The editor's word in Buenos Aires literary magazines

from Babel (1988-1991) to La Gandhi argentina (1997-1998)

Abstract

The objective is to analyze the interventions of editors in the Argentine cultural press in relation to the changes in the publishing market at the end of the twentieth century. Between 1988 and 1998, editors wrote in literary magazines in regular sections for the same target audience of the books they launched into the market. Unlike earlier publications, when editors wrote for their peers, in the late 1980s editors became visible to the public. The editors' publications in Babel magazine and the interviews in La Gandhi Argentina were read from the perspective of history and cultural sociology. The editors in the act of taking the floor situated their practice in comparison with the recent past and marked the tension between the different economic logics of cultural goods. The figure of the editor appeared in the press as he lost space in editorial management and decisions were taken by the commercial and marketing area. In a country without publishing archives or national bibliography, the writings and interviews with publishers serve to reconstruct fragments of their work and the absent catalog, at least until the implementation of the ISBN.