The Margins of Publishing

Reflections on the Quindio Authors Library

Abstract

Publishing projects mobilize ideas and resources to create, preserve, and circulate knowledge, culture, and wisdom; they also involve diverse academic and cultural actors. The Biblioteca de Autores Quindianos (BAQ) represents a hybrid project, comprised of diverse university, independent, and institutional agents; due to its public ties, it has no commercial purpose. Between 2010 and 2025, 65 books were published, which encourages critical work for their understanding and dissemination. To contribute to this, in the context of publishing culture, books, and reading in the humanities in Colombia, we review some positions on publishing processes, the production, and circulation of theoretical and artistic creation that allow us to characterize the BAQ. We then present some theoretical perspectives to assess it in the context of Quindio criticism and literature, giving rise to some questions based on the understandings of writing, books, and publishing presented above. Finally, we identified the need to review some guidelines and work on the collection, in light of the changing environment, to address other readers and reading styles, since these are necessary conditions for the future viability of the BAQ project.