Publishing Houses and the 'Discovery' of Brazil, 1930–1950

The flourishing of the publishing market in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century is associated with the social, economic, and political transformations that accompanied the advent of the republic and, after 1930, the inflections of the so-called Vargas era. Publishers with growing prestige began to create repertoires that could capture the multiple dimensions of the nation and affirm identarian matrices. Through letters, lively soirées, and political complicities, they constituted solid sociability networks, reflected in the names of the authors in their catalogues. In the presentation and selection of works, they assimilated the impulses of the modernist and regionalist literary movements, revealing talents from various regions of Brazil. They benefited from the expansion of educational policies, the birth of universities, and the maturing of the human sciences. In addition, they made efforts to educate the reading public using rigorously organized collections under the curatorships of renowned writers and bibliophiles. They were aware of the cultural mission they carried out in a country with a still-precarious cultural and educational structure. Among the many collections which appeared, involving the translation of classics of literature or foreign popular science books, a central place was given to the '(re)discovery of Brazil.' In austere or finely made editions, the Brasilianas (works about Brazil), literary collections, individual works by Brazilian writers, poets, and essayists from different generations, and also foreign perspectives of Brazil all gained materiality. Echoing the famous phrase by the Paulista writer Monteiro Lobato, “a country that makes men and book,” the publishers of the period acted in a profound connection—even in positions of confrontation—with the ideas of the nation that appeared on the horizon at that time.