Books, Space, Power: Bogotá, 1880s–1920s

By showcasing books alongside busts and pencils, bookstores participated in the commodification of Bogotá’s urban space during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As other shops, bookstores turned Bogotanos and Bogotanas into consumers, both of local and imported goods, as well as of their own city. In this presentation, I use the case of the bookstore Librería Colombiana, owned by the partnership Camacho Roldán & Tamayo, to explore how bookstores not simply shaped consumption practices, but the patterns of real estate speculation. I examine the combined speculative investments of the partnership in books, cows, and land to explain how they maintained one of South America’s most famous bookstores for decades in a country where people were “poor and read little.” Amidst the whirlwind of speculation spurred by urban renovations during the 1880s, the partnership siphoned off capital from their hacienda to buy foreign books and urban land and helped connect Bogotá to a global world of books. Thanks to these global connections, Librería Colombiana became both a pivot for the partnership, and a landmark in the city. It came to be the model of what a bookstore in Bogotá could be, and as such, many other businesses followed its lead. Unlike other bookstores, however, Librería Colombiana endured. And it did so because it relied on the ever-increasing rent extraction of both rural and urban land. In Bogotá, bookstores thus helped to reinforce the city’s own internal spatial hierarchies, and shaped how the rural, urban, and global came together.