Private Ownership Also Pre­serves

Juan Javier Negri has forwarded this article which La Nación, a large Buenos Aires daily newspaper, recently published as an editorial.

The recent inaug­ur­a­tion of the 18th Buenos Aires Antique Book Fair, organ­ized by the Asso­ci­ation of Antique Book­sellers of Argen­tina, brings back to the table a debate as old as it is cur­rent: who should guard the doc­u­ments that make up our col­lect­ive memory: the State or the cit­izens?

In the name of the ”pro­tec­tion of cul­tural her­it­age”, some pub­lic offi­cials have imposed, in recent years and without any legal sup­port, a series of restric­tions that in fact hinder the legit­im­ate cir­cu­la­tion of books, manuscripts and ancient doc­u­ments. The res­ult has not been a strength­en­ing of the col­lect­ive memory, but a grow­ing dis­trust between those who should be its nat­ural allies: the col­lect­ors, book­sellers and antique deal­ers who, with their work and their invest­ment, res­cue and pre­serve mater­i­als that the State itself neither knows nor could pre­serve.

The usual argu­ment is as simple as it is mis­lead­ing: if something has his­tor­ical value, “it must belong to the state.” But that equi­val­ence between pub­lic interest and pub­lic domain is a legal fal­lacy and a prac­tical injustice. The doc­u­ments that make up the his­tory of a coun­try do not lose their cul­tural char­ac­ter because they are in private hands. On the con­trary, a large part of the Argen­tine doc­u­ment­ary archive – let­ters, first edi­tions, pho­to­graphs, plans, per­sonal archives – was saved from destruc­tion thanks to the ded­ic­a­tion of indi­vidu­als who bought, clas­si­fied and pro­tec­ted them when no pub­lic insti­tu­tion was inter­ested in them.

The cur­rent legis­la­tion – from Law 15,930, which reg­u­lates the Gen­eral Archive of the Nation, to the regime for the pro­tec­tion of cul­tural prop­erty – was designed to pro­tect the her­it­age of the State, not to limit the prop­erty of cit­izens. However, abus­ive inter­pret­a­tions and prac­tices have allowed cer­tain offi­cials to with­hold doc­u­ments, pre­vent their tem­por­ary export or hinder their sale and pur­chase, under a gen­eral pre­sump­tion of ”his­tor­ical value” or pos­sible alleged smug­gling. This prac­tice, besides being arbit­rary, is coun­ter­pro­duct­ive: it dis­cour­ages respons­ible col­lect­ing and pushes the mar­ket to opa­city.

Private prop­erty, far from threat­en­ing his­tory, pre­serves it. And it does so with an effi­ciency that the State would do well to imit­ate rather than hinder.

NOTE: The 18th Buenos Aires Antique Book Fair took place from October 29 to November 2, 2025 , at the Palacio Libertad. This year’s fair focused on the theme of literature by women writers from Argentina, spanning from the 19th century to the present.