The trajectory of the formation of a bookseller-printer in southern America: Guilherme Echenique and the Livraria Universal in Pelotas

Abstract

In this article, I have sought to understand the foundation of a bookshop and a typography press as part of a broader cultural and commercial project, which involved marital and mercantile networks amongst families from several regions of southern America. By reconstructing some aspects of the trajectory of a bookseller-printer named Guilherme Echenique and of his family networks, I analyze the meaning of the emergence of the book industry to a lineage that has long been familiar with other productive and commercial transactions. Located in the south part of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the late 19th century, the enterprise invested in book merchandising precisely in a context of intense changes in traditional lifestyles associated with the countryside and of broader changes in society. The relationship between the bookseller-printer and the local political elite, composed mainly of ranchers’ sons, heirs of the decadent charqueadas, occurred through the sharing of cultural interests concerning gaucho matters that established a common way of thinking about the lifestyle in the south of the state.