In the broad scheme of things, publishing books as a way of spreading culture is arguably much less cost-effective, or indeed in any way effective, than other mass media of culture. Jordana Mendelson's work on the work of the periódico mural, for example, illustrates the immediacy and effect of print culture in a non-standard situation (Mendelson 2007). If you engage in propaganda, then, as Carmelo Garitaonandía points out, non-book publishing is likely to be far more effective than what can be achieved by engagement in the book trade (Garitaonandía 1989: 166). Not only posters on walls, but the radio and newsprint are all going to reach a wider public at greater speed. So when we look at the activity of the book trade, we are automatically into a territory of elites and minorities. Furthermore, in a country that, according to El Sol in 1918, had a level of illiteracy in the population of 50.2 per cent (a level that rose to 60 per cent in rural areas, with 48 per cent in urban centres) (Álvarez 1989b: 83), then the idea of ‘cultural dissemination’ is necessarily automatically curtailed. The issues of how to transfer knowledge to the people, a large proportion of whom had to be assumed as either illiterate, or barely literate, is taken up in Chapter 7, ‘Taking the Knowledge to the People’, where the propagation of specific canons is examined in detail. In the interim, we can see a spectrum of activity in publishing houses as centres of exchange.