This is a first book by a professor of Spanish who clearly has an interest in the cultural ramifications of the history of print and a love of archives. William Garrett Acree makes a convincing case for the importance of what he calls “everyday reading” in the Río de la Plata and suggests that it was not an accident that Argentina and Uru-guay have had the highest literacy rates in Latin America since the late nineteenth century. Acree defines everyday reading to include a wide variety of activities, from reading newspapers, being read to in pulperías, and seeing advertisements to using schoolbooks, stamps, and currency.
According to the author, there were four principal moments when everyday reading led to systemic cultural shifts in the Río de la Plata. The first was the introduction of a printing press into the region in 1780, resulting in what the author considers to...
