RECALLING THE OLD BOOKSTORES AT BELEM CITY IN PARÁ STATE, BRAZIL

A STUDY BASED ON THE LABELS AND STAMPS OF BOOKS OF ANNUNCIADA CHAVES COLLECTION

Abstract

The general objective of this study is to map the bookstores, typographies, distributions, publishers, printers and similar establishments that existed in Belém do Pará throughout the 20th century by consulting the ownership labels and stamps that were attached to the books. And its specific objectives were as follows: a) To indicate where the establishments that dealt with the preparation and sale of books were located; b) To identify who owned them; c) To ascertain the nationality of their owners; and, d) To verify which segment of books they worked with. The corpus was extracted by consulting the works that make up the collections of the Moronguêtá Book Memorial. This methodology was developed from studies by Ubiratan Machado, who used this procedure to survey the bookstores in Brazil, the result of which was published in “A Etiqueta do Livro: subsídios para a história das livrarias brasileiras”. A total of 41 bookstores were obtained. The survey revealed a considerable decrease in the number of bookstores, since of the 41 that existed in Belém in the 20th century only two remained: Livraria da Universidade Federal do Pará and Livraria Nossa Senhora dos Corações.