Diversificación del público lector en Bogotá (1910-1924).

Un análisis de las revistas ilustradas El Gráfico y Cromos*

 

Paula Andrea Marín Colorado[1]

Universidad Santo Tomás (Bogotá) -  Colombia

 

Reception: 19/08/2015

Evaluation: 25/04/2016

Approval: 16/05/2016

Research and Innovation article.

 

Resumen

 

El Gráfico (1910-1941) y Cromos (1916-actual) fueron dos revistas de gran reconocimiento en Colombia en las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Ambas tuvieron como objetivo la configuración (real e imaginaria) de un público lector amplio que consolidara una industria editorial, pero esta ampliación reveló las diferencias sociales entre los muchos que aspiraban a prácticas de consumo “modernas” y los pocos que, efectivamente, pudieron acceder a ellas. Asimismo, estas revistas señalaron la necesidad de ver la literatura como una empresa comercial; de allí que sus páginas sean importantes para entender el proceso de consolidación de un mercado literario en Colombia, pero también sus obstáculos.

 

Palabras clave: Historia de la lectura en Colombia; prensa colombiana del siglo XX; cuento colombiano; publicidad.

 

Diversification of the Public Reader in Bogotá (1910-1924). An Analysis of El Gráfico and Cromos Illustrated Magazines

Abstract

El Gráfico (1910-1941) and Cromos (1916-present day) were two widely recognized Colombian magazines of the first decades of the XX c. The objective of both of these publications was the (real and imaginary) configuration of a wide reading public that would consolidate the editorial industry; a possible reason for the inclusion of literature as a comercial Enterprise in these publications. This study will examine the configuration of the reader, as part of the editorial project of both magazines, and the reading (and consumer) practices evident in aspects such as advertising and the writing forms included, such as chronicles, short stories and literary criticism.  

Key words: history of reading in Colombia, Colombian press in the XX century, Colombian short story, advertising.

 

Diversification du public lecteur à Bogota (1910-1924). Une analyse des revues illustrées El Gráfico et Cromos

 

Résumé

 

El Gráfico (1910-1941) et Cromos (publiée depuis 1916) ont été deux revues d’une grande diffusion dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle. Toutes les deux ont eu pour but la constitution (réelle et imaginaire) d’un large public devant consolider une véritable industrie éditoriale. Cet objectif a conduit les revues à concevoir la littérature comme une entreprise commerciale. Dans cet article seront analysés l’institution du lecteur, certains aspects du projet éditorial des deux revues, ainsi que les pratiques de lecture et de consommation, repérables dans des aspects comme la publicité, les contenus des chroniques, les contes et les critiques littéraires.

 

Mots-clés: Histoire de la lecture en Colombie, presse colombienne du XXe siècle, conte colombien, publicité.

 

1.           Introduction

 

The second and third decades of the twentieth century in Colombia can be considered as the gradual closing of the nineteenth century and its unstable political landscape, marked by numerous civil wars, and the beginning of another, interwoven with powerful processes of modernization and the emphatic implementation of the capitalist model. In the specific case of Bogotá, these two decades mark the beginning of profound transformations in the organization of the city, synthesized in two processes: the emergence of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, and the displacement to the north and south of the higher and lower spheres of society, respectively; the city, then, began to expand, but also to highlight "a greater differentiation between the social groups[2]," which previously lived in the center. This differentiation, in spatial terms, was accompanied by a distinction in symbolic terms that further emphasized the economic distance between the various social groups. Such a distinction is increasingly discernible in consumer aspirations and practices; the products offered in the market reinforce the differentiation between consumer groups. The press and, above all, magazines, as cultural and commercial products, show in their materiality and in their contents, both aspects of this social distinction: the economic and the symbolic, and allow the review of the concurrent process of the diversification of the reading public of the time.

 

El Gráfico and Cromos were two illustrated weekly magazines (they came out on Saturdays) that began to be published in the second decade of the 20th century in Bogotá. At first glance, these are two magazines with many similarities, both in their contents and in their forms of presentation and, according to the self-advertising that appears in them, were the two magazines with the largest circulation in the country. However, in studying these publications, their differences begin to be evident, as well as to bring into question the affirmation of that "largest" circulation. The gradual manner in which the publicity appears in each of the magazines and some of the editorial notes indicates that the fact of being the most read serialized publications by Colombians was - at least in the beginning – more of a pretension than a reality; its support over a longer period was due more to the fact that the owners of both magazines had other incomes from their photography and printing shops and their trade office between Paris and Bogota (in the case of Cromos)[3].

 

 

Although the two journals share authors of literary texts, chroniclers and editorialists, presumably they are configured from their beginnings towards different public    readers[4]. On the one hand, El Gráfico will be aimed more at a middle class that was in formation, with limited consumer capacities, for readers who did not have a significant literate culture and who felt more comfortable reading national authors than foreigners. On the other hand, Cromos would address a more elite social class, with greater purchasing power (or who aspired to have it), to some readers who supposedly have a broad literary culture and who are familiar with foreign authors. These differences will be studied here from the analysis of mainly the following aspects: the advertising that appears in the magazines, the chronicles and the stories published in each one of its publications and the critical notes that appeared in them on theater, poetry and narrative, as well as the catalogues of bookstores that appear in these publications.

 

 

 

2.           "Real" and imagined readers: specialization and diversification

 

         

 

Although the phenomenon of the specialization of the reading public is not typical of the twentieth century, because in the nineteenth century, periodicals specializing in literature and aimed at the female audience appeared, in the first decades of the twentieth century this specialization was focused on the enlargement of the reading public and on the concomitant consolidation of publishing companies. However, it is not possible to determine precisely - for lack of quantitative data - the number of readers that both journals had nor their socio-economic typology; we lack data on the number of copies printed by issue and the full lists of subscribers. We know - from photographs in magazines - that they were sold in newsstands and in stores (also outside Bogota and even in Panama, in the case of Cromos), a fact that would confirm the intention to expand that reading public that before was concentrated in small literary circles or in small groups of subscribers.

 

 

We also know that while the circulation of El Gráfico remained until 1941, Cromos has survived to this day, being the longest running magazine in Colombia. This fact demonstrates the success of Cromos as an editorial company and this could have to do with the intentions of each of the magazines: El Gráfico can still be associated with an intellectual company (like the nineteenth-century periodicals) that began to make use of some of the more modern techniques of so-called informative journalism (graphic reports, news of the "social life" of the city, foreign curiosities, tabloids)[5]. Cromos, meanwhile, was considered from the first issue as a more commercial company (a greater presence of advertising, larger format and more pages, with more space for photographs, photo-engraving and illustrations); In there no articles on the history of Colombia were published, nor did its editorials raise the personal issues of the owner-directors of the magazine related to difficulties in getting subscribers, or their intellectual objectives, as they did in El Gráfico[6]. In both journals, most editorial notes focus on commenting on aspects of the country's political life, leaving the interior pages for chronicles (verbal and photographic) or notes of foreign and national cultural varieties, curiosities or aspects of daily city life; This decision to leave politics as a minimum section in publications and focus on the search for the "event" will be a remarkable difference in relation to the nineteenth-century press.

 

 

Cromos focuses on providing the reader with a magazine, both reliable (from the point of view of its symbolic capital), and attractive (from the point of view of its materiality - quality of paper, photo-engraving, the artistic cohesion achieved due to its illustrators). The editorial notes always deal with an aspect of the political, economic or social reality of the country, functioning as a "pen" of authority on the matter (ministers, politicians, such as, Guillermo Valencia and even the president himself, Jose Vicente Concha), a circumstance that gave the magazine seriousness and national commitment. The articles of literary criticism are signed by the most recognized scholars and writers of the country; and perhaps the most relevant item in this search for symbolic capital associated with the aspirations and imagination of its readers: Paris as a reference in literature and fashion, especially (in the first years of publication), following World War I, which, apparently, on this side of the world, was assumed to be a disjunction between pro-Germans and pro-French.

 

 

Specifically, Cromos was addressed, most of the time, to some "female readers". Beginning with issue 6, the back cover of the magazine began to publish a self-advertisement in which we read that Cromos is a "must read for ladies", "it is recommended reading for your wife and daughters" and "every issue is a book that must enhance the luxury of your library. " The advertisement is therefore addressed to the purchaser of the magazine: the "boss" - "provider" of the household, who must ensure that a publication suitable for the women "under his charge", that is, his wife and his daughters, is available. Cromos assured the eventual buyer that it was a safe investment, from the point of view of increasing family cultural capital, because in addition, the collection of the magazine would be organized in his library as if it were a book[7]. In several of the chronicles and in many of the published stories, the narrator-authors address a "female reader"; many of the illustrations of those same stories are designed for the reader who is conceived as someone who enjoys with her imagination the scenes described, with the characters and situations that, in most cases, refer to a love or family story. Also, since its first issue, Cromos began to publish a series of photographs of "ladies" from different cities of the country and in issue 106 (1918) published those of two “cute little readers" who had sent letters to the editors of the magazine, coming from Caldas (Antioquia) and Pamplona (Norte de Santander). in addition, the magazine established a section titled "Elegance", written by a "Parisian" who signed her articles from Paris and talked about aspects of women's fashion: "Elegance will have its readers on the agenda of what is 'fashionable', not of what had already been given to advertising in other magazines, but of the new creations from the most refined fashion houses[8].”

 

 

For its part, El Gráfico, established its "Page for the Ladies" starting with issue 34 (1911) and the section appeared intermittently up to issue 78 (1912), when it was announced that the author (Berta Rivarol) had committed to the magazine to write this page more consistently. El Gráfico does not present this preference for the "female readers," but for a more diversified, more general public. This is seen in the themes of the chronicles and the notes on varieties (just to mention a few: life on Mars or travel to Mars, occult practices, formulation of mathematical problems to be solved by readers, cases of cannibalism) which, unlike those we read in Cromos, are not completely framed in a literate culture, but rather a popular one.

 

The search for a more diverse reading public in El Gráfico is also seen in the published reviews on plays, which, in contrast to what Cromos presents, focus on telling the reader the whole plot of the play and it is only in the final paragraph that some comment on the performances or the musical part (in case of it being an operetta or musical comedy) is made, that is to say, there are no comments with literary or artistic references that can make the reader feel excluded. Also, the "illustrations" of the stories do not only target a female readership, since, for the most part, they are photographs of different places in Colombia (parks, bridges, rivers, cities) and rarely drawings referring to the content of the tales; many of them even appear without illustrations, a circumstance that rarely happens with the stories published in Cromos - and that may be due to a lack of sufficient capital to pay a permanent draftsman. While it is true that a large part of the readership were women rather than men, and traditionally among educated men, the owners of El Gráfico and Cromos were also aware that in Colombia only a minority could have access to newspapers[9]  and they had to be addressed to a female literate readership (more Cromos than El Gráfico), but also to those who, thanks to the slow progress in the process of the literacy and modernization of cities, began to be consumers of this type of publication (more El Gráfico than Cromos).

 

 

Cromos cost 10 cents, while El Gráfico cost 5 cents[10]. If these prices are compared, my initial assertion about the differentiation of the readership of the two magazines is corroborated, but also, the material differences of the two publications have to be taken into account, which equally make production costs vary and differentiate between those who could buy them. El Gráfico was considered to be the cheapest magazine in circulation throughout Colombia, a fact that would ratify the intention here: to reach, more and more, a wider audience; Cromos wanted to achieve two objectives: to be the periodical publication with the widest circulation and also to be respected by that small literate community, the first recipient of any printed text that was made in Colombia.

 

 

 

In spite of the lack of quantitative data that could corroborate these statements, it is necessary to refer to an editorial in El Gráfico (issue 398) written by the renowned poet, storyteller and critic Eduardo Castillo, in which he states: "Already the intelligent and educated editors of our two best magazines, El Gráfico and Cromos, have thought of taking that measure of literary prophylaxis[11]. " Castillo referred to the need to create a "censorship" committee of the literary publications that arrived at the addresses of these magazines, before being published. What I am interested to point out here is the mention of both magazines as the best in the country, a fact that shows that although Cromos and El Gráfico did not have as many buyers as their owners wanted, they did have enough to be recognized by many of the most consecrated chroniclers, writers and critics of the time and to be the publication goal of many aspirants to this recognition.

 

  The presence of advertising is also an index of the considerable circulation that these two magazines reached in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, because only a significant distribution could guarantee and maintain the interest of the different advertisers. At this point it is necessary to emphasize the growing influence that the relationship between merchants and owners of periodicals began to have, in the process of the industrialization of print circulation and in the professionalization of journalism[12]. Only from issue 52 of El Gráfico (1911), we began to see two consecutive pages full of advertising, that is to say, one year after the publication of its first issue. In the case of Cromos, advertisements (different from those of the companies Arboleda and Valencia, the first owners of this publication) begin to appear a year after publication, but much more slowly than in El Gráfico. At the beginning of the 1920s and with the change of the owners of Cromos (Luis Tamayo & Co.), the advertising increased considerably and, by 1924, it is clear that Cromos already had more advertisers than El Gráfico[13]. We can venture that the change of owners implied that the magazine had to support itself more, and because they no longer had another type of income, this circumstance implied that publicity had to have a greater presence in the pages[14].

 

Advertising thus contributed to this expansion of the reading public. On the one hand, in order to safeguard the interests of the merchants, the offer of advertisements led to the magazine being distributed in various places that had nothing to do with the traditional mechanisms of print circulation. On the other hand, the advertisements caused the magazine to be of interest to people who did not have anything to do with the traditional means of socializing literate culture, since the information they found there was not only aimed at an intellectual world, but also at entertainment, current events, and daily life. Cromos and El Gráfico helped to find solutions to the main obstacles to the sustainability of magazines in the first half of the twentieth century in Colombia: the difficulties of distribution and the few advertisements[15], and to link two areas that during the 19th century, tended to be separated: intellectual and daily life.

 

 

Clearly, the magazines are directed to an urban reader, whose consumption needs were related to the advent of a process of the modernization of Colombian cities and, specifically, Bogotá, which at that time had between 150,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, a figure that speaks of a city more similar to a town than a city, and that explains the persistence of nineteenth-century habits in the daily life of the Bogotanos[16]. In this respect, then, it is valid to ask several questions: Who really could buy the products that were advertised in the pages of the magazines? Did the readers really identify with the use of those products? Today, when we look at the pages of the most recent issue of Cromos, we realize that literature has disappeared from its pages to accommodate information, especially about the "stars" of television and film. This is normal, considering that the celebrities of the first decades of the twentieth century were the writers (hence the repeated reports and interviews on contemporary national and foreign authors). What connects the characters of television and film with writers? Both groups are converted by the media into life models.

 

Advertising, "social" news, reports and stories endow readers with models of life and, more precisely, consumer aspirations. Today, looking through the pages of "celebrity" magazines is to find advertisements for a series of products that, for the most part, are not within reach of the economic means or are not part of the lists of daily consumption of a great percentage of the common readers of those publications. However, that does not imply that such magazines are only marketed to a consumer for whom those products are affordable. The same happens with the El Gráfico and with Cromos; although the products promoted in their pages were not available to most Colombians - and, specifically, the citizens of Bogota - this does not mean that they felt excluded from their pages. These two magazines worked, then, more than as effective examples of the way of life of Bogotanos, as a way to strengthen their consumption aspirations, their models of life. As López Uribe's research demonstrates, the vast majority of Bogotanos were not able to access many of the practices and inputs associated with modernization in the first half of the twentieth century because of a literal lack of economic means that increased the gap between social groups[17]. The role played by these journals was to build an identification with that process of modernization and to link it to the belief system of both the elites and the emerging middle classes.

 

 

I venture that El Gráfico was more aware of this difference between the aspirations and the realities of consumption of its readers, because in this publication there is a closer proximity between this emerging reading public and their daily practices that could contribute to the fact that it really reached a broad or at least broader and more diverse audience than in previous decades. However, I must make three caveats: first, bear in mind that, if there were few who could buy the magazines, the actual readership of the time was made up less by the nascent middle classes and more by the elites, for whom, indeed, the advertisements in Cromos did in fact represent their possibilities of consumption. The second, that it is difficult to take into account those who, although they were not buyers of the magazines, were their readers, among whom, perhaps, there could be workers and day laborers, and for whom El Gráfico was still a little closer as an interlocutor that Cromos. The third, that, perhaps, the advertisers preferred Cromos to El Gráfico and that here is the difference between the number of announcements and their origin.

 

In spite of the above, the marked contrast between the type of products that appear in each of the magazines should not be taken as an indication of the diversification of the reading public of the time. In El Gráfico there are ads for coffee, chocolate, insurance, bakeries, photography workshops, cigarettes, sewing machines, pianos, beer, toothpastes, furniture, locks, restaurants, false braids, women’s face creams, corsets, treatments for less bothersome pregnancies and for syphilis, gift stores for ladies and gentlemen, lawyers, pool halls, pens and invigorating tonics, just to mention the most representative. In Cromos there were ads for sanitary equipment, treatments for breast development, typewriters, oil lamps, toothpaste, pens, recorders, medicines for "impotence and genital weakness," razors, medicines for slimming and for fattening, anti-wrinkle treatments, clothing and accessories imported directly from Paris, invigorating tonics, dietary stimulant supplements, lice treatments, hangover and headache pills, pistols, cars, personal cameras and watches, just to mention the most common.

 

 

 

The advertisements in El Gráfico represent more of the practical needs of living in a city or of adapting a house to live in, consumer practices or products more for daily use than sporadic. For their part, those in Cromos make more reference to luxury products, both domestic and personal. Thus, among the most necessary or habitual products, and the most luxurious, the readers of these two magazines were building their aspirations, their belief system regarding capitalism and, in general, the modernization practices of the city they inhabited, as well as their models for being a woman and being a man in that new society that was emerging, although languidly[18]. In this sense, El Gráfico and Cromos are translated into sources that allow us to understand a complex and rich intersection of historical, cultural, social, aesthetic, economic and political processes. This intersection allows us to understand, for example and for the purposes of this text, that literature cannot be conceived outside the effective reading practices at a given time and that, in these decades, periodicals played a fundamental role in the formation of a model of a literature reader. I will refer to this below.

 

 

3.   Readings: the short story and literature as entertainment

         

The short story was present in most of the literary supplements and cultural magazines of the first half of the twentieth century. If, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the serial novel was a favorite in periodicals and the picture of customs figured as one of the most assertive genres of writers[19], in the first half of the twentieth century, the short story will be featured in periodical publications that reserved a predominant place for literary creation (and almost all so-called cultural magazines did so). The ridiculous number of story books published in the first decades of the twentieth century, compared to other literary genres[20], refer us to the state of the intellectual field of the time: the short story was not yet a literary genre legitimized by literary authorities, but a writing exercise that prepared one for the publication of a novel, or a text that was edited, exclusively, to be published in the magazines, at the request of their directors. If poetry was featured in magazines because of its size and format, as well as its symbolic capital (it was the most respected literary genre, the “purest”), the story is conceived, above all, to entertain, to get the attention of the readers and their "loyalty" to the publication.

 

As Castro-Gómez puts it, advertising, fashion and entertainment activities generated a "symbolic identification with a capitalist lifestyle for which material conditions[21] did not exist yet", in Bogotá in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, in relation to entertainment, there was an "absence of a leisure economy[22]"; leisure activities were concentrated on the walks around Bogota, its parks, sports events (including boxing and horse racing), cockfights, bullfights, conferences, film and theater. Theatrical performances (including musical comedy and zarzuela). Most of these events were limited to one season and, after their completion, the citizens of Bogota complained again about how little fun the city offered.

 

The process of modernization and the consolidation of capitalism entail, on the one hand, a liberation from manual tasks that leave more and more time for leisure, rest and fun, and, on the other, a surplus in the economic income that is directed towards new forms of consumption. Although the material basis for this process, at this time, was more imagined than real, the entertainment functioned as a complementary discourse to that new modern subjectivity in formation: the human being needed rest to resume his daily activities in an efficient way and he had to find the means to procure it.

 

Reading and conferences were the events that had greater symbolic prestige, because they were associated with the literary field and, implicitly, as activities whose contents could be more controlled (from a moral point of view) than those presented by the cinema and theater. In this sense, we understand the need for illustrated magazines such as Cromos and El Gráfico to appear on the scene of the printed Bogota world; both filled a void that aimed at two objectives: to supply a large part of the needs of "healthy" entertainment of Bogota, with topical information, and moral and aesthetically correct contents that contributed to increasing the prestige of the country. If it is unusual today to find texts of literary creation in cultural magazines, in Cromos and El Gráfico, poems and stories occupy a central place. The intellectuals of the time stressed that the editors of magazines published "quality" texts; the owners of the publications wanted, above all, for these texts to obtain the loyalty of the readers. This intention is more noticeable in Cromos than in El Gráfico, because while most of the stories in the latter are constructed from abstract ideas, reflections and descriptions of states of mind, thoughts or landscapes, in Cromos, stories will usually have a compositional mechanism based on actions, in the follow-up of a story narrated over time.

 

 

The section of El Gráfico dedicated to stories was titled "National Tales"; in Cromos, "The Thousand and One Stories of Cromos". As its title indicates, El Gráfico favored national writers over foreigners, whereas, since the inception of Cromos and during its first years of circulation (the period corresponding to World War I), it was the French writers who were featured as authors of the published stories[23]. The reason seems to be obvious, but not so much if we also see it as a positioning strategy in the intellectual field of that moment. If El Gráfico was already publishing national stories, Cromos would mark a difference between the readership with foreign stories. There would be two other reasons for this choice: first, to select stories that would create an emotional identification between the reader and the war that captivated the attention of the whole world; second, to achieve the reader’s loyalty through the exhibition of a culture that had a lot of acceptance within the elites and the intellectual field of the time: the French[24].

 

 

Gustavo Bedoya Sánchez has shown that in several Colombian magazines over centuries, Paris is an unavoidable reference and French is the most translated language[25]. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, France had become a cultural reference point for Colombia, not only within the political sphere, but also socially and artistically (especially literary). Cromos’ choice did not mean, therefore, the introduction of an unknown element into Colombian intellectual life, but it was inserted in this chain of cultural transfers between French and Colombian authors. France also represented a politically correct decision, within the ideological struggle unleashed in the context of World War I. Perhaps this made the scale incline towards a completely positive assessment of the French. If, until the first decade of the 20th century, French culture was a fluctuating reference between what was harmful and what was considered an example to follow, that is, between traditionalism and cosmopolitanism[26], in El Gráfico and Cromos, anything that was French was not the target of criticism. This is confirmed in the publication of the list of "French books" available in the Colombian Bookshop Camacho Roldán and Tamayo, in several of the issues of the magazine corresponding to 1924[27].

 

 

          The stories published in Cromos after 1916 differ from those published by El Gráfico in the previous five years because of the ability of the former to create and maintain a narrative tension. Either because of the type of situations that the French authors were experiencing or because of the conception that the national writers had about the story (closer to the social mores and to the modernist tale), the literary forms of both are enormously different and their reading achieves different effects; as do the chronicles. According to Alain Vaillant's research, the press created new literary forms and a new type of relationship between the reader and print, in this case, between the reader and literature[28]. If the writing was argumentative, of "oratory abundance," the press makes it, little by little, move to a more narrative and shorter mode[29]; in the same way, the press makes the relationship with the reader become closer and, above all, more every-day, through the introduction of a conversational writing style[30]. These narrative and conversational modes are more visible in the Cromos stories than in the El Gráfico stories and, of course, are better represented in the chronicles (more in Cromos than in El Gráfico). In this sense, I can argue that the modernization of the story in Colombia has a close relationship with its recurrent mode of publication until the mid-20th century (the press), with a journalistic genre (chronicle) and contact with a foreign cultural model[31].

 

 

On the other hand, it can also be said that the permanence of the genre in the pages of periodicals is associated with the popularity of the theater as a favorite entertainment activity for citizens, who could buy season tickets, and the relationship that the short story form maintained with its more classic versions. The above is showcased in two of the characteristics presented by the magazines' stories: dialogues as a prevailing form and the narrative resource in which a character refers to a known story whose main character is someone else. Thus, many of the stories are narrated exclusively from the dialogues between their protagonists, with just a few minimal comments included by the narrator, about the place or the moment in which the dialogues occur or an explanation of the circumstances of the encounter between the characters. A great number of stories use the technique of two or more people whose conversation refers to the story of someone who is not present, witnessed or simply heard at some point; this feature recalls the meetings of the storytellers of folk tales or the "journeys" that make up works like El Decamerón. Both narrative techniques, then, connect the stories’ authors’ literary forms and a large number of readers. This relationship of "common property" -although with normal grade differences for writers and audiences[32]-also contributed to an easier acceptance of stories by readers and, in general, to better communication between magazines and their readership.

 

 

The annotations that appear next to the title, or the author's name, in the stories in Cromos ("Translation of Cromos," "reproduction prohibited," "version of Cromos," "written especially for Cromos") lead one to think of a more commercial intentionality than an aesthetic one, on the part of the owners of the magazine. On the one hand, these annotations ensure intellectual property rights over stories and, above all, the exclusivity of the publication, but, on the other hand, suggest a drafting "protocol" for authors; Cromos did not publish any available story, but requested them, according to the needs of the magazine (and the reading public). At the beginning of the 1920s, we see that the story section changes to “Our Own Tales" and "Cromos’ Tale." Both titles signify the same thing: the exclusivity of the magazine, the ownership of the stories and the control over what was published so that it was to the taste of its readers. This type of annotation does not appear in El Gráfico, a fact that returns us to my initial statement about the intentions of this magazine to be more an intellectual than a commercial project.

 

At this point, we must return to the relationship of magazines with their female readers. If I have already mentioned the importance of literature, and especially stories, as an object of entertainment, I must also mention, again, the importance of writers (and artists) as celebrities of the moment. In both El Gráfico and Cromos we can read numerous interviews with Colombian writers and critics, accompanied by photographs that allowed the reader to delve into the daily life and privacy of those names stamped on the copies that came into their hands. The capital of the country was, for both women and men, the city where the most important intellectuals of the country got together, where they could be found walking along one of the streets of the center, in some of the cafes or presiding over one of the many conferences that were offered. The reader, therefore, sought a closeness with writers and magazines provided it. The press and photography contributed to creating an image of the author and a series of symbols associated with it, more than in the nineteenth century, that transformed the profile of the scholar to that of a public figure and the private room to the street.

 

Two chronicles published in Cromos allow us to recognize the dimension of this new image of the writer. Tic-Tac (pseudonym of Carlos Villafañe) and Dr. Mirabel refer to the "epidemic" of autograph albums, collected by a large number of "ladies" of the capital. These albums were entrusted to the men close to their female owners so that, if in case of daily work or socializing activities, they met with a writer, they would pass the album for him to autograph and write a phrase, verse or, if they were lucky, even a complete poem. Similarly, the men gave the albums to the writers to write some words addressed to the owner, with the aim of ingratiating himself to her and obtaining a "yes" to the proposal of a relationship. Tic-Tac talks about five or ten albums he receives per week to print his autograph[33]; Dr. Mirabel talks about boyfriends, relatives and friends who carry "thousands[34]" of albums to and fro. Exaggeration or not, these testimonies of two of the most recognized chroniclers of the time confirm the importance of writers as characters-celebrities who helped to achieve the loyalty of the periodical reader and, at the same time, the appearance of the signatures of the writers in its pages contributed to affirm its fame and the preponderant place that they had in the literary life of the time.

 

The writer was then (much more than at present) a model of life, both for men who saw in him an example of a public figure or who had his own aspirations to be a writer, as for the women who flocked to him as a model of masculinity that, on many occasions, embodied their existential or romantic aspirations, in the sense of representing a life out of the routine of their everyday life. In this regard, two stories published in El Gráfico are illuminating. In “Ahora” (Now) a story is told of a woman who after 30 years of marriage reflects on having a husband who did not live up to her expectations; while she wanted dances, trips and adventures, her husband, from the first party they attended together, did not invite her to dance to any songs and so she had to sit all night at his side[35]. In “Cuento Ligero” (A Lighthearted Tale), a story is told of a 20-year-old girl who collects autographs from writers. One of them falls in love with her, but she only wants to see him write and for him to sign her autograph album[36]. Both stories, therefore, exhibit the image of the woman as one who depends on men, either from the point of view of the couple or the intellectual aspect, because it is this what gives meaning to her life.

 

If there were few modes of entertainment available to men, they were even more restricted to women, given the social and moral pressure on them:

 

 

Where a woman does not cycle, does not climb mountains, does not ride a

      horse, does not drive a car, does not fence, does not swim, does not play 

      baseball, does not pilot airplanes, or aspire to advanced education, does

       not go to clinics, neither composes music nor paints pictures, neither

      writes books nor dictates lectures, and does not even know Congressional

      platforms, her biggest responsibility is to maintain the sacred fire

      of being beautiful, chic, having a pleasant manner and an amusing way

      about her[37].

 

 

In this sense, reading, as an educational and entertainment practice that could be controlled within the private sphere of the home, acquired a fundamental role in the daily life of women - those who had the time and opportunity to read - in the way they shaped themselves as subjects and imagined their relationship with men and the outside world[38]. Hence their favorite topic of reading and conversation was love, relationships and marriage, for it was the nearest and most accurate destiny they saw for their lives; this is seen in the themes of the stories published in the magazines, but also in the symbols of everyday life that appear in them. In two volumes of El Gráfico there is a section of telegraphic announcements (Issues 81 and 82, 1912); half of them are commercial and the other personal. The latter revolve around sentimental relationships between men and women who prefer to use this channel of communication, rather than traditional letters - not to mention the telephone, which was still a strange element for most Bogota households-:

 

 

 

            Your disposition is (sic) unbearable. Why do you not let yourself be seen? Hopeless!!

          Tomorrow we will visit (sic) where J is... Go without fail at 3. We need to talk.

          They keep bothering me at home. I was in the park on Sunday, but I did not

           see you. What happened?

          You are unfair to me and you hurt me a lot. It is imperative that we meet.

  Answer me here.

 

We do not know why the section disappeared, but what we can know is that the announcements were sent by men and women alike, a circumstance that shows that, although the former had more activities than the latter, the main focus of their lives was also to find a suitable mate, according to the family model that prevailed at the time. A society, therefore, organized for women and men engaged or married, not for singles, is what the pages of the two magazines show, and, therefore, a society in which sentimental affairs occupied much of their time, in the absence of greater diversity in areas of socialization and other entertainment activities.

         

These situations explained in the previous paragraphs lead to an understanding of the way in which the pages of Cromos and El Gráfico continued to reinforce a traditional image of women who, in the midst of the advances of capitalism and the modernization of their city, had to adapt to new imperatives, but without sacrificing their femininity. New beauty products and fashion advances allowed them to meet the new modern demands and, at the same time, "increase their power of seduction[39]." Chosen by the directors of El Gráfico and Cromos as the first target audience, women were also disparaged by many of the most important critics and writers of the time. An article by Eduardo Castillo on the visit of the famous writer José María Vargas Vila to Colombia reveals this negative assessment of women readers who, for the most part, were called "sentimental maids[40]," for their preference for the "popular" novels that made them cry easily. Castillo underestimated (and concealed) the undeniable literary and popular phenomenon represented by the works of Vargas Vila, for it was not only domestic servants who read the writer's books, but rather a considerable proportion of the reading population in the Spanish-American world.

 

 

 

Perhaps Castillo was not a regular reader of the Cromos tales or deliberately overlooked that many of these stories were also aimed at making tears flow easily.  Or perhaps he could not yet understand the new role of periodicals, which not only included aesthetic or scholarly purposes, but also commercial-entertainment, since they were no longer restricted to a literate subscriber. In spite of this, it is clear that these same stories were able to show situations that were not shown by other means, or that, despite their undeniable daily existence, it was not so easy to socialize in public, because of ideas of "immorality" or social criticism. Themes such as infidelity (male and female), cocaine and opium use, open and direct female flirtation, sexual violations against women, social injustices, among others, were some of the narrative motifs in the Cromos tales. Although both this magazine and El Gráfico ratified a traditional feminine image, the fact that Cromos favored the publication of foreign authors and references to the European world introduced the possibility of thinking and talking about issues that allowed a certain secularization of female readings.

 

 

 

Conclusions

         

 

The gradual popularization of photography, photo-engraving and, in general, modern illustration techniques, as well as the modernization of Bogota during the first decades of the 20th century (the arrival of cinema, the proliferation of advertising and new objects of consumption, among others), influenced both periodicals and reading practices to transform and produce diversification of writing and reading styles. In this way, "the aristocratic literate city became vulgar and commonplace, not without regret[41]." Although the press and writers claimed that there were not so many changes, journals such as El Gráfico and Cromos show that there were, and that, in the midst of a society apparently as languorous as Bogota at the beginning of the century, the conception of culture began to gradually diversify, thanks to the strategies used by both magazines to retain their readers and advertisers, while safeguarding the literary prestige of the traditional Colombian press, thanks to the good name of its editors.

 

With a more commercially oriented proposal, Cromos has managed to keep circulating for almost one hundred years in the country.  El Gráfico disappeared in 1941 and it became one of the longest-running magazines in Colombia; it followed the objectives of a more intellectual company, although committed to the enlargement of the small reading circle of the homologous, contemporary and previous publications. For both magazines, literature was an essential component of the content of their pages and, specifically, the story served their purposes: to entertain and, in this way, to keep the reader; to assert the models of subjectivity that they wanted to impose at the time; and serve as a showcase to display the names of recognized writers or prestigious cultural references. The analysis of the stories in both magazines shows that the development of this genre in Colombia was due to popular literary forms shared as a cultural repertoire by writers and the public, the relationship with the press (as a format and as a mode of expression), and with foreign models. These relationships and mixtures also influenced a new model of a literary reader to be unfolded throughout the first half of the twentieth century: he who read because he had been taught that it contributed to his literary and moral and aesthetic development began to accept (without blame or without judgments) entertainment as part of reading, as well as his daily experience, his tastes and his feelings.

 

 

The "aesthetization" of everyday life (the beautiful, the healthy, the comfortable) was an extensive characteristic of Cromos in both its fashion section (with large photographs exhibiting the latest models of Parisian fashion), and advertising (with advertisements for products more related to luxury than practicality), entertainment (with large photographs to illustrate the social chronicle: dances, teas, holidays, lunches, meals and elite marriages) and literature (drawings of the stories and illustrations of the covers made by two of the best painters in the country: Zerda and Leudo). This aesthetic dimension is not addressed to the intellect, but to the "passion and desire" of the readers (and especially to the female readers) and made Cromos’ commercial intention more effective, protecting, in turn, its prestige among literate subscribers, who saw it as a ratification of its quality. Although these characteristics could be the result of the greater economic resources that the magazine had, compared to El Gráfico, they cannot be ignored in this analysis. Cromos spoke more to those who shared and had more resources to realize (in terms of consumption) a capitalist ideal of material and "spiritual" progress. El Gráfico spoke in terms more in line with the reality of the capital on this same ideal and, in this way, managed to diversify the reading public more in the first decades of the 20th century.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Agudelo, Ana María. “Hacia una historia del cuento colombiano”. Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica, núms. 81-82 (2015). En prensa.

 

Bedoya Sánchez, Gustavo. “Destino París. El sistema literario francés en la prensa literaria colombiana. El caso de Revista Gris (1892-1896), Revista Contemporánea (1904-1905) y Trofeos (1906-1908)”. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana [en línea], vol. 43 (2014): 63-84, disponible en: http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/rev_ALHI.2014.v43.47113 (julio de 2015).

 

Castillo, Eduardo. “Nuestro menosprecio por los poetas”. El Gráfico, núm. 398 (1918): 377-378.

 

Castillo, Eduardo.  “Vargas Vila en Bogotá”. Cromos, núm. 401 (1924): 276.

 

Castro-Gómez, Santiago. Tejidos oníricos. Movilidad, capitalismo y biopolítica en Bogotá (1910-1930). Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009.

 

Condesa d’Avigné. “Mujer y madre”. Cromos, núm. 19 (1916): s.d.

 

Chaverra, Gaspar. “Ahora”. El Gráfico, núm. 32 (1911): s.d.

 

El Dr. Mirabel. “Epidemias chicas”. Cromos, núm. 37 (1916): 196.

 

Francette. “Elegancias”. Cromos, núm. 1 (1916): 15-16.

 

Loaiza Cano, Gilberto. Poder letrado. Ensayos sobre historia intelectual de Colombia. Siglos XIX y XX. Cali: Programa Editorial-Universidad del Valle, 2014.

 

López Uribe, María del Pilar. Salarios, vida cotidiana y condiciones de vida en Bogotá durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2011.

 

[Los Redactores]. “La prensa en los Estados Unidos”. El Gráfico, núm. 32 (1911a): s.d.

 

[Los Redactores]. “La cultura y la moda”. El Gráfico, núm. 34 (1911b): s.d.

 

[Los Redactores]. “Leer entre la cama”. El Gráfico, núm. 58 (1911c): s.d.

 

Pachón Padilla, Eduardo. “El cuento: historia y análisis”. En Manual de literatura colombiana, t. 2. Bogotá: Procultura-Planeta, 1988.

 

Ramos Urdaneta, Alfredo. “Cuento ligero”. El Gráfico, núm. 65 (1911): s.d.

 

Tic-Tac. “Albuminuria”. Cromos, núm. 28 (1916): 44.

 

Vaillant, Alain. “Poética de la escritura periódica: cuestiones de método y de historia literaria”. Secuencia. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales [en línea], núm. 62 (2005a): 195-206, disponible en: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=319136829009 (julio de 2015).

 

Vaillant, Alain.  “El romanticismo y el triunfo de lo impreso”. Secuencia. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales [en línea], núm. 62 (2005b): 184-194, disponible en: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=319136829008 (julio de 2015).

 

Vallejo Mejía, Maryluz. A plomo herido. Una crónica del periodismo en Colombia (1880-1980). Bogotá: Planeta, 2006.

 

Williams, Raymond. Marxismo y literatura, Guillermo David, trad. Buenos Aires: Las Cuarenta, [1977] 2009.

 

 


* This article is derived from the research project in Spanish: "El cuento colombiano en las revistas literarias colombianas (1900-1950). Estudio histórico y hemerográfico" (The Colombian short story in Colombian literary journals (1900-1950). Historical and hemerographic study”) in the framework of the Sustainability Strategy for research groups CODI 2016-2017 (Universidad de Antioquia). 

[1] Professor researcher from the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the Universidad Santo Tomás (Bogotá). Doctor in Literature (Universidad de Antioquia). Member of the research group: Colombia: Tradiciones de la Palabra [Colombia- Word traditions] (Universidad de Antioquia). She had been granted scholarships by the Ministry of Culture (National Stimulus Program, 2015), by Colciencias (Program of National Doctorates, 2012) and Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Andrés Bello Seminar, 2005). Her lines of research are the history of literature and the history of edition and reading in Colombia. She is the author of the folowing books in Spanish:  Acercamiento a la novela colombiana de los setenta: Los parientes de Ester de Luis Fayad y Juegos de mentes de Carlos Perozzo. Aproximación sociocrítica (Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2010) y De la abyección a la revuelta: La nueva novela colombiana de Evelio Rosero, Tomás González y Antonio Ungar (Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2013). Email address: paulanmc@hotmail.com

[2] María del Pilar López Uribe, Salarios, vida cotidiana y condiciones de vida en Bogotá (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2011), 41,

[3] Maryluz Vallejo demonstrates that this kind of statement about the "wide" circulation of periodicals was a repetitive practice in magazines and newspapers of the time (see Maryluz Vallejo Mejía, A Plomo Herido. Una crónica del periodismo en Colombia (1880-1980) (Bogotá: Planeta, 2006), 41), which must be taken, then, as an advertising strategy.

[4] Alberto Sánchez and Abrahán Cortés were the owners-editors of El Gráfico. Dr. Mirabel, pseudonym of Alberto Sánchez, also published his chronicles in Cromos. This shows the ties established in journalism at the time, far from a criteria of exclusive or explicit competition, as it will be the case years later.

 

[5] These "beginnings" of information journalism are also perceived in the fact that the judicial reports on robberies or murders present continuous and explicit value judgments; they even associate the journalistic enterprise with a more pedagogical and moral objective rather than purely informative, as it would be decades later, when the character of impartiality in periodicals was more emphatically imposed.

[6] Perhaps also because they did not have these difficulties, because they had more income from their parallel companies.

 

[7] From there Cromos presents a continuous page numeration by issue, meaning for each year of the magazine, starting with the first issue.  Not so with El Gráfico, which did not use page numbers until 1914.

[8] Francette, “Elegancias”, Cromos, issue 1 (1916): 15. As with the great majority of magazines and publications of the time, the image of women can be drawn from the previously mentioned elements and from those that will be discussed in the second section of this text, which can be summarized in the following quote: “ ‘Incomplete’ describes the life of the woman who takes her selfishness to the extreme of not wanting to be a mother” (Condesa d’Avigné, “Woman and mother”, Cromos, issue 19 (1916): n.d.).

[9] Ver Maryluz Vallejo, A plomo herido, 25.

[10] According to María del Pilar López Uribe, for the same period, a bottle of beer cost 13 cents and a cup of chicha cost 4 (Salarios, vida cotidiana y condiciones de vida in Bogotá, 62).

[11] “Nuestro menosprecio por los poetas”, El Gráfico, no. 398 (1918): 378.

[12] With regard to this last process, in issue 32 of El Gráfico we read an article entitled "The Press in the United States," which emphasizes the advantages of having more advertisements in periodicals, in order to pay the editors "in a splendid way" ([ The Editors], "The Press in the United States," El Gráfico, vol. 32 (1911a): nd) and have a greater number of press personnel.

[13] During the same period, the magazine went from a format of two to three columns, a situation that gives the reader the perception of a faster, more agile reading process, in line with the layout of a reader adjusted to the new "Modern” times and the most commercial intentions of the magazine: to offer" quality "texts in a format that is comfortable for the reading public.

[14] These pages are of a different quality, because it is a newsprint; Some advertisements are reserved to appear on the inside of the front and back cover of the magazine, maintaining the original quality of the paper.

[15] Maryluz Vallejo, A plomo herido, 41.

[16] For example, water supply and sewage services had not been extended to all citizens and this generated many hygiene and health problems in the city. María del Pilar López Uribe speaks of a water supply system for every 17 inhabitants (see Salarios, vida cotidiana y condiciones de vida en Bogotá, 31).

 

[17] Salarios, vida cotidiana y condiciones de vida en Bogotá, 10, 210.

[18] Santiago Castro-Gómez's research on Cromos shows that advertisements of beauty, health and fashion products aimed at modeling a subjectivity according to the image of modern women and men, that is, people that could meet the expectations of the active life of industrial capitalism (see Tejidos Oníricos. Movilidad, capitalismo y biopolítica en Bogotá (1910 – 1930) (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009), 197).

[19] Eduardo Pachón Padilla, “El cuento: historia y análisis”, in Manual de literatura colombiana (Bogotá: Procultura-Planeta, 1988), 525.

[20] Ana María Agudelo, “Hacia una historia del cuento colombiano”, Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica, issues 81-82 (2015).

[21] Santiago Castro-Gómez, Tejidos oníricos, 20.

[22] Santiago Castro-Gómez, Tejidos oníricos, 230.

[23] During the first year of publication, the French writers who had more than one story published were: JH Rosny (these brothers are Belgian but they worked in Paris), Michel Provins (four stories), Henry Lavedan, Maurice Leblanc, Francis de Miomandre and Fréderic Boutet. The exceptions to this "invasion" of French authors were short stories published by six Spanish authors (Ricardo León, Condesa de Pardo Bazán, Jacinto Benavente, Juan Arzadun, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Vicente Salaveri), six national authors (Dimitri Ivanovitch- pseudonym-, Eduardo Castillo, Manuel Laverde Liévano, Miguel Santiago Valencia - owner of Cromos -, Luis Tablanca and Alberto Sánchez - Dr. Mirabel) and two from Brazil (Machado de Assis) and Portugal (Álvaro Sodré). Only two women are featured as storytellers this year: a Costa Rican woman (Carmen Lyra) and a Colombian woman (Ernestina Molina).

[24] However, it should not be forgotten that the choice of publishing foreign authors could also be contingent on the economic resources with which each publication counted; while paying translators was possible for Cromos, maybe it was not so much for El Gráfico.

[25] “Destino París. El sistema literario francés en la prensa literaria colombiana. El caso de Revista Gris (1892-1896), Revista Contemporánea (1904-1905) y Trofeos (1906-1908)”, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, vol. 43 (2014): 70.

[26] Gustavo Bedoya, “Destino París. El sistema literario francés en la prensa literaria colombiana”, 78.

[27] After the end of World War I, the percentage of Colombian authors increases and by the early 1920s the situation has been reversed: there will be more Colombian stories than foreign ones. This will also be due to the change of owners of the magazine and to the intention of Cromos to publish exclusive stories, as I will show in the following paragraphs. But even in this new situation, references to European culture and, above all, to French culture, will not disappear from the stories.

[28] Alain Vaillant, “Poética de la escritura periódica: cuestiones de método y de historia literaria”, Secuencia. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, no. 62 (2005a): 206.

[29] Alain Vaillant, “Poética de la escritura periódica”, 197; Alain Vaillant, “El romanticismo y el triunfo de lo impreso”, Secuencia. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, no. 62 (2005b): 185. This demand for brevity is visible, for instance, in the short-story contest proposed by El Gráfico in its 8th issue (1910). In the announcement, it is specified that the length of the texts cannot be more than one and a half pages. This would suggest that there is a direct relation between the space destined to stories in the press and the characteristics of their length during the first half of the 20th century in Colombia. However, this affirmation should be contrasted with other publications within a longer period of time.

[30] Alain Vaillant, “Poética de la escritura periódica”, 198.

[31] It would also be necessary to mention the importance of the publication of Panida (1915) in Medellín and Voces (1917) in Barranquilla at this time. Gilberto Loaiza Cano has pointed out very well the contribution of these two publications to what could be called an avant-garde movement in Colombia (see Poder letrado (Cali: Editorial Program -Universidad del Valle, 2014), 225). In this way, it could be affirmed that both the more commercialized and the avant-garde press equally influenced the process of the modernization of the Colombian story.

[32] Raymond Williams, Marxismo y literatura (Buenos Aires: Las Cuarenta, 2009), 251.

[33] “Albuminuria”, Cromos, no. 28 (1916): 44.

[34] “Epidemias chicas”, Cromos, no. 37 (1916): 196.

[35] Gaspar Chaverra, “Ahora”, El Gráfico, no. 32 (1911): s.d.

[36] Alfredo Ramos, “Cuento ligero”, El Gráfico, no. 65 (1911): s.d.

[37] [The copywriters], “La cultura y la moda”, El Gráfico, no. 34 (1911b): s.d.

[38] In the magazines, they show images of women reading or writing, always confined to this domestic atmosphere, although not in the bedroom, but rather the study and the living room, a situation that confirms the control exercised over women's reading and writing. In this sense, it is interesting to note that which appears in volume 58 (1911c) of El Gráfico, entitled "Reading in Bed", which states that, despite what has been said otherwise, it has been proven that reading before falling asleep is a beneficial practice. At the end of the article (no author given), the following words appear: “Do what you like and you will be right" ([The Editors]: nd), a statement that opens the possibility of perceiving some liberation of those reading practices, outside the supervision of family or men.

 

[39] Santiago Castro-Gómez, Tejidos oníricos, 223.

[40] “Vargas Vila en Bogotá”, Cromos, no. 401 (1924): 276.

[41] Gilberto Loaiza Cano, Poder letrado, 282.