Toward a Sociology of a Singularity in the Book World: : Vitor Silva Tavares and his &etc Publishing House (1974–2015)

This article looks at &etc, a small, independent, Lisbon-based literary publishing house that began publishing books on the eve of the Carnation Revolution (1974). It was not “just another case” in the Portuguese literary publishing scene of the last four decades. It went out of business in 2015 following the death of Vitor Silva Tavares, the publisher and life and soul of &etc. Its main traits included a return to certain forms of craftsmanship and knowledge, rejection of a purely mercantile relationship with books, promotion of marginal literary discourses, and association with specific aesthetic groups. Broadly speaking, the purpose here is to underline some analytical concerns and concepts (singularity, biography) that can be used to achieve a historical and sociological understanding of &etc and its practices, thereby improving knowledge of the literary publishing field in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Portugal.