Between the Sacred and the Secular: Publishing, Books, and Everyday Life in Colonial Cochinchina

Records of the colonial legal deposit allow us to reconstruct the rapid rise of print culture in late colonial Indochina. Between 1922 and 1945, approximately 257 printing and publishing houses produced more than 25,000 periodicals and non-periodicals. Using data from the Indochinese collection of the French National Library, this chapter traces the landscape of publishing in colonial Cochinchina. It then focuses on the multiple meanings of the book as a printed object, and particularly the practice of book donation, to explore how print culture transformed local relations to reading, trading, and devotion. While books are often understood as vectors of modernity, attending to their materiality reminds us they were also an everyday consumer good. In the case of donated books, they could even serve as a kind of religious currency, creating social ties, and confirming readers’ participation in a shared traditional cosmology.