It is an approach to the book as an object of study and not as a mediator of knowledge. In my case, I deal with illustrated publications and books in the 19th century, affirmed María Esther Pérez Salas Cantú, a research professor at the Mora Institute.
According to the specialist, this study of the book as an object has a long tradition in France, England and Spain. In Mexico and in the specific case of said institute that belongs to the System of Public Research Centers of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), for about 15 years this perspective began to be worked on.
We try to rescue the printers, the publishers, what was their function, their history. We draw on what has already been done outside the country. Now, what is relevant is to establish contact with researchers in Latin America, to further locate a Latin American context of this entire process, he said.
Pérez Salas Cantú has a PhD in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has been working academically at the Mora Institute for 28 years. An expert on the subject of lithography, she outlines this technique and its importance in the history of publishing activity in the country.
Lithography was a very important means of mechanical image reproduction in the 19th century. According to the researcher in her work titled Costumbrismo y litografía en México: un nueva modo de ver, the development of lithography was closely linked to editorial activity and served as visual support for the texts.
It is from the use of lithographic images in books that we fully enter the era of visual and graphic communication. The importance of lithography lies in the fact that it allows the reader to approach books in a different way. The image is a very important tool, it gives us the possibility of having a different knowledge of things than the receptors had, when it was only a textual reading, explained the researcher.
It was in 1826 when Claudio Linati introduced this technique and published a newspaper with illustrations.
The arrival of this new technique favored the production of books in the 19th century in Mexico and also changes in their format, because illustrated books began to be produced as was done in Europe. The lithographic workshops work closely linked with the printers, which is why books were produced that were very different from what was done in previous centuries, where metal or wood engraving was used.
The heyday of lithography at the editorial level are the decades of the 40s and 50s, in which a large number of publications proliferate. And this lasted until the 1970s and 1980s, when lithography did not disappear but was used in other genres, no longer editorial but commercial, such as labels, advertisements, posters and others.
