless and combative cultural agitator, he dedicated his life to promoting other people's work. In the 1970s he married the singer María Herrero, who survives him.

· Alejandro Finisterre (Alejandro Campos Ramírez), publisher and inventor, born May 6 1919; died February 9 2007

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