The fourth and final volume of the collection that brings together the essay work of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio is titled QWERTYUIOP. This sequence of letters, which forms the top row of an alphanumeric keyboard, appears to be an arbitrary one, but in fact, it follows a rational order that combines criteria such as frequency and proximity, among others.

The decision to title this fourth and final volume of Sánchez Ferlosio's Essays in this way ironically reflects the diversity of issues addressed within it, which at first glance might suggest a scattered and capricious range of interests. However, this is not the case. The subtle yet decisive contrasts between happiness and satisfaction, remorse and repentance, instructing and teaching, games and sports; the significant difference between speaking of a consumer society or a production society; the pairs of opposites that form concepts such as leisure and business, consumptive time and acquisitive time, goods and values – all of these elements configure a whole field of tensions that have as their backdrop issues to which Ferlosio has never ceased to pay attention, such as education, advertising, television, work, the competitive mentality, the role of women, and the commercialization of beauty. It is in these areas that his particular critical attitude towards modernity, inherited from and continuing the work of authors such as Thorstein Veblen and Th.W. Adorno, manifests itself.

This work has received editorial assistance from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.

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