It is the 22nd century, an advertisement-drenched world in which the big ad agencies dominate governments and everything else. Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonize Venus, a hellhole where nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up for. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships. After a dirty maneuver by his competitors, Mitch is relegated to the lowest levels of society, from where he must rise again to regain the position that has been taken from him.

The cover design for this Spanish edition of The Space Merchants mimics the style of travel advertising posters of the 1950s, with a campy science fiction flavor that conveys the unsophisticated popular perception of space travel in the early period of technological development of rocketry. The title typography features two different contrasting fonts, a common practice of 1950’s advertising design. The tridimensional extrusion of the word ‘Espacio’, translating to space, is also a graphic tribute to the period’s science fiction books, comics, and cinema-style of lettering.