How Barsa was created, an encyclopedia that made the minds (and schoolwork) of generations before the internet

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For those who grew up before the arrival of the internet and the popularization of personal computers, intellectual status was sporting a robust collection of red-covered books on the living room shelf. First edition of Barsa DISCLOSURE For those who grew up before the arrival of the internet and the popularization of personal computers, intellectual status was to sport a robust collection of red-covered books on the living room shelf. Sixteen volumes, from A to Z — or rather, from A to Zwingli, respectively the first and last entries — with 130,000 entries. In theory, everything that was important was there. On its neat spines, one could read the name that commanded respect and pomp: Enciclopédia Barsa. The history of this encyclopedia, which was launched a few days before the 1964 military coup and had its last edition printed exactly 50 years later, in 2014, involved big names in Brazilian culture and, for families who were enormously concerned about their children’s studies , meant a lot of struggle and sometimes debts. Since the year 2000, publishing rights belong to Editora Planeta, which also sells the printed version and also a digital platform with the content, called Barsa na Rede. According to the publisher, there are 170,000 paying users. “The focus is on the school public: students, teachers, administrators and the school community. In addition to others interested in themes from different areas of knowledge”, explains the general business director of the company, Anderson Silva. The kickoff for this encyclopedic adventure was given by businesswoman and editor Dorita Barret de Sá Putch (1914-1973). American born in California, she became a naturalized Brazilian and lived in Rio de Janeiro. Her father was executive editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which despite its open origins in her name, had been published in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, in a business captained by the University of Chicago. In Brazil, the businesswoman saw the opportunity to launch a national encyclopedia. But she didn’t think that simply translating the Britannica would solve the gaps in Brazilian culture. Thus, in 1960, already at the helm of the Encyclopædia Britannica do Brasil operation, she hired the journalist and writer Antônio Callado (1917-1997) to head the operation’s local team. This commercial interest of Barret met a need that was already known in Brazil. According to historian Pedro Terres, a researcher at the Center for Digital Humanities at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), since the 1930s there has been a national and state project to create a national encyclopedia. “The government’s idea was that it should be organized by the State and they even called the [escritor] Mario de Andrade [(1893-1945)] to think about the project”, he says. “But it never went ahead, although the state continued to fund the idea until the 1970s. Nothing like this was ever published.” As Terres contextualizes, in the 1960s this niche ended up being supplied by the arrival of commercial encyclopedias. And the ones that stood out the most were Britannica do Brasil and Delta Larousse. And Barrett put together the most “Brazilian” project. Including adopting a genuine name for the publication. Barsa, from the combination of her surnames and those of her husband, the diplomat Alfredo de Almeida Sá. “Barsa was born with the aim of giving Brazilian weight to the encyclopedia”, points out Terres. “There was a consensus among the intelligentsia that foreign encyclopedias did not carry the weight of Brazilian culture. And to manage a Brazilian encyclopedia, it was necessary to give this weight, to think about folklore, the specificities, the synthesis of Brazil.” The third and final chapter of the master’s thesis by historian Terres, in progress, deals exclusively with Barsa. A Brazilian encyclopedia Charged with leading the new project, Callado had a high reputation. He had been editor-in-chief of Correio da Manhã and enjoyed intellectual prestige. His idea was to call big names and order special entries from them, not only informative but also argumentative. Thus, it fell to the architect and urban planner Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) to write about Brasília. Historian and sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982) wrote the text about São Paulo. Jorge Amado (1912-2001), an already renowned writer, was in charge of the entry on cocoa. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) wrote both the text on Pernambuco and the one detailing the importance of sugar to Brazilian economic history. The entry on Ceará was written by the writer Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003). “It also had a commercial purpose, that is, to have important names for the encyclopedia”, emphasizes historian Terres. In addition to this star-studded team, the encyclopedia operation also had a large newsroom made up of permanent employees. Most of them were recent graduates from the University of Brazil — later renamed the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) — and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio (PUC-Rio). “There was a dialogue with the universities, which were still very few in Brazil, and this was articulated to think about a work of syntheses that was focused on Brazil, a synthesis of Brazil within an intellectual project”, comments the historian. According to the researcher, there was a network of collaborators that reached 257 names — 221 men and 36 women. This was only for the first edition of Barsa, launched in 1964. The work in the editorial office was not just about writing and compiling the entries. In a time before computers, it was necessary to organize and catalog systematically, so that the indexes worked correctly and there were no failures. Checking was also extremely necessary. Terres found some documents that suggest that Callado had an agreed salary in dollars to take care of the operation – something in the region of 1 thousand dollars. For designer collaborators, there are correspondences that allow speculation on how much they were paid: around 30,000 cruzeiros per article. “It was more or less the monthly salary that an office secretary earned at the time. A reasonable amount, but not an exorbitant price either”, says Terres, who says that there are indications that Freyre tried to negotiate better fees. The current director of Barsa, Anderson Silva, at the head of the DIVULGAÇÃO collection “These signed entries were very well publicized in the press, that is, Callado made a whole move to be able to commercialize the encyclopedia”, adds the historian. These entries written by renowned authors had a very interesting style. “They were not definitional entries, but they had a dissertative character, more than a panoramic view of the theme, they also brought arguments, hypotheses. In Gilberto Freyre’s text, there is his thought being placed there, with all the biases of that. They were academic productions, with the objective of defending ideas, theories”, he analyzes. Barsa was launched in 1964 with 30% new content, entirely produced in Brazil. The rest was done with the translation of entries from the Britannica. According to Editora Planeta, this prerogative of resorting to bigwigs for certain entries was maintained over the following decades. It ended up becoming a tradition, a Barsa brand. “The encyclopedia, by its vocation, was thus produced to contribute to the scientific and cultural knowledge of society and the world”, says Silva. He cited illustrious contractors such as the philologist Antônio Houaiss (1915-1999), who was part of the editorial board of the publication from the beginning, and also the journalist Otto Maria Carpeaux (1900-1978). Silva also highlighted some entries produced in more recent editions, signed by prominent names. The text about Oscar Niemeyer was written by poet and writer Ferreira Gullar (1930-2016); that of the Recôncavo Baiano, by the geographer Milton Santos (1926-2001); the entry Ayrton Senna is authored by the pilot’s sister, Viviane Senna; journalist and biographer Ruy Castro was hired to write an article on the centenary of Carmen Miranda. Price of a car? If the encyclopedia became a fetish for middle-class families, it was not without hardship that purchases were made. It was with the advent of Barsa, for example, that the idea of ​​paying in installments became common practice in Brazil. It is common to find wistful comments on social networks about how expensive the encyclopedia was. That is true. Many say it cost the price of a zero car. It wasn’t for that. But when I remember the old Fiat that lived in the garage of my parents’ house when I was a child, I can understand that those volumes on top of the shelf had cost more than the family’s means of transport. My gratitude to my parents becomes even greater when I remember that there was a period, not far from that when Edison Sr. arrived announcing the news of Barsa’s purchase, when the garage was completely empty: the portrait of the crisis. “The collection really was very expensive, it required a lot of purchasing power or a considerable amount of debt”, analyzes Terres. “In the past, there are reports that it cost close to the value of a car or land, a lot”, comments director Silva. Today there is no longer the figure of the encyclopedia seller, that almost folkloric guy who knocked on doors. Barsa is only marketed through the Barsa Shop website, maintained by the publisher. In 1964, when the encyclopedia was released, the 45,000 sets of the first printing sold out within eight months—a tremendous success. The peak of sales, in 1990, meant 120,000 collections were sold. In 2010, in a world already used to using Internet search engines and the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, there were only 8 thousand. I sent a WhatsApp message to my parents asking how much they had disbursed for the Barsa of my childhood, if it would still be possible to remember something along those lines. “Ah, son, I asked your father here… He says he doesn’t remember how much, he just remembers that it was a lot”, was my mother’s response, a few hours later, via audio message. I grew up hearing that that investment had been hard-earned, but that it was “thinking about my studies”, “to help me at school” and that, therefore, “it was worth it”. For me, Barsa was the perfect metaphor for how, for my parents who never had access to university education, their children’s education should come first. I asked the historian Terres to help me arrive at Barsa’s price in the heyday. He looked for information in newspaper advertisements and, with the help of data from the Central Bank, concluded that from the year of launch, in 1964, until the end of the 1970s, the value was always somewhere between R$ 12 thousand and 14 thousand, if corrected to current values. “A Barsa collection in December 1964 cost 350 thousand cruzeiros. A zero Beetle, 3.8 million cruzeiros”, compares Terres. I did the same process with ads from the 1980s, when my parents bought Barsa, and I got the same figures. The encyclopedia had cost much more than my father’s monthly salary, at the time an agricultural credit employee at Banespa in Taquarituba. But still less than a zero car or a terrain, as the common imagination insists. When I was a child, Barsa was the inaccessible books on that shelf. They were at the top — it’s okay that the height reference is very different when age doesn’t allow us to have much more than 1.20 meters. The beautiful red-covered books had to be handled with extreme care, “so as not to spoil”. I looked at that immensity of knowledge and, resigned, I fantasized about expectations. That of reading all 130,000 entries one day — I even tried, as a teenager, but failed in the fourth or fifth book. The simplest of these expectations, however, was imagining what subject I would ask my father to read to me when he got home from work in the evening. And there are some of the best memories I have of my childhood. Among many, many things, I learned that Pedro Álvares Cabral, “a Portuguese navigator and discoverer of Brazil, was born in Belmonte in 1467 or 1468”, that pragmatism “is above all a method, from which a theory of truth derives”, which bone, “hard and resistant”, is something “configured to support the weight of vertebrates”, “one of the most surprising evolutionary acquisitions of the animal kingdom”. And, of course, that Zwingli, the last entry in the last book, is just Huldrich’s surname. Who was, according to the encyclopedia, the “principal leader of the Reformation in Switzerland”, whose “doctrines influenced the Calvinist confessions”.

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