“Plenty Penmanship”: The Politics of Reading and Writing in Late 19th-Century Bogotá

In late nineteenth-century Colombia, the Biblioteca Nacional was envisioned as a place for solitary, studious reading. Yet it was much more than that. It was crucial for defining the meanings and forms of writing, too. The renowned patrons with leeway to read the vetoed “pornographic” books were usually also the ones allowed to copy manuscripts or trace maps. Not only did these purportedly patriotic endeavors assure the Biblioteca’s mission of preservation, but served various political functions, from informing border disputes to enhancing Colombia’s standing abroad. In a moment of increasing political centralization, and an obsession with overall order, reading and writing in the Biblioteca were key for fostering cultured practices in patrons, as well as delineating bureaucrats’ tasks for standardized procedures. Bureaucrats were increasingly enmeshed in a whirl of paper and ink as they composed catalogues, labeled spines, organized slips, and established rules to ensure the Biblioteca was an ordered, cared for place. Both reading and writing, I show, were material practices defined more broadly by the politics of paper, which was not only expensive and scarce, but seemed irreplaceable too. Stalemates and contradictions thus abound. Why were library workers obsessed with classifying and binding certain newspapers while simultaneously selling others as scrap paper? Which papers “served no purpose”? Why were some forms of reading and writing seen as useful, while other ones disparaged as frivolous? Reading and writing, I argue, were contentious material and political practices, paramount for shaping the relations of bureaucrats and citizens with the state-system. By exploring how reading and writing were defined and experienced at the Biblioteca Nacional, I shed light on the intertwinement between the lettered world and everyday political practice in late nineteenth-century Bogotá.