The year 1870, with the enactment of Law 419 for the protection and promotion of popular libraries, is a key date for the Argentine library tradition.

However, a few years later and in an unstable political context, the government repealed the law and, in less than two decades, the popular libraries that had grown under the government’s protection were decimated. In this essay, Planas offers a meticulous reconstruction of those developments, while he delves into the understanding of the history of books and reading in our country.

Javier Planas has a degree in Library Science and Information Science, a Master's and a PhD in Social Sciences from the National University of La Plata. Since 2005 he has been a professor at university, in which he works in the Chairs of History of the Book and of Libraries and Technology and Media, in addition to giving seminars on the history of library science in Argentina. He is a postdoctoral fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research. His interests span the history of the book, publishing, and reading, with special emphasis on understanding libraries as social spaces.

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