Briefly mentioned in textbooks of literary history, the pioneering publisher Francisco de Paula Brito (1809-1861) is the main character of this thesis. The focus on his figure is a way to observe literature and history from a perspective that considers its material conditions of production and circulation. We start from the premise that belated installation of a communication system based on the press just on the beginning of nineteenth century had consequences for the definitions of the contours of the literary in Brazil. It was this delay which simultaneously condensed three different aspects of edition – capital, intellectual autonomy and voice – in the figure of Paula Brito. Aiming to describe each of these aspects we consulted historical texts, journals and articles published at the time. The research did not seek to isolate each of these aspects, but to show that contingencial interweaving between them promoted the presence of writing and literature in everyday Brazilian court. Although we use the figurations of the editor to structure the thesis, it is important to say that Paula Brito passed through freely by all functions of the literate world, and it was precisely its multiple and ambiguous character which allowed us to draw relationships between seemingly distant concepts and activities as typographer and author, intellectual and manual, body and meaning. Is exemplary in this sense the existence of Petalogica, literaryhumorous society where we could observe paradoxical relationships that draw a productive conflict in the search for boundaries between literary and non-literary.