Lecture | Mexico City's Avant-Garde Librería de Cristal Bookstore

NYU doctoral student Luis Fernando Bañuelos will lecture on the Librería de Cristal, Mexico's first everything bookstore. In a long, sinuous, marble, glass, and steel building downtown, plastered with billboards, blinding neon letters mounted on the roof, it offered leather-bound collections, textbooks, children's literature, pornographic paperbacks, dictionaries, literary magazines, titles by popular romance authors and those of Alexander von Humboldt and John Steinbeck, as well as coffee, plus paintings by renowned artists. The enigmatic, contradictory store was a monumental palace for Mexico's lettered elites, an extravagant attempt to bring mass commercial culture to print matter in a semi-illiterate country, an attempt to democratize knowledge and culture by making them accessible to all social classes, the remnant of an obsolete, pre-industrial belletristic culture... The lecture will explore the store's cultural history through publications, films, first-hand testimonies, photographs, and advertising. In a post-revolutionary, developing country such as Mexico, what happens to print culture in general, and literature in particular, what do they gain or lose, when entangled with commercial culture?

Luis Fernando Bañuelos is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. His research interests include print culture, book history, sociology of literature and publishing, and the history of literary criticism. His dissertation explores Mexican literature from the 1920s to the 1970s in relation to the publishing industry's rise.

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