About this Event
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.
Registration
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Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For over 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.
Accessibility
An ADA-compliant lift from street level to the lobby is available to anyone with mobility issues. All desk staff should be ready and able to assist you in operating the lift, with or without advance notice.
A “T-Coil” assisted listening system is available to anyone attending a lecture in the Exhibition Hall. Visitors with hearing aids should turn their devices to the “T” setting in order to access the system; visitors without hearing aids may request a “loop receiver” with earphones.
Environment
The temperature and humidity in the exhibition hall are tightly controlled for the sake of the valuable items on display, and this may cause the room to feel chilly, particularly in warmer weather, to those coming in from outside. Members and visitors are advised to bring a light wrap when visiting an exhibition, or attending an event in the hall.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
