El registro de empresas editoriales: la censura en la ley de prensa e imprenta de 1966

Abstract

The Register of Publishing Companies was one of the tools of editorial censorship that was promoted by the Francoist regime in its effort to control the influence that publishers, as cultural agents with political impact, had on the Spanish society during the sixties and seventies. The Press and Printing Act of 1966 established the obligation to register all publishing companies in a Register managed by the Information and Tourism Ministry. Despite the liberalizing appearance, this regulation focused the cultural repression on book producers: the publishers and the publishing companies. The documentation related to Register of Publishing Companies is preserved in the Spanish Administration Archives and its study allow us to understand the process of development suffered by the publishing industry from 1966 to the early eighties. This article examines the study case of publishing houses that were part of Enlace Distributor, whose files show almost all typologies that we can find in this Register.