“Essential in every school”: an incursion in the world of school objects

ABSTRACT This paper analyses sales catalogues of the Companhia Melhoramentos de São Paulo, a publishing house with relevant operation regarding the production and trading of a wide range of school objects. We aimed at examining the action of this company in the configuration of the material culture related to primary school in the first decades of the 20th century. Companhia Melhoramentos was created in 1890 and from 1915 it relocated its investments, from the initial focus on printing and binding books to the production and sales of various school materials, in order to support school practices, and, at the same time, trying to generate new needs for consumption, thus expanding its business in a context marked by the dissemination of primary school in São Paulo, Brazil. Based on the analysis of the publishing house’s catalogue and on the problematization of the potential of such material as sources for the research of school material culture, we intent at raising the artifacts destined to be used in the many disciplines of the school curriculum and to the practices that happened in school, hence capturing traces of the material dimension of childhood schooling.