The Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

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.