Introducción: Nuevas aportaciones a la historia de la edición y de la lectura en la España del siglo XX
Year: 2026
Type: editorial
Abstract: The history of publishing and reading is one of the most fruitful lines of research in cultural history in recent years, studying the production, circulation, and appropriation of works in an interrelated manner within the society of a given era (Martínez Martín, 1998).It offers significant works on the publishing industry and reading practices in a specific time and place.It allows us to approach sociocultural issues such as the circulation of ideas from other perspectives, focusing on the creation, dissemination, and assimilation of publications.Since the publication of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's book, L'apparition du livre, in 1958, significant progress has been made in theoretical and methodological matters, as well as in research driven by authors such as Roger Chartier, Robert Darton, Jean-François Botrel, among many others.The history of publishing and reading is necessarily multidisciplinary given its scope of study.Dialogue is required between disciplines such as economic history, cultural history, literary history, the history of literacy, sociology, and library science.From a multidisciplinary perspective, it focuses on the figure of the publisher and their trajectory from individual initiatives to the publishing strategies of corporations.The publisher is the backbone of the process that transforms texts into formats and physical units for dissemination and consumption within a specific context.Furthermore, it analyzes the dual nature of publishing, since the book, apart from being a vehicle for ideas and opinions, is also a commodity.The book has a dual economic and cultural dimension.This dual nature of the book requires a multidisciplinary approach as an economic, cultural, and social object.The book is a product launched onto the market, subject to the "mechanisms of investment-production and distribution-sale," but at the same time it is a mode of communication and cultural transmission (Tuñón de Lara, 1980, p. 14).
Author: Ana Martínez Rus
Institution: Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Language: Spanish
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7224296649