We never want to get rid of books

A recent study carried out by Wallapop, a digital platform for selling second-hand items, concluded that books are the object that the Portuguese accumulate most at home and are most reluctant to throw away. This is a good starting point for a conversation with José Bártolo and Jorge Silva, the curators of the exhibition Para Ser Eterno Basta Ser Um Livro - Editorial e Design do livro em Portugal no século XX, on show at Casa do Design in Matosinhos from 4 May to 27 October.

"Books provide comfort. Having books at home gives us a comfortable back"; says Jorge Silva, himself an avid book collector. "They also have a symbolic dimension. Bought, given or inherited, books decorate our home and that's why we don't want to get rid of them. In this symbolic dimension we establish a slightly fetishistic relationship, which ends up being a disturbance", explains the graphic design specialist.

For José Bártolo, Casa do Design's senior curator, "books work in the same way for those in the research field, because they always bring cultural identity". "Books have documentary value, but they also have narrative value, because they tell stories. And there's also an artistic value, in terms of illustration and graphic arts. It's therefore an object to be read, but also to be seen", points out the ESAD professor and researcher.

The exhibition at Casa do Design shows a lot of this passion that the Portuguese have for books from a wide variety of perspectives, but the way it is organised aims to highlight the importance of book publishing in the 20th century. "We're both book collectors and here we're presenting a small fraction of the books published in Portugal", says José Bártolo, adding "a balanced exhibition, not aimed at a specialised audience, although this type of audience may find important and unpublished things".

"Obviously, the exhibition has the clear intention of provoking aesthetic enjoyment", says Bártolo, while Jorge Silva lifts the veil on what visitors will be able to see at Casa do Design: "The exhibition is prepared to give several winks. One of them is aimed at older people, who will surely smile, get emotional and look at certain books with nostalgia. Another is aimed at young people. The 20-year-old design student, for example, will see the book differently". "This exhibition really is like an alternative bookshop", says Jorge Silva, while José Bártolo tells us how the themes and spaces of the exhibition have been organised.

"We're aware that we're also giving away an unimaginable amount of information and that's why the logic of the organisation of the exhibition spaces is intended to bring peace to those who visit", he explains. The first of the exhibition's four themed spaces has been baptised "Explosions" and here the curators wanted to take the visitor into the world of books as if they were making a book themselves. However, it is in this space that a chronology emerges, drawn up after careful research. "It looks arid, but it's not. It takes up one wall and shows the logos of 20th century publishers,", says José Bártolo.

"I'd like to remind you that this is a collection exhibition, which is why the chronology is missing so many more publishers. It is clearly incomplete. But we certainly have the most important publishers, the biggest and those that played a disruptive role in their time", says the researcher and scientific director of esad-idea.

For Jorge Silva, this chronology "ends up being a coincidence of design". "Logos, symbols and monograms also tell the story of publishing houses. They have the air of their time. The graphics have always been created for the identity of these publishers", he adds. The second space is dedicated to collections, many of them iconic, such as "Livros RTP". "The collections emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, inspired by and even copied from foreign publishers, especially Spanish ones, and were designed to retain readers so that they would buy every issue that came out", says José Bártolo, who also draws attention to "the strong identity of these collections", which also contain a strong graphic harmony.

As we travel around the exhibition, we come to the third space, dedicated to major themes, which bring together books from different eras. "Our proposal here was to group together books dedicated to themes that marked Portugal in the 20th century, such as war, revolutions and politics", reveals José Bártolo, inviting the visitor to take a closer look at a sub-space in this section, dedicated to banned books, "some of them very rare, because they come from editions that someone had destroyed, and there are very few left". There is also space for school books and how they have evolved over the generations.

The fourth section is the most interactive and is designed for young people. "The anatomy of the book has an educational side and is aimed at design students. There we can follow the making of a book as a piece of design: the material, the core and the binding", says José Bártolo. In a more relaxed tone, Jorge Silva reminds us that "young people today need to know that eggs come from chickens and steaks come from cows". "In this centre they learn how a book is produced,", he adds.