Book, Marca do Z, A: life and times of editor Jorge Zahar[LS]

An important chapter in the history of the world of books in Brazil The Z brand is more than the profile of a major publisher. Jorge Zahar's life is intertwined with the history of ideas in Brazil in the 20th century. Bookseller who became an editor, he inaugurated among us the professional edition of human sciences, contributing decisively to the formation of successive generations of readers. Self-taught who loved poetry, music and cinema, Jorge Zahar liked to say that an editor is not necessarily an intellectual, but someone sensitive to cultural phenomena. And he knew how to be like few others in his passionate dedication to the catalog he built. From the first title published, Manual de sociologia, in 1957, to innovative collections and reference works in the 1990s, it launched almost 2 thousand titles, which gave the Brazilian reader information and training in the most diverse areas - psychoanalysis, sociology, music, anthropology , history, cinema, philosophy, politics, economics, science, theater... With his formidable antenna for classics and contemporaries, he "revealed" Jacques Lacan to the Brazilian public and turned it into a best-seller History of Man's Wealth, by Leo Huberman, which he considered the book of his life. The impressive list of authors he published includes Freud, Marx, Mircea Eliade, Althusser, Erich Fromm, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Garcia-Roza, Bertrand Russell, Norbert Elias, Gilberto Velho, Eisenstein, Zizek and Bauman. Written by Paulo Roberto Pires in an affectionate way and carefully researched, this book also reveals that Jorge Zahar's intellectual performance was always linked to his emotional heritage. With his fundamental friends Ênio Silveira and Paulo Francis he maintained decades of intimate complicity, crossed by dramatic moments in the years immediately following the 1964 coup.