Kapelusz Publishing House and its relationship with Ibero-American education: an interview with María Rosa Neufeld, granddaughter of the founder

In this interview with María Rosa Neufel, we do not explore her prolific academic career in the fields of Political Anthropology and Education. Instead, we focus on shedding light on a lesser-known aspect of her biography. She was the granddaughter of Adolfo Kapelusz, founder of the Argentine publishing house Kapelusz, established in 1905. With branches in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Spain, in addition to its headquarters in Argentina, the publishing house had a significant impact on the consolidation of a teacher training library in Ibero-America. It produced everything from pencils to school textbooks for primary, secondary, and teacher’s education. Among the various products it released were wall charts, maps, exercise notebooks, and worksheets, as well as academic books by Argentine authors and Spanish translations of foreign authors. In her youth, María Rosa worked at the publishing house. In the Art Department, she worked alongside her mother, Maria Etelvina Kapelusz, who was responsible for creating illustrations and book covers, as well as commissioning images from artists outside the publishing house. Through this interview, we gain access to information about the organization of a family business, the locations it occupied, the editorial lines it implemented, and many other details of the book production process. These are fragments of memory that allow us to reconstruct elements of an editorial history intertwined with a family tradition. In the 1990s, with the sale of Kapelusz to the Colombian organization Carvajal, forming Kapelusz-Norma, the archives were lost. By making this interview public, we aim to help address this documentary gap, contributing to studies in the history of education, publishing history, and the history of school culture.

Keywords:
History of education; Publishing circulation; Material culture; School textbooks; Publishing history