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  • Los orígenes de la Biblioteca Pública de Buenos Aires: Antecedentes, prácticas, gestión y pensamiento bibliotecario durante la Revolución de Mayo (1810–1826)
  • Donna J. Guy
Los orígenes de la Biblioteca Pública de Buenos Aires: Antecedentes, prácticas, gestión y pensamiento bibliotecario durante la Revolución de Mayo (1810–1826). By Alejandro E. Parada. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UBA, 2009. 343 pp. $20.00.

Parada is the preeminent historian of library science in Argentina. Director of the Biblioteca de la Academia Argentina de Letras, he also is the author of five other books on diverse aspects of the history of Argentine public and private libraries and librarians of the first half of the nineteenth century. Los orígenes deals with the history of private libraries at the end of the colonial period in Argentina and their role in the creation of the Biblioteca Nacional in 1812, shortly [End Page 501] after Buenos Aires declared independence from Spain. (It took until 1816 and the Congress of Tucumán to get the other provinces of the Argentine interior to declare their loyalty to the independence movement.) While that is the stated purpose, Parada has in fact written a masterful history of library science in Argentina, informed by an acute reading of the relevant historiography on the National Library.

Parada begins his work not in 1812 but rather in the historiography of the book and its social context in the European world, placing great emphasis on the historians who have used the library as a focus of the social construction of civilization through the print medium. He also is keenly interested in the symbolic link between a public library and the formation of a new nation-state that promised (although did not always deliver) greater freedoms.

Influenced by the work of the French Annales school, Parada demonstrates his wide-ranging knowledge of the world history of libraries not only in elite history but also in the history of the everyday life of the Argentine National Library, from operations matters to budget concerns. Parada also devotes considerable space to the history of library science and library history in Argentina and thus takes his time getting to the actual history of the public library.

Prior to the National Library, most of the libraries of any size belonged to religious institutions and wealthy individuals. In the convents and monasteries most books never entered into circulation outside the walls of the establishment and tended to focus on religion and philosophy. Important clerics, usually foreigners, brought their own private libraries to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, as Argentina was called during the colonial period. These books were needed: until the viceroyalty was founded in 1776, late in the colonial period, Buenos Aires was a backwater town on a river where smuggling was the only form of commercial trade.

For the educated elites of Buenos Aires, Facundo Prieto y Pulido and his wife's 1794 donation of their library—the third largest in the city—to La Merced Convent, with the specific purpose of making the books available to the public, must have augured a great future for the now bustling port city. Prior to their gift, the family lent books to their friends and kept a log of who borrowed what and when. In contrast with religious orders, the Prieto y Pulido collection was far more varied in topics, with a strong emphasis on science, medicine, and philosophy. Furthermore, even a few women borrowed books, and it is likely that many shared the books borrowed by their husbands; this practice would disappear with the formation of the National Library, which did not lend books.The downside to their revolutionary lending library was that their friends often did not return the books, and when the collection was finally donated to the convent, it probably was to alleviate the Prieto y Pulido family of the need to keep asking friends to return them. Prior to 1812 the library at the convent was the only "public" library in Argentina, and for Parada, the partial list of books lent and...

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