Letters and numbers. Spanish book production in the twentieth century through the statistical sources

Abstract

Long-term studies about the Spanish book publishing industry based on time series are scarce. It has been long considered that Spanish statistical sources about this industry are unreliable, so they pose problems when trying to quantify the evolution of the sector. Subsequently,available statistical sources have frequently been used only as a complement to the text. This article examines five of those sources and uses them to build a narrative around them for the Spanish book publishing sector in the twentieth century. Based on the results, this article establishes five stages in the Spanish book publishing sector for the last century and links those trends to the main developments in every period