El Dédalo y su ovillo: ensayos sobre la palpitante cultura impresa en la Argentina
by Alejandro E. Parada. Buenos Aires: Insituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecologicas, UBA, 2012. 322 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-9867-1785-58-2
Alejandro E. Parada is a professor attached to the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the University of Buenos Aires. For nearly two decades he has researched and published on Argentine intellectual history, using libraries, librarians and reading as his principal references. El Dédalo y su ovillo (“the labyrinth and its thread”), a title referring to the classical Greek tale of a hero’s escape from an impenetrable maze by laying a thread to mark his path, presents eight of Parada’s essays illustrating various facets of his past and ongoing investigations.
If the book has a uniting theme, it is an appeal for the importance of humanistic inquiry in information studies, a field that becomes, daily, more technical. Parada insists that no profession is better positioned to observe the interrelation between humans and ideas and argues that if the historical trajectory of archives, libraries and librarians were elided from the curriculum of librarianship, for which he uses the Spanish word bibliotecología, something immeasurable would be lost.
The essays cover a variety of topics, among them: epistemology -- the meaning of the expression “libro antiguo” (when does a book become old; are old and rare synonymous?); historiography -- micro history, library history as form of the history of reading, the history of reflection; and the history of women -- examining images published in Fray Mocho, a popular magazine from the 1910s, as the basis for speculation on feminine roles in Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century.
As a historian I found Parada’s use of sources quite imaginative. He examines the first Reglamento (operating rules) of the Public Library of Buenos Aires and the library’s Libro de cargo y data and Razones de gastos (expense accounts), all written in the early years of the Argentine republic. From them he reconstructs a schematic of the library’s contents, its personnel, and its functioning. In another essay, Parada examines the diary compiled by the Argentine patriot, Bartolomé Mitre, during his service as an artillery officer in the mid-19th century. Mitre, a ferociously organized man, followed a regimen of morning reading and evening reflection, with synopses and critiques of the morning’s reading journaled by candle light. The diary shows, in a way that I had not appreciated before, how an individual’s reading and resulting contemplation can be gleaned from a source now mute.
As a librarian I fear that Parada’s call for humanistic inquiry as part of professional training for my craft falls on deaf ears. iStudies have carried the day in contemporary research and teaching, and they show no indication of receding anytime soon. However, as Parada so well illustrates, the history of the book, of reading, and reflection are very much alive in other fields, and this volume makes a case for how these themes can be explored and expanded using Latin American sources.
David Block
Benson Latin American Collection
University of Texas at Austin
