The Civilização Brasileira publishing house was, without any doubt, a landmark in modern brazilian history. It serves as an example of excellence in several aspects of publishing production and was also as vehicle of the vanguard political-ideological discourse. This dissertation was focused on the graphic design of the books published during a period when the publishing company reached a well-known level of graphical and visual quality, being also distinguished as reference in the publishing market. Throughout its existence this publishing house has gone through various phases, but under Ênio Silveira´s command, there were three distinct periods. The fi rst one goes from 1951 to 1959, it was a time for the restructuring of its publishing project. The second, from 1959 to 1970, was the main focus of this research, when the publishing project ripened and a visual renewal in the graphical production of the publishing company occured. The third phase, beginning in 1970, was not approached in this work for being a moment of a decreasing quality production, when the fi nancial hardships of the military dictatorship could be felt in book publishing. Firstly we had approached in this dissertation a historical context of book publishing in Brazil. After that, we had brought up the edictor´s Ênio Silveira trajectory and formation, as well as the construction of his publishing project. At last, based on publishing company´s primary sources we presented a reconstitution of the productive processes which evolved graphic design, detailing it´s main actors, techniques and making also a description and graphical analysis of the books collected between the decades of 1950 and 1970.