About El Hogar

El Hogar

El Hogar was an Argentine weekly magazine founded in Buenos Aires in 1904 and published for nearly six decades. Its publisher's records list Editorial Haynes as its publisher with tenure 1904 to 1963, while the batch record for this profile dates its closure to 1962; the magazine ended in the early 1960s either way. It began, according to Editorial Haynes's publication history, under the original name El Consejero del Hogar. Classified by its publisher under the topic of society, it was a weekly general and women's magazine that rivalled Editorial Atlántida's titles in the 1940s and 1950s, and it is remembered in literary history above all as the magazine in which Jorge Luis Borges held a regular column from 1936 to 1939.

El Hogar belonged to the great age of the Argentine illustrated weekly, when a handful of Buenos Aires publishing houses — Atlántida with its magazine Atlántida and Para Ti, Haynes with El Hogar and Mundo Argentino — competed for the family reader with a mixture of society coverage, fiction, advice, illustration and photography. Of Haynes's many titles, El Hogar was the flagship and the longest lived, the magazine that carried the house's name into Argentine homes for two generations.

Editorial Haynes and its flagship

Editorial Haynes was one of Buenos Aires's major publishing houses, centred in a building at Río de Janeiro and Bogotá streets that was later demolished. Its catalogue mixed magazines and newspapers: Mundo Argentino (from 1911 or 1912), the newspaper El Mundo (1928–1967), the film magazine Sintonía (from 1933), the humour magazine Don Goyo, the economy title Riqueza Argentina, and, in the 1940s and 1950s, a family of Mundo titles — Mundo Deportivo, Mundo Agrario, Mundo Infantil, Mundo Radial and Mundo Atómico. El Hogar preceded them all as the house's founding success in magazines, listed by Haynes among its publications with the topic society and the tenure 1904–63.

The list of notable contributors to Haynes imprints shows the world El Hogar belonged to: Jorge Luis Borges (El Hogar, 1936–39), Roberto Arlt (El Mundo and Don Goyo), Quino, Alberto Gerchunoff, Ernesto Sabato, Jacobo Timerman and Horacio Verbitsky all left contributions in the house's publications. A publisher that could draw that range of Argentine writing talent was not a minor operation, and El Hogar, as its society weekly, was the title through which Haynes addressed the broadest family audience of all.

From El Consejero del Hogar to El Hogar

The magazine's original name, recorded in Haynes's history, was El Consejero del Hogar — the adviser of the home. The name announced the founding proposition: a counsellor for the household, a weekly guide to running a home and raising a family in a rapidly modernising city. Shortened to El Hogar — The Home — the title kept that promise at its centre while broadening into the general and women's magazine described in its profile record.

That founding identity placed El Hogar in the first generation of Argentine magazines addressed to the home and to women readers as decision-makers. Buenos Aires in 1904 was a city of immigrants forming new households, often far from extended family, in a country whose cities were growing faster than its institutions of advice. A weekly counsellor in print — on the house, on children, on manners, on money, on health — answered a real need, and the magazine that answered it earliest and most completely built the loyalty on which Haynes's whole empire rested.

A society weekly for the family

Haynes classified El Hogar under the single topic society, and its profile record described it as a weekly general and women's magazine. Society, in the magazine language of the time, meant the coverage of social life in all its layers: the doings of prominent families, weddings, theatre and fashion, but also the broader life of the city — its institutions, charities, schools and celebrations — reported and photographed for readers who saw their own world, or the world they aspired to, in its pages.

As a general magazine it mixed that society material with the standard resources of the great weeklies: fiction and poetry, illustrated features, household and practical advice, and commentary on books and the arts. Its nearly sixty-year run meant the mixture adjusted repeatedly to its century — through the First World War era, the prosperous 1920s, the crisis of the 1930s, the Peronist 1940s and 1950s and the modernising 1960s — while the magazine's promise, a weekly portrait of Argentine home and social life, remained recognisable enough for readers to sustain it across all those transformations.

Rivalry with Atlántida

Histories of the magazine Atlántida recorded that Atlántida was eclipsed by its longtime rival, El Hogar, during the 1940s and 1950s. That single sentence from the rival camp is the most telling evidence of El Hogar's position in its mature decades: in the years when Editorial Atlántida was Argentina's dominant magazine house, its own flagship general magazine was overshadowed by Haynes's El Hogar, which became a monthly-era benchmark the Atlántida title could not match.

The rivalry was structural as well as editorial. Atlántida and Haynes were the two great Buenos Aires magazine factories, each with a portfolio spanning the family's reading: children's titles, women's titles, sports, cinema and general weeklies. El Hogar's ascendancy over Atlántida in the 1940s and 1950s therefore signified Haynes's temporary victory in the most prestigious category of all, the general society weekly — the magazine that sat in the living room and announced, by its presence, which publisher a household trusted.

Borges at El Hogar, 1936–1939

The magazine's most studied chapter began in 1936, when Jorge Luis Borges accepted a part-time position as an editor for El Hogar — described in accounts of his career as a respected ladies' journal — in charge of a column called Libros y autores extranjeros, Foreign Books and Authors. Every two weeks, from 1936 to 1939, Borges introduced his audience to an eclectic range of writers, from Ellery Queen to Virginia Woolf. Haynes's own contributor list confirms the tenure: Jorge Luis Borges, El Hogar, 1936–39.

The work Borges did there became one of the famous episodes of his biography. Alongside numerous legitimate translations and reviews, he published original works in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or the Thousand and One Nights, originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon, and he developed in that column his signature device of the review of an imaginary work — the form that would produce, in the following decade, some of the most celebrated stories in Spanish-language literature. He wrote, in the assessment of one account of the column, in an accessible style while refusing to underestimate his audience; one of his final pieces was a disparaging review of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. After dozens of reviews, translations and capsule biographies, the column concluded in 1939. That a society weekly gave three years of pages to the young Borges is now the single most cited fact about El Hogar, and it fairly represents the magazine's serious literary ambitions beneath its society surface.

Women readers and the home

El Hogar's profile record identifies it as a women's magazine as well as a general one, and its original name made the address explicit: the home, and by extension the woman who ran it. In early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, such magazines were among the few mass media written substantially for women, and they carried a real cultural function — mediating between tradition and a modernity that was changing women's education, work, dress and expectations within a single generation.

The magazine's society classification should be read in that light. Society pages were not only gossip; they were a public record of a world in which women were the central actors — as hostesses, organisers, brides, mothers, readers and, increasingly, professionals. A weekly that documented that world for nearly sixty years left a visual and textual archive of Argentine women's public and domestic life that historians of the period continue to use, precisely because El Hogar took that life seriously enough to illustrate it every week.

Buenos Aires, the Haynes building and the illustrated age

El Hogar was produced in Buenos Aires by Editorial Haynes, whose building at the corner of Río de Janeiro and Bogotá streets housed the house's editorial and production operation until its later demolition. The magazine's Buenos Aires was the expanding, prosperous capital of the early century: a city of new suburbs and apartment houses whose households were exactly the homes its title invoked. Its distribution followed the pattern of the great weeklies, reaching the provinces as well as the capital, so that El Hogar functioned as a national standard of what a home, a wedding or a social season should look like.

The magazine also belonged to the illustrated age in a technical sense: it was a product of the era when photography and high-quality illustration made the weekly magazine the dominant visual medium of Argentine life, before radio drama and then television took that role. Its pages of photographs and drawings, week after week for six decades, constituted one of the great running picture archives of Argentine society.

Closure in the early 1960s

El Hogar ended in the early 1960s — Haynes's publication table gives its tenure as 1904–63, and this profile's batch record dates the closure to 1962. The small discrepancy between sources is recorded here rather than concealed; either date places the end in the same moment, when television was displacing the illustrated weekly as the family's window on society, and when Haynes itself was in its final years — its newspaper El Mundo survived only until 1967.

The magazine's closure was part of a general extinction. The great society and general weeklies of Buenos Aires, Atlántida's and Haynes's alike, could not reproduce their economics in the television age, and one by one the titles that had defined Argentine Sundays disappeared. El Hogar outlasted most of its generation: founded in 1904, it was still publishing when magazines founded decades later had already closed, a longevity that testified to the depth of its household loyalty.

Legacy and present status

El Hogar is a closed magazine with no current edition, print or digital. Its legacy survives in three places. First, in publishing history, as the flagship of Editorial Haynes and the documented rival that eclipsed Atlántida's own general magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, in literary history, as the home of Borges's Foreign Books and Authors column of 1936–1939, where the devices of his mature fiction were rehearsed in public, for the readers of a ladies' journal — a fact that still startles readers who meet his name first in more exalted contexts. Third, in the archive: six decades of society photography and coverage that record how Argentina lived at home.

For a directory of Argentine magazines, El Hogar represents the domestic pole of the classic weekly system — the magazine of the home, set against the satire of Caras y Caretas, the politics of the newsweeklies and the sport of El Gráfico. It was founded in 1904 as the home's adviser, it grew into one of the two or three great general magazines of the country, and it closed in the early 1960s when the world that sustained it ended. Its name, simply The Home, remains one of the most evocative in Argentine publishing.