«A publisher already unmasked or marked»: the Livraria Moraes Editora and the censorship

Abstract

In the 1950s a group of Catholics delineated a project combining “thought and action”, covering various stages and disseminating ideas for the achievement of its ultimate aim: to create a magazine of ideas. This group’s approach to António Alçada Baptista, who was to buy an old bookshop, Moraes, would some years later make the dream come true with the creation of O Tempo e o Modo. But it was in the publishing house Moraes, with its innovative editorial policy, that this group of progressive Catholics created a new form of political and artistic action with their interventionist humanism. If the publisher’s identity was revealed in its catalog, its cultural revolutionary and socially subversive impact can be measured by the weight of the censorial persecution to which its  publications were subject. The censors’ comments confirm Moraes difficult position as a Catholic publishing house that became a “third way” in the debate of ideas in the second half of the 20th century in Portugal.

https://doi.org/10.14195/1645-2259_16_20