Cultural Links
Literature Book Collections in the Twentieth Century in Colombia: Form and Canon Criteria
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gloria Morales Osorio
The book collections Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana (1941-1952) and Biblioteca de Autores Colombianos (1952-1958) are essential resources for understanding the attempts to give shape to a national literary canon in Colombia in the twentieth century. These ambitious national projects continued the creation of a secular space for books and allow us to reflect on the construction of a readership community. This paper describes these two collections sponsored since 1941 by the Colombian government in terms of (i) their bibliographical morphology, (ii) the political and cultural context in which they were created, and (iii) the aesthetic values at the basis of this canon. This revision, in turn, can help us understand literacy projects, the formation of a literary canon, reading practices, and reading promotion during the second part of the twentieth century in Colombia.
Capturing a Community’s Stories: A Case Study
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lori Ward
Author Neil Gaiman, in the second annual Reading Agency lecture, said, “books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.” Focusing on the conference theme of “Publishing Practices: Past, Present, and Future,” this paper is based on a case study of a book that was produced for the specific and deliberate purpose of capturing a story that was important to a specific group within the community before that story was lost. It addresses all three of the conference concerns of access, diversity, and democracy as they apply to a project that responded to a specialty publishing need. The discussion focuses on one purpose of a book, as described by Gaiman, to learn from those who are no longer with us, and will discuss both the process of producing a book for this purpose and the decisions that were made about design and publishing formats.
Publishing Standards – Mission Impossible?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrej Blatnik
According to the UNESCO definition, books are 'bound non-periodical publications having 49 or more pages'. US Postal service defines them as 'bound publication having 24 or more pages, at least 22 of which are printed and contain primary reading material, with advertising limited only to book announcements'. Is e-book not a book? And who is a publisher? Is Twitter a book publishing company? »I think it is. It is an open access publisher producing very short books,« says an important publishing professional. The present publishing theory could object. According to the conditions for publishers defined by Michael Bhaskar in The Content Machine (2013), tweets may be amplified, but they are not filtered by anyone else but their author and therefore, the traditional publishing standards are not applied to them. This study reviews these publishing standards – and if we should continue applying them.
