The Colony

Although the earliest printed books in Colombia have been frequently placed at the advent of the Jesuits’ printing press in 1735, the first typographical testimony in 1738, and the installation of the Royal Press in 1778, the history of publishing in Colombia begins much further back. Selnich Vivas Hurtado has emphasized the need to link the languages and modes of expression of indigenous communities to the history of publishing and reading in the country;¹ those of José Luis Guevara Salamanca (located in the colonial period) call attention to the profuse circulation of printed and manuscript books in the New Granada territory;² yet Álvaro Garzón Marthá demonstrates how the books that circulated in New Granada did not respect the prohibitions of the Catholic Monarchs and Emperor Carlos V.³ This would contradict the belief that what circulated the most were religious books; in fact, scientific books and, even more widely, fiction, also circulated.

The 19th Century

Alfonso Rubio and Juan David Murillo present a periodization for the circulation of printed matter in the country.⁴ The end of the 18th century saw the appearance of the first New Granadian public periodical: the Papel Periódico de Santafé, edited by Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez. Between 1822 and 1851, despite the very high rates of illiteracy, both printing workshops and printed works increased while newspapers multiplied (although few of them extended past the first year of existence). As for books, the best sellers of this era and the rest of the century were catechisms (specifically, Father Astete’s Christian catechism) and manuals (specifically, Venezuelan Manuel Carreño’s treatise on urbanity and good manners). Throughout the 19th century, despite the difficulties in obtaining mobile types and paper, periodical publications supported the embryonic Colombian publishing industry. The state, which by promoting the printing of laws and press officers, as well as official periodicals, legitimized and promoted—along with a political order—the rise of the printed matters and public opinion, and indirectly the publication and circulation of the legislative book.

The year 1851 marked an important development for the history of Colombian publishing because, under José Hilario López’s presidency, absolute freedom of the press was decreed. From then on, the number of printing presses increased, periodic publications proliferated even more, and, thanks to the promotion of education by the state (which had begun in previous decades), the schoolbook market became another fundamental support of the national publishing industry—first, through foreign publishers and booksellers, and then with national production. It was also in 1851 that, according to Gilberto Loaiza Cano and Juan David Murillo, the first bookstore in Colombia appeared, established by Frenchman Juan Simonnot.⁵ Cano and Murillo have also established that it is from the 1880s that bookstore circuits in the country expanded; those bookstores were also book importers as well as publishing-graphics workshops.

In the 19th century, the circulation of literature depended especially on periodicals, which had as one of their objectives the autonomy of the literary scene from political influence. This was evidenced in newspapers such as El Mosaico, founded by a group of intellectuals that included José María Vergara y Vergara. In the pages of this newspaper, important novels such as Manuela by Eugenio Díaz and several costumbrista tales of Vergara y Vergara, among others, were published. An interesting case of promotion of print and literature in 19th-century periodicals can be found in the corpus composed of Catholic newspapers and weekly newspapers that were widely distributed and circulated. Among the most important were El centinela (1856–1857), La Matricaria: periódico de la juventud, colección de artículos de costumbres, revistas i literatura (1855–1856; plus five issues published from 1860 to 1862) and La Caridad: Correo de las Aldeas. Libro de la familia cristiana (1864–1888).

These publications contained translations of Víctor Hugo and the works of Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of the writer Cecilia Böhl de Faber y Ruiz de Larrea), who wrote about Andalusian traditions and was a strong defender of Christian morals. Works by Manuel María Madiedo (Cartagena, Colombia, 1815–1888) were also published, the most prominent being Los amantes pintados por sí mismos. Madiedo was not only a writer but a recognized translator and an author dedicated to comedy, a genre that was not very common in Colombia. The publication of these works indicates that the Catholic press contributed to the dissemination of Colombian letters and, in general, of literature in Colombia.

Among 19th-century printers, the Echevarría Brothers, León Cecilio and Jacinto, liberals and Venezuelans, arrived in Colombia in 1848 by invitation from the liberal politician Manuel Ancízar. Within this group of printers, J. A. Cualla was known as the printing presses’ generalissimo and who, until the arrival of the Echevarría Brothers, dominated the monopoly of the printing presses in Bogotá. Despite the multiple closures of their printing press because of the political instability in the country, the Echevarría Brothers not only published the most important newspaper in the country (El Tiempo) but also a large collection of literary works.

Before the arrival of the Echevarría Brothers, printers were closer to craftsmen who assembled and typed the orders that they received. The Echevarrias became intellectual assets within Colombia, using their printing press as a kind of public arena. Consequently, the figure of the printer as mere craftsman evolved toward that of a public writer, an editor who was not limited to providing his manual services, but openly expressed his political and ideological positions as well.

Another important achievement by the brothers lies in the decentralization of information through the presence of El Tiempo in seventeen regions. With greater demand, printing presses produced more information and works; this led to the writer outside the national reality becoming an active editor, who was paid for his work, which was the first step toward the professionalization of the writer and the creation of a more public and committed intellectual figure.

The secularization introduced by the reforms of the liberal governments in the second half of the 19th century, although hampered by numerous civil wars and, in general, by the opposition of conservative political groups, decreased the power of the Church in state affairs (its properties were nationalized and a more secular educational system was organized) and decentralized power, through the implementation of a federal model: the United States of Colombia.

During the 1860s and 1870s, night libraries, mobile booksellers and libraries, used booksellers, and reading cabinets appeared, as Gilberto Loaiza Cano has shown in his work on the expansion of the book in Colombia in the second half of the 19th century.⁶ In addition, women, children, and workers joined the emerging reading public, thanks in large part to the efforts of liberal governments to increase educational opportunities. Toward the end of the century, the first great editorial collection published by a Colombian appeared: Jorge Roa’s Biblioteca Popular (Popular Library, 1893–1910). According to Miguel Ángel Pineda Cupa, this collection of 178 titles, including works by domestic (69) and foreign authors, propelled the prestige and success achieved by this editor-bookseller-printer.⁷

The 20th Century

The printing house Imprenta Eléctrica appeared during the first decades of the 20th century (1905–1912) as one of the means for official publications in a period where the urgency to re-establish national unity was the order of the day due to the ongoing conflicts from the recently ended Thousand Day War (1899–1902). This war had bled, impoverished, and dismembered the country, and resulted in new confrontations between the liberal and conservative political parties.

Some books published by this printing press focused on literature, history, and geography, vital in the construction of a national identity that had been cracked by violence and the recent loss of the Panama Canal (1903). Faced with a nation that was increasingly fragmented, literature served as an essential vehicle for the illusion of a historical and identity continuum. For this reason, the printing press published, in 1908, La Novela en Colombia by Roberto Cortázar, after an editorial panorama in which newspapers and the so-called pasquines (lampoons) served as a political platform for Colombian bipartisanship, either as a denunciation space or as a scenario for political proposals faced.

Two years after publishing Roberto Cortázar’s book, the Imprenta Electrónica released one of the most conservative books of the 20th century, Novelistas malos y buenos juzgados en orden de naciones (1910) by Pablo Ladrón de Guevara of the Society of Jesus. The author judged 2,057 novelists from various locations to argue that the novelistic genre is an expression of sin and of a society that had lost values. The publication of Ladrón de Guevara’s work served as a response by the clergy to the libertarian expressions that adopted positivist philosophies and framed the celebration of the centenary of independence.

According to Gonzalo Canal and José Chalarca, between 1911 and 1930, printing made two important advances: in 1911, the first linotype arrived in the country and, in the 1920s, the first automatic small-format printing machines were acquired.⁸ During the last years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, censorship once again marked the history of Colombian publishing due to decrees sanctioned by the government, specifically, the famous Horse Law (1888), for which the government wanted to stop the spread of liberal ideas and therefore exercised control over both imported books and those produced in the country, as well as over periodicals. It was so named for what appeared to have been false news of banditry (initially, against horses, in different parts of the country) and was later used by the conservative government to justify the implementation of measures that would ensure greater order by stopping the advance of the “enemies of the Constitution” (as conservatives used to call liberals), such as the application of censorship on printed matter and publications.⁹

After the reforms of the radical liberals during the second half of the 19th century, the governments of the Liberal Republic (1930–1946) spurred a second printing boom. The decisions of the Colombian government to promote the circulation of books and cultural magazines and to create an environment that stimulated cultural life in all its manifestations were reflected by two events: the publication of the Biblioteca Aldeana and the Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana collections. The first was a collection of Colombian literature (the Samper Ortega Selection of Colombian Literature), universal literature (the Araluce Collection), scientific and historical books (from Appleton publishing house), pedagogical books (from Seix Barral publishing house), and rural manuals for peasant education, which consisted of a series of short pamphlets that synthesized the basic knowledge (about botany and medicine, among others) that peasants were supposed to learn. Those books were put into circulation through the numerous libraries that were founded in various cities and towns and contributed to the popularization of the book in Colombia.¹⁰

By contrast, the Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana (BPCC) was an edited collection directed by Germán Arciniegas as Minister of Education and was composed of 161 volumes. Like the Biblioteca Aldeana, the BPCC was distributed through the incipient network of public libraries in the country, but was also marketed through libraries, at cost (the buyer was charged only for the printing of the book). The price of the books ($1, roughly the equivalent for a day’s labor), their design, and the fact that it was proposed as a compendium of the best of Colombian culture contributed to its success and helped to expand the reading public in the country.¹¹

The printer and editor Arturo Zapata Tirado, founder of the Arturo Zapata Publishing House and Graphic Workshops, published almost one hundred books between 1928 and 1954. These innovative works introduced new techniques in graphic arts, the use of an avant-garde editorial design, and the use of an alternative circuit to the traditional ones in Colombia for the sale and promotion of his books (the railway network, of which, before Zapata, there are no references of having being used for this purpose in Colombia).¹²

The enactment in 1958 of the Emerald Law, which was promoted by Congresswoman Esmeralda Arboleda, granted tax exemptions for the importation of books and machinery for the printing industry. This, the first book law that was sanctioned in the country, helped reduce editorial production costs, including the payment of taxes for postal services, export of books, and import of machinery and paper for printing. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bedout Bolsilibros (pocket books) offered a collection of titles comprising Colombian and world literature, philosophy, and history, some of which reached 10,000 copies. Bedout marks the consolidation of the commercial edition in the country.

The printing house El Comercio was founded by Félix de Bedout in 1899. In 1914, the family consolidated the Félix de Bedout e Hijos Society until 1937, when the company changed its name to Editorial and Typography Bedout. From that moment, the publishing house began to print religious and schoolbooks, thus promoting its development. In 1953, the publishing house entered a process of modernization by bringing new printers, expanding its workshops, and training its workers in new technologies; it also started exporting several books to Ecuador and Costa Rica.

Although the publishing house had already had editorial successes with the publication of the works of Colombian novelists and poets Tomás Carrasquilla (1858–1940), Eduardo Caballero Calderón (1910–1993), León de Greiff (1895–1976), Porfirio Barba Jacob (1883–1943), and Fernando González (1895–1964), it prospered in the 1960s with the circulation of schoolbooks and the foundation of the Bolsilibros collection (1960–1992).Through this collection, Bedout presented several young writers who would later be central figures in the national literary system. The Bolsilibros catalog was the entrance to letters for many men and women who had benefited from the literacy campaigns undertaken by the government. All these initiatives were accompanied by an open and accessible distribution circuit: they distributed the collection in kiosks and popular stores, lowered costs, and made risky bets on the titles.

The collection’s 238 titles of literature, history, philosophy, and education were augmented by the publication of 128 reprints, for a total of 366 books circulating, all of them numbered. The process of review and publication of the Bolsilibros was thorough. About fifteen titles were printed per year with an initial circulation of 4,000 copies; if the title was adopted by the high school reading plan (for students who read a book per quarter), the print run could reach 90,000 copies. In spite of the quality of the titles, their price was very economical and they were widely available for purchase. Bedout also established a very interesting advertising system that focused on the magazine El Impresor, which it also edited.

El Impresor promoted all the activities of the publisher and featured articles on the literature published in the collection. The pages dedicated to the Bolsilibros clearly pushed the idea that the main objective of the collection was to create a simple and open access for all readers and to promote Colombian literature: of 238 titles, 150 are literary and 67 of them Colombian. Bedout assumed the risks in curating its contents because he firmly believed in the renewal of the Colombian market, and the entry of young writers guaranteed such change. Short story writers, such as Rocío Vélez de Piedrahita, Hernando García Mejía, Efe Gómez, or Néstor Madrid Malo, confirm that Bedout sought to add new names to renew the corpus of titles, rescue of writers— especially from the Antioquia Department, who had been forgotten over time—and publish classic literature.

The Bolsilibros collection increased the presence of this publishing house in the national and regional environment. “La prensa comenta” (The press comments) was one of the sections of the magazine El Impresor, comprising all the reviews and criticism that cultural periodicals had made of the titles of the collection. Moreover, Bolsilibros, with their large print runs, benefited the company’s bottom line. For example, Carrasquilla’s book had 60,000 copies circulating, while the work of Caballero Calderón reached 90,000.

The large runs, the circulation in popular locations, the linkage of the collection to the reading requirements of schools, and the promotion of new Colombian writers form the determining link between literature and the circle of editorial communication. Also, Bedout consistently expressed a concern for education as a means to social progress. He sought to upgrade the technical abilities of the workforce and remove the country from the list of nations with the highest illiteracy rate to guarantee greater foreign investment. His educational mission, however, was tied to a risky bet in the catalog: new names mean, in turn, new aesthetics.¹³

At the end of the 1960s, the Tercer Mundo publishing house appeared.¹⁴ And in the 1970s, just as the second Law of the Book is enacted (1973), in the city of Medellín, several publishers emerge with a clear leftist tendency, including Oveja Negra, La Carreta, El Tigre de Papel, Zeta, La Pulga, Estrategia, Hombre Nuevo, Ocho de Junio, and Norman Bethune y Pepe. The first two continue in operation in the third decade of the 21st century—although without their original left-wing editorial policy. For a decade, these publishers nurtured the rise of the leftist book, whose circulation was driven primarily by university students, members of trade union groups, and revolutionary politicians. This phenomenon prepared an editorial circuit for the Colombian book (of Colombian authors and about Colombian issues), a fact that constitutes an ostensible change with respect to the previous moments in the history of national publishing, in which the circulation of imported books predominated.¹⁵

After the disappearance of these left-wing publishers, various editorial projects emerged since the late 1970s and during the 1980s that expanded the Colombian publishing space with the publication of titles of general interest (literature, social sciences, humanities, journalism): Carlos Valencia Editores, El Áncora, Norma (associated with the Carvajal group) and, later, Arango Editores and Villegas Editores.¹⁶ The 1980s can be considered as the peak of the Colombian publishing industry, due to two facts: the exponential increase of published titles (from 628 titles published in 1971 to 1,000 in 1989) and of copies printed by title (thanks, in large part, to the exceptional success of the editions of Gabriel García Márquez’s books by La Oveja Negra);¹⁷ and the diversification of the editorial offer beyond the traditional markets of periodicals, the school book, the religious book, and the legislative one.

At this time, Colombians saw more books from national publishers in the showcases of bookstores, chain stores, pharmacies, and even city crossroads, the latter, new book circulation spaces that were taking hold. It was a process of mass production and distribution of books that had not been possible previously. This consolidation also contributed to the impulse from Colcultura secured with the publication of several collections (also put into circulation almost at cost price like the BPCC)—among them, the Autores Nacionales Collection and the Colección Popular.¹⁸ Despite this campaign to strengthen local publishing, the Colombian reading public remains quite small.

The 1980s saw the installation of foreign publishers’ subsidiaries: Círculo de Lectores (of German origin) and the Spanish Plaza and Janés, and Planeta. The national publishing market competed with these subsidiaries, which by the end of the decade included Alfaguara, also Spanish. The Book Act of 1993, China’s entry into competition for the book printing market—in which Colombia had advantages during the 1970s and 1980s—and the reduction of tax incentives for book exports added to this process of editorial concentration through these foreign subsidiaries. This produced a debacle in national publishing, only offset by the conversion of the publishing house Norma, in turn, into a multinational.

The 21st Century

The decision of the publishing house Norma to close its line of literary editions in 2011 marked the end of this phase of consolidation of the publishing industry in Colombia. During the first two decades of the 21st century, Norma had become an editorial benchmark for the entire Latin American continent through the presence of its different subsidiaries in some countries and its diverse and carefully selected literary editorial collections, aimed at adults, young people, and children. Similarly, Norma had become a benchmark for professional translation by Colombians and, in general, a benchmark for professional publishing, thanks to the outstanding editors who made up its production team. However, since 2005, the emergence of several small and professional publishing companies, calling themselves “independent” (among them, Babel, Tragaluz, Laguna, Luna, Rey Naranjo, Sílaba, Mákina, and Angosta), has reinvigorated publishing, some through a focus on children’s literature. In addition, the professionalization of the university edition, one of the fastest growing editorial lines, and the emergence of training programs for editors at the undergraduate (literary studies and edition at University Jorge Tadeo Lozano) and postgraduate (master’s degree in editorial studies at Caro y Cuervo Institute) levels suggest new avenues for publishing in Colombia.

Still, the highest sales in the publishing sector are currently concentrated in the subsidiaries of Spanish publishers (Planeta, Penguin Random House, and Santillana), despite the fact that there are more publishers within Colombia. As in the 1980s, most published titles consist of school textbooks and children’s literature. Thus, the Colombian publishing industry remains an area supported by the education sector; hence, the highest percentage of book readers remains between twelve and twenty-five years old.

Colombia had an uninterrupted positive trade balance between 1986 and 2012; since 2013, book imports have gained ground again, but while a large part of the exports of that so-called golden age were the product of books manufactured—although not published—in Colombia, in 2020 foreign sales account for most of the books purchased in Colombia.

Discussion of the Literature

Current research on Colombian publishing focuses, above all, on charting an account of its cultural history, especially because this field of studies has been dominated for several years by bibliographic and inventory-type studies.¹⁹ Among these investigations, the following stand out: books like Minúscula y plural. Cultura escrita en Colombia [Lowercase and Plural. Written Culture in Colombia] edited by Alfonso Rubio,;²⁰ Historia de la edición en Colombia. 1738–1851 [Publishing History in Colombia] by Alfonso Rubio and Juan David Murillo; and Un momento en la historia de la edición en Colombia (1925–1954) [A moment in the history of publishing in Colombia] by Paula Andrea and Marín Colorado;²¹ as well as two monographic issues published in the journals Historia y Memoria;²² and Linguística y Literatura;²³ the first of them directed by Gilberto Loaiza Cano (Books, Readings and Readers in Colombia and Latin America) and the second by Diana Paola Guzmán and Paula Andrea Marín (Written and Printed Culture in Colombia).

All of these publications are part of a broader effort to consolidate studies on books, reading, and publishing in Colombia (what has been called “written and printed culture”) from a diachronic point of view, although focusing on specific periods. Several books have been published since the 2010s, among them Lectores, editores y cultura impresa. Siglos XVI–XXI, edited by Diana Paola Guzmán, Paula Andrea Marín, Juan David Murillo and Miguel Ángel Pineda;²⁴ Editar en Colombia en el siglo XX. La Selección Samper Ortega de Literatura Colombiana (1928–1937) by Miguel Ángel Pineda Cupa;²⁵ Ellas editan by Margarita Valencia and Paula Andrea Marín on Colombian women editors (in the 20th and 21st centuries);²⁶ and the dossier on Colombian literary editing coordinated by the research group Colombia: Traditions of the Word, led by Ana María Agudelo and Paula Andrea Marín: Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, published by the University of Antioquia.²⁷ These last two publications represent new approaches in the publishing studies of the country: the relationship between publishing and literature, from the framework of the sociology of literature, and ethnographic research, more suitable to analyze the publishing field of the present.

Despite these contributions to the history of publishing and the field of editorial studies in Colombia, many other monographic and panoramic studies are still needed to understand the development of the Colombian publishing field (and its relationships with other fields), as well as studies on the current publishing field that go further than the annual reports prepared by CERLALC (Regional Center for the Promotion of Books in America and the Caribbean), the Colombian Chamber of Books, and the Ministry of Culture.

Moreover, the history of reading or reading practices in the country has not been a concern of the academic critical colloquiums; on the contrary, it is an aspect overshadowed by the teaching of reading in school settings. However, certain dynamics can be evidenced around the study of readers, supports, and methods.

The first approaches were made through the idea of a literary reader who presented himself as an aesthetic room. These studies, led by the works of Professor Carmen Elisa Acosta, were based on the reception theory of Wolfang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, focusing on the literary periodicals of the 19th century and in serialized novels as reading props.²⁸

Based on cultural history, the books by professors Renán Silva Olarte and Gilberto Loaiza Cano present a more open possibility to understand, from a historiographical perspective, the relationships between education, the state and readers. Focused on specific moments such as the Radical Olympus or the Liberal Republic, these works contemplate a more systemic vision that links social, political, and cultural aspects around matters such as materiality, circulation, and access.²⁹

Reading scenarios have also been related to the history of reading practices. This is the case of the studies on village libraries or on the history of public libraries by Hernán Muñoz or Diana Paola Guzmán, who has also carried out research on the history of teaching methods and literacy in Colombia in the mid-20th century.³⁰

The study of specific readers has also occupied a modest place in these investigations. Papers on women readers, workers, and peasants have been presented, but it still turns out to be a scenario that deserves more attention. Although several efforts are being made, there is still a need for proposals on reading traces or marginalia that account around an active presence of the reading subject. In short, the history of reading practices in Colombia is still in the making; however, interest in this type of research seems to grow every day, which cannot be separated from the history of materialities and publishing.