D’O Recreio à Livraria Romano Torres: edição para o grande consumo no Portugal contemporâneo

This study seeks to grasp the ways in which the social world of the publishing production of print culture is structured around the creation of books and their circulation, by articulating explanatory contributions of both sociology and history. Books targeting a wide public and mass consumption can be seen as an interesting laboratory to understand the social world of publishing, inasmuch as it constitutes a privileged ecosystem for the launching or testing of formats, of narrative processes and forms of circulation and diffusion, and of modalities involved in the creation and shaping of published works. The empirical object of this analysis is a one hundred years old publishing house set in Lisbon – Romano Torres –, which established its activity in the realm of the Portuguese language between the years of 1885-1886 and 1990. The primary sources for this study were the documents compounding the Romano Torres Historical Archive (Arquivo Histórico Romano Torres). The empirical strength of this study lies in the data provided directly by the records of the Romano Torres house and the dynasty of its publishers, as their very existence favors particularly the elaboration of a sociology and history of book publishing and print culture in Portugal, for the last century and a half. The research undertaken, having this publishing house as the empirical focus, is not intended to be a gateway to apprehend the whole of Portuguese publishing for the period between the late eighteen hundreds and the late nineteen hundreds. Instead, the exploration carried out translates into a case study with the purpose of gaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a plethora of mechanisms and processes through which publishing raises and shapes the world of books, whose effects ripple in the wider context of publishing for large consumption. Therefore this research is not set out to offer an institutional biography of the Romano Torres house either. The in-depth study of Romano Torres’ trajectory shows how a publishing house sets itself up as an actor capable of intervening in the agency of authors, guiding – even determining, on multiple occasions – the performance of the writers, translators and adapters it accommodated in the catalogue. Thus, to examine the publishing activity through the case analyzed herein is to understand how this intricate system of relations, and their context, shapes the action of agents and their dispositions. This reveals how in cultural production and circulation, the autonomy of each field can only be explained taking into account its permeability. In the end, this study is interested in capturing the ways a book publishing house for mass consumption ended up shaping a catalogue and its forms of circulation, by intervening simultaneously in the transformation of the book market, as well as in the forms of making books reach their readers through the course of a social itinerary conjoining, in tension and cooperation, multiple actors of the book world.