Livros para o povo: a atuação do Instituto Nacional do livro junto à Biblioteca Pública de Maranguape, Ceará (1975-85)

Abstract

This research sought to understand the work of the National Book Institute (INL) with the Capistrano de Abreu Municipal Public Library (BPMCA), located in Maranguape 3 a municipality located in the northeast of the State of Ceará, 27 km from the capital 3, during the period 1975-85. Regarding the institutional work, the following questions were asked: a) the distribution of books, through donations of bibliographic collections; b) the technical assistance made available for the improvement of library assistants; and c) the theoretical and practical knowledge disseminated by the Institute with the objective of promoting reading education at the municipal level. The corpus analyzed is the result of qualitative, exploratory, documentary research, consisting of sources of diverse nature, and whose epistemological reference is anchored in the field of History of Education in Brazil, under the approach of New Cultural History, using, above all, the set of theoretical-methodological contributions extracted from the line of studies that deals with the History of books and reading, as proposed by Roger Chartier (1999) (2004) and Robert Darnton (2010) (2011). In the first stage of the investigation, four catalogs were constructed based on the lists of books donated by the INL to the BPMCA. These catalogs were configured as essential methodological instruments for the construction of data that captured the composition of the bibliographic repertoires and their reception. In the second stage, textual and oral documents were analyzed in order to bring to light the technical and cultural guidelines established by the Institute to govern the operation of municipal libraries. Finally, with regard to the analysis of the theoretical and practical knowledge that was disseminated, two works that had reading formation as their central theme were selected from the list of books donated at the time: Children and Literature by the writer Tereza Casasanta and How to encourage the reading habit by Richard Bamberger, in order to identify, in them, concepts and proposals aimed at working with reading. In the end, the data revealed that, by using strategies to disseminate books and promote reading in the country, the INL acted in line with the ideals that were in vogue at the time, linking its actions to pedagogical technicality and the cultivation of a <Brazilianness= that revolved around national affirmation, propagating a cultural trend that inaugurated new perceptions for the formation of Brazilian readers. However, despite the political and social forces that surrounded it, the institutional action was fruitful in the reality of Maranguape, based on the understanding that educational reading practices could not be thought of divorced from their concepts and purposes. If on the one hand the Institute9s actions proved to be normative in its propositions, on the other hand it combined a sum of fundamental actions to facilitate greater and better access to books and information.