ABSTRACT
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, in Brazil, the State still had a monopoly over the use of the printing press, and private companies were not allowed to set up a typography of their own. Two movements which, in Europe, lasted for over a century can be regarded as taking place simultaneously in Brazil, where it was necessary to adapt a traditionally illiterate culture to the world of the printing press, as well as to take action in favour of the professionalization of writers. Accordingly, it is not surprising that in the nineteenth century different ways of making the manufacture of books economically viable coexisted. In an indirect way, it determined a degree of the professionalization, or at least of remuneration, of those who set out the text, an essential part of creating the physical book.
