The publishing house Vanegas Arroyo

Born in the city of Puebla and coming from a family dedicated to printing, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, founded on his arrival in Mexico City one of the most important printers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The printing house that began operating as a bookbinder, ended up as one of the most popular publishers in Mexico. 

The Vanegas Arroyo printing house developed materials with diverse contents such as verses; songbooks; recipe books; riddles; manuals; guides and accounts of daily, social and historical events, among others.

The prints were presented in flyer and booklet formats, which were made with low-cost materials that allowed the copies to be sold at a penny price, managing to position themselves in the tastes of Mexican popular culture. 

Within this combination of narration and graphics emerged the constant collaboration of Guadalupe Posada as the main engraver in the publications of Vanegas Arroyo.  Posada managed to place his graphic as one of the most representative of the time for its critical and satirical style. Thus, Posada was at the height of Manuel Manilla, another of the outstanding engravers who collaborated in these prints.

Antonio's printing press was always located in houses or premises adapted as workshops in various streets of  the current Historical Center of Mexico City, until he established all his machinery and his home in a building near what was the Penitentiary of Mexico, today the current headquarters of the General Archive of the Nation.

The flyer was the most used format for prints related to news content such as natural disasters, political and social events, crimes, shootings and events of a religious nature. This sheet was mostly printed on both sides with a size of about 20 cm.  by 30 cm. , vertically.  

The booklets that were published in the Vanegas Arroyo printing press ranged from 4 to 16 pages, with a more homogeneous content in the textual, since they were made from the use of verse such as songbooks, guessing games and plays. 

Unlike booklets in the form of prose, materials with a more instructive function  were produced, such as manuals,  recipe books and prints dedicated to codes and language, mostly publicados in collections and numbered series. 

Under this popularity d is that the prints of Vanegas Arroyo subsist beyond the own archive of the publishing house because several collectors and writers were responsible for preserving his work in their private archives.

Such is the case of the Spanish writer nationalized Mexican, Felipe Teixidor, who in addition to gathering a large library, gathered an important collection of various documents donde are the prints of Vanegas Arroyo, which were deposited in the General Nation Archive.